On Rejection: Caelyn Cobb

Short fiction and the girl wide web

Hello and a very happy Chocolate-Is-Half-Price-at-CVS Day to all who celebrate!

Today I’m very happy to have Caelyn Cobb joining us for this week’s On Rejection interview! Caelyn is a great writer and she has a novelette coming out from ELJ Editions this summer. She has a lot of great insights to share about publishing both as a writer and from her work at a publishing house.

If you’re just discovering Collected Rejections, welcome! In this world, writing is still fun, rejection is not a bad word, and we’re all here to grow as writers. If you’re into that, subscribe to this newsletter here:

Hi Caelyn! Tell us about a time you experienced rejection.

Over the past year, I've been shopping around a short story collection, Saturn Return, that's half published material and half unpublished material, thematically about womanhood and the specific griefs and joys of coming of age as a millennial. Short story collections are a tough sell already, and I'm by no means a rising literary superstar with top-tier publications or an MFA, so I decided to submit it myself to contests and indie press open reading periods. I'm keeping track in a spreadsheet: 30 submissions, 23 rejections, 6 'further considerations,' 3 tiered/finalist rejections, and still 0 acceptances. Some of those rejections weren't even real rejections; some places just straight-up don't respond if they're not interested. It's been brutal!

How are you getting over it?

I'm still sending it out. I really believe in the book as a whole; some of my best work is among the unpublished stories in there! The tiered rejections and finalist finishes have been good confidence boosters. I try to remind myself that these smaller presses have limited capacity and there are so many good writers--I work at a small-ish press myself (Columbia University Press) and have to make calls like this all the time. 

If you could go back and tell yourself anything right before that experience, what would you say?

Every iteration of this collection that I've submitted has gotten better--from 60k words to 50k words, some stories moved around, etc. In a way, the process has helped me refine it even more and gotten me closer to producing something that's the best it can be. So I guess I'd tell myself to buckle up and remember that it's not over 'til it's over!

You're currently an editor at Columbia University Press--does that influence your own writing in any way?

At Columbia, my authors and the authors we publish are working on some of the most pressing problems in the world, from global warming to democratization to the nature of art under capitalism. It's heartening because I don't need to feel like I have to fix or comment on major crises--I know people who are working on them! My job really puts my writing in perspective for me. It's fine to just stay in my lane. I don't feel bad at all about writing my silly little stories just to have fun and make people laugh. 

What are you working on now?

I'm writing a deeply embarrassing internet memoir, specifically about all the female-dominated 'girl wide web' spaces I've been a part of from 2000 to now. I've reconnected with women I haven't been in touch with since I was seventeen or even younger, and despite scaring the shit out of them when I pop up in their LinkedIn DMs, it's been really fun. And there's always the collection, which I'll probably keep tweaking until it finds a home. This summer I'll have a novelette chapbook, Boomerang, out with ELJ Editions in their Afternoon Shorts series, so that will tide me over until that day comes.

You can follow Caelyn on Twitter or check out her website.