I wrote the first version in 1990, in an apartment in Evanston, Illinois. At the time, I was sharing the apartment with an entrepreneur who was in the process of founding the delivery company Peapod. I still kick myself for not giving him a hundred bucks as an investment. But regret is a useless emotion, so let’s get back to the story. One night I dreamed I could fly. The next day, sensing the seed of a short story, I started writing it down. My mental image of the story was remarkably clear; the result was that it was finished within a few days.
I sent it out to a few publications, most of them well-known. At the time, I was unaware that this might not be the best strategy: the highest-profile magazines almost never pay any attention to the lowest-profile writers, those who are just starting out. Naturally, the story was rejected by all of them. There was, however, one bright spot. One of the editors of the Atlantic Monthly sent me a personal letter, expressing her liking for the story and adding, “we’d be glad to look at more of your work.” Considering the magazine’s status at the very summit of American letters, I felt that getting such a rejection was better than being accepted by some no-name literary journal.
But I never did get published in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, or any comparable organ. I set the story aside, and embarked on a journey through various writers’ groups, which lasted for several years. Only one of these groups ever did anything good for me. It was a group hosted by the late Paul Wolf, a special ed teacher whose hobby was writing fiction. Actually, the word “hobby” is somewhat misleading. This wasn’t some pleasant free-time activity; as far as I could tell, it was the most important thing in his life.
Paul Wolf’s group taught me a lot about the nuts and bolts of writing short stories and novels, things that one can only learn via hands-on application and the helpful critiques of similarly engaged writers. Just as importantly, it taught me a lot about the marketing side of writing. The realities of the market were intimidating. At the time I met him (around 1996), Paul had published around twenty short stories. He had managed to do this because at any one time, he had approximately 25 submissions circulating out in the world, sometimes even more. It was common for him to come home and find several rejected stories stuffed into his mailbox, day after day. The key thing was that he didn’t let the rejections get him down, and he submitted his work in a very regular, persistent fashion.
Because of its seriousness, Paul’s group drove many writers away. It initially attracted a lot of people who were not prepared to have their work subjected to sometimes harsh critiques. When those critiques were made, these people left in a huff. If you’re not willing to hear people ripping your literary efforts to shreds, you probably shouldn’t be a writer. This meant that the turnover rate was high – but those who stuck it out invariably improved their writing and their prospects for publication.
No other writers’ group that I attended was anywhere near as useful to me as Paul’s group. That’s because most of them lacked any real critical spirit. They were mostly about self-affirmation. In the most useless of all these groups, writers read their work out loud, and were then applauded by the other writers; no substantive criticism was allowed.
Other, more subtle problems with writers’ groups included an imbalance among their members: basically, different people doing different things, and requiring different levels of critique. When I was living in Prague (2001-02), I belonged to one such group. One of its members was the avant-garde novelist Joshua Cohen, who was just starting his career; we read some of the first drafts of his giant Joycean novel Witz. Other members, however, had no interest in experimental literature, and would rather write memoirs about trips they had taken, or conventional fiction that went basically nowhere, and which they had no real intention of publishing.
I submitted my original draft of “Everest” to Paul’s group on a whim. I had basically forgotten about the story in the years after it was gloriously rejected by the Atlantic; but the group was looking for submissions to discuss at the upcoming meeting, and we were a bit thin on material at the time. The result was that I got the first actual critique of the story, many years after I had written it. I don’t recall any of the details, but I do remember that Paul liked it.
Yet this positive critique did not lead to any quick acceptance. Real life intruded, and I forgot about it again. In 2005 I moved to Moscow, where I had other claims on my attention. In addition, moving away from the English-speaking world meant that submitting any of my material for publication became more difficult. Postage was more expensive, I was unable to meet with other writers in person (something still necessary in our “virtual” age), and I was essentially out of touch with the complex world of literary magazines and other venues for publication. One thing that had changed: submission via email was becoming more and more common. But since I had basically forgotten about the story, I never really tested the possibilities of doing this. So “Everest” continued to languish in obscurity, like a neglected manuscript moldering away in the basement.
Its eventual acceptance came as something of an anticlimax. In 2016, I learned that Terrain.org was holding its annual writing contest, with prizes in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Why not submit it? I did so, and the happy day came when I was informed that it had triumphed over 59 other entries to achieve the status of Finalist. I was not so much elated as relieved that it had finally found a home.
So, what lessons can we take away from this rather convoluted history? I count three:
1. Persistence pays off.
2. Luck matters.
3. Writers’ groups can help you or hurt you. You can only know which groups are helpful or hurtful by participating in them.