![]() ![]() ![]() How could so many publishers be wrong? One rejection, from an editor who has since become a friend, put it this way: “As is true in most of his short stories, Yarbrough just doesn’t quite manage to get to the heart of things in this novel.” I couldn’t think of any more short stories that begged to be written, and I felt all but certain that I was not a novelist. Over the previous year, I’d actually turned to writing non-fiction, publishing a handful of essays. ![]() Though I was tenured and had recently been promoted to full professor on the strength of two short story collections published by university presses, my first novel, finished two and a half years earlier, had chalked up somewhere north of forty rejections, refused by all the big New York publishers, as well as every small press my agent and I could think of. Professionally, things hadn’t been going my way. “Steve,” a voice said, “this is Susan Lyne calling from Disney.” I was not in the best of moods. One day in the spring of 1996, I walked into my office at Fresno State, where I taught at the time, and saw my answering machine’s message light flashing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |