The Year I Was Finally Going To Make It As A Writer (But Didn’t)
October, 2015: In the fall of 2015, a friend and I biked from our homes in Pittsburgh, PA, to Washington, DC along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Trail, camping along the way. It was a fantastic trip: we took our time and stopped to see all the trail towns. We didn’t wreck our bodies by biking huge mileage…we kept it quite low: between 25 and 45 miles a day. And though not everything about the trip was perfect, it was fun and exhilarating and I felt I could spend the rest of my life biking and camping and eating great food back and forth on those trails.
November, 2015: Soon after returning home, I found the article 29 Amazing Writing Residencies You Should Apply For This Year. Reading through the list, I recognized Wildacres in North Carolina; my father took art workshops there. It was in the Blue Ridge Mountains and offered writing residencies of just one or two weeks, which sounded perfect and do-able. Now that I knew my husband and daughter could (easily) do without me for that length of time, I applied. The project I applied for was a memoir I wanted to write about my life with my oldest daughter, who had special needs and who died in 2007, when she was eight years old.
December, 2015: I decided that next year, 2016, would be The Year I Finally Made It As A Writer. I would stop seeing acupuncture clients and focus solely on my writing, letting my husband — also an acupuncturist — pick up the slack. I would submit a Readers Write essay to The Sun Magazine every single month, no matter what the topic. Things would happen for me. This would be my year.
January, 2016: I got to work blogging about my bike trip. I had an idea that I could write about my bike trip but it would actually be the framework for the memoir about my daughter Molly. Like how Cheryl Strayed wrote about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild, but it was really a memoir about the loss of her mother, or Claire Dederer in Poser wrote about yoga poses but really it was about her life. That seemed to be The Thing To Do: write about something epic you’d done, but REALLY write about your life.
As I wrote about the bike trip, I found myself simply reporting details: how far we’d biked, where we’d camped, where we’d stopped for lunch, what I ate. The only stories I managed to tell were about how the friend I went with had specifically annoyed me that day. It wasn’t going well.
March, 2016: I got the writing residency at Wildacres! Things were looking up! But writing about the death of my daughter would be tough, and I knew I needed time and space away from my family to focus on the endeavor.
April, 2016: This month’s submission to The Sun was accepted! The prompt was “First Impressions,” and I wrote about first meeting my husband. But when I wrote it I was mad at him, so I ended the piece comparing him to a tick that got under my skin and, like Lyme Disease, was something I couldn’t shake. Though they accepted my submission they edited out my ending, turning it into a sweet piece. Sadly, my metaphor was an eerie foreshadowing: in the spring 2018 my husband did get Lyme Disease, and though he immediately took his full course of antibiotics, the disease got into his neurological system and in January 2019 he killed himself.
May, 2016: We were gifted some money for our 15th wedding anniversary, so we decided to go to Rome! We leave at the end of the month.
June, 2016: Rome was amazing. I wrote a few essays about our time there, one stands out in my mind: it was a Jubilee year and the special Vatican door was open. We walked through and all our sins were washed away. Upon passing through the door my eleven year old daughter said, “Jesus Christ!” When I asked her about it she said it felt unnatural to be without sin, so she took Jesus’s name in vain and felt better immediately.
July, 2016: RESIDENCY! There were three writers in residence; we each had our own cabin. We could go to the main campus for meals if we wanted, but we didn’t have to because our cabins had kitchens. I loved my cabin. It had a screened porch where I spent most of my time…until I met the cabin’s other resident: a GIANT spider who I named Mergatroyd. She was terrifying, and ended up defining my entire week.
August, 2016: I did not get my memoir written. I wrote some things. I cried a lot. I also wrote short stories and sketched. But who was I kidding? When I got home I stumbled across an article called Why You Should Aim For 100 Rejections In A Year. I decided this will be my new goal.
September, 2016: I madly started sending out all the stories and essays I wrote — including the one about my daughter at the Vatican, and soon began accumulating rejections. In the spirit of the challenge, I was excited. A rejection! Then five rejections! Ten! But then it began to wear on me and I found myself in bed with the covers pulled over my head never wanting to get out again. It was demoralizing to say the least. By the end of the year I had 41 rejections, and apart from that one submission to The Sun, only one other essay I wrote was accepted for publication anywhere (not the Vatican one).
October, 2016: Realizing I needed help with memoir writing, I applied for a grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council to take a workshop in memoir. I also committed to a writing challenge where I wrote on a specific theme every day for the entire month in my blog. My theme was travel, and I completed Around The World In 31 Days.
November, 2016: I got the grant! But the workshop I planned to take was canceled. They allowed me to use the money for a different workshop — The Spiritual Art of Memoir — at an ashram in Virginia, slated for next June.
December, 2016: I applied for another Wildacres residency. I had already been rejected from all the other residencies I applied for this year (yay! more rejections!): Millay, one in Alaska, one in Rochester, NY, one in Rhinebeck, NY. I told Wildacres that I was so productive last time, but I was only there a week. This time, I was applying for two weeks, and I felt certain I’d be able to complete my memoir.
2016 ended, and it wasn’t my year. But I decided to try the 100 rejections in even more earnest for next year, (it ended up worse than 2016! 61 rejections and only one acceptance!) but I ended up getting the Wildacres residency. I got a different cabin so no more Mergatroyd! Instead I got to share my cabin with …
A snake. In the fireplace. In the cabin. And that’s about how 2017 went for me, though my visit to the ashram was amazing, and I’ve been back twice since. But that’s a story for another time.
Melissa Sokulski is a writer from Pittsburgh, PA. You can read about her adventures on her blog Satchelful Of Stars. She also writes about wild food at Food Under Foot.
