Back in December 2021, I noticed that it was Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day. That’s charming, don’t you think? So I whipped out an email to a few of my Whovian friends (including Julie Herman) with that holiday as the subject. The message is long gone from my Sent folder, but it went something like this: I can travel any when. I have. I caught D B Cooper as he fell.
In my mind, that was it. My friends would understand that I was Pretending to Be a Time Traveler. And then one of them replied: I love this poem, but you might want to add a few more lines.
A poem, you say? Now that I think of it….
It came together fairly quickly, and it was quirky oh my yes. The line breaks and internal rhyme almost formed themselves, and with a few revisions it did what I wanted it to do and a little bit more. So I began sending it out to the poetry journals. To 62 of them over the next 16 months.
I’ll bet you’re wondering about my masochism. You are not alone in that. Why did I go on offering up this particular piece when it was so clearly not wanted? I kept sending it out because I like the poem. I like the rhythm and the flow and the deeply-embedded message.
But sometimes you just have to face the facts…
and give up.
Which I almost did. After 62 rejections, it seemed clear that the poem needed to be retired, and I vowed not to send it to another journal.
Almost as if the universe wanted to show me who’s really in charge, there appeared in my Inbox that very day a message from the last journal I’d submitted it to. “We love it” the editors wrote, and asked to use the poem in an upcoming issue.
The lesson is
in art or in life, we must persist.
So go write something, and put it out there. And keep at this for as long as it takes for your art to find its loving home.
One Interesting Thing
The story of D B Cooper, according to the FBI
Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry, and served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years. Her D B Cooper time traveler poem will be published later this year, but you can read “Show Me the S on Your Chest,” the poem that was rejected only 57 times, at JAKE.
You can read previous issues of b.read.crumbs here.
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