by Michael Fedo

Fifty years ago, as a college sophomore, I enrolled in a short story writing course taught by Harry Collins (not his real name). It was the only creative writing class I ever took and I got a C in it. According to Dr. Collins, my stories lacked verisimilitude and were weak in character development. Heedless of my instructor, over the subsequent decades I’ve published eight books—including one novel—and scores of articles, essays, short stories, and poems, each one a refutation of Prof. Collins’s discouraging words. I may have become a writer to dispel his perception that I wasn’t one.

Each week Harry would read and discuss several stories in class, and he selected my initial story—about a young man in war—for oral rendering. I sensed that he didn’t like it, because his reading was interspersed with sighs. My premonition proved accurate when upon completion Harry looked up from the podium and said, “Class, what’s wrong with this story?”

“Pulp fiction, man,” said a slouching-in-his-seat student. “Sounds like somebody trying to write for money.” Heads nodded in agreement.

“Perhaps,” Prof. Collins said. “But do you suppose this author has been to war? Class, it’s a cardinal rule that writers write what they know. This writer didn’t do that. Therefore the story lacks verisimilitude.”

Following Dr. Collins’s appraisal, others jumped in with seconding opinions of the quality of my story. Most reaffirmed its dearth of verisimilitude (a new word for me that day) and stated that its blatant attempt at commerciality negated it as literature.

Strangely, I wasn’t devastated by the critiques. I somehow—perhaps arrogantly—intuited that Harry and his acolytes were wrong.

It was true that I had no experience with war or prisons or disintegrating families—subjects addressed in other stories I submitted. But what I understood, even before I took myself seriously as a writer, was that writers are not necessarily limited to writing only what they know; they write to discover what they don’t know, to discover and articulate what they think about topics and issues. In short, writers are risk takers and evolving learners, not restricted to narrow parameters of life as personally encountered. And way back then I somehow knew these truths, and that made me impervious to the scoldings by the teacher and fellow students.

Over the years, the specter of my old professor hovered as I composed. With each publication I felt an urge to send the story, essay, or book off to him. But I resisted. Several years after I’d graduated, I learned from a fraternity brother currently enrolled in Harry’s class, that another of his former students had recently published an essay in the old Reporter magazine, a noteworthy achievement, as it was one of the country’s premier intellectual journals, rivaling the Saturday Review, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly. Harry, who apparently hadn’t been impressed with that student author some years earlier, was also dismissive of his essay. “What it shows,” he said, “is that even a mediocre writer can publish if he hangs around long enough.”

Actually, there’s some truth in the old professor’s last statement. Persistence indeed pays off. Richard Hooker’s MASH was rejected 21 times; The Dubliners brought James Joyce 22 turndowns; Jack London received 600 rejections before making a sale; Gertrude Stein submitted poems for 20 years before earning an acceptance; and crime novelist John Creasey was nixed 754 times prior to publishing 564 books.

Scores of editors and professors have wrongly assessed fledgling authors. E. C. Mabie, a 1930s University of Iowa theater professor, savaged a student’s play in front of his playwriting class. The piece was written by Tennessee Williams, and Prof. Mabie later refused to write a recommendation for him when Williams applied for a graduate fellowship.

Many readers recall the sad tale of John Kennedy Toole, whose Confederacy of Dunces posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, 12 years after the author’s suicide. Toole had struggled for years to interest publishers, before his determined mother, with Walker Percy’s influence, persuaded the Louisiana State University Press to issue the novel in 1980. Would any of the multitudes of editors who passed on the manuscript admit to being wrong after it won the Pulitzer?

That’s hard to say, but I don’t think any of my published writings would have validated me in Harry Collins’s eyes either. He might have said that I was just lucky or persistent, maybe both.

On the other hand, Harry taught me, albeit inadvertently, that each rejection of my work was not necessarily a reflection of its worth—or mine; rather it indicated that an editor was wrong, and I always maintained that somewhere down the line another editor would get it right.

Michael Fedo’s eighth book, A Sawdust Heart: My Vaudeville Life in Medicine and Tent Shows, by Henry Wood as told to Michael Fedo will be published in May, 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press.