Vivisection
Rejection, plays, and a rose quartz elephant
I overthink when it comes to this Substack1. Despite having different sections for a variety of topics, I haven’t exactly committed to any of them. It’s fear, really, that holds me back. Sure I love Hamlet and think Ophelia and floriography are cool, but does anyone else? Same with all the weird saints out there and the tropes of dead girls, are they just pestering thoughts in my head or is there any merit to them?
The answer, simply, is that it doesn’t matter. If I find it interesting then I should write about it, screw everyone else. And I do care about writing these things, it’s just that I’m also writing about other things, submitting those things and hoping that those somethings will end up on paper. Such is the life of a writer, you write, you wait, you write while waiting, repeat. And then, on the rare occasion, someone likes your writing so much that they publish it. Mostly it’s rejection.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of rejection lately. I keep a notebook with the name and date of agencies and Indie publishers I’ve sent my queries and manuscript excerpts to and highlight them red when I’ve gotten a rejection. It’s a well red book2, and some morbidly curious part of my brain wonders how full it will end up getting while also dreading filling it entirely.
Rejection is part of the job, you either handle it or you don’t and I’m lucky to have trained my brain enough to shove down3 the disappointment of rejection and focus on the next application. But now that I’m not only submitting short fiction but an entire manuscript, sometimes things get heavy.4
So let’s talk about something positive, an acceptance. On March 9th and 10th the first scene of my play Pussy Killing was performed as a part of the She Creates festival by Neruda Arts under the She Speaks category which featured plays and monologues from five other playwrights. It was a wonderful event, my family came as well as so many of my friends5. I ended up feeling so incredibly loved, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I haven’t had a play in a festival since 2020, so getting to see one of my works performed again felt like a homecoming. I’ve missed it, and if anything getting to be in the festival made me realize how I need to put some focus in my writing time into playwrighting. I love the excitement of it, and the weirdness of seeing your words performed back to you as well as seeing people watch it being performed. It’s a surreal experience, and something I love feeling.
After the play there was a talkback, which I’ve never done before. I did a version of that online with gritLit when my story “What Happened to Natalie?” was an honourable mention for their 2020 writing contest and there was a (very delayed) Zoom event where myself and the first place winner read excerpts and spoke about our stories. But theatre is different. With the other festivals I’ve been apart of I’ve been used to being an invisible part of the process, the actors getting the applause while I sit in the shadows and watch. So it was different to sit in the performance space with the other playwrights, to be seen by the audience and be asked about my play.
Pussy Killing is a surreal play so leading up to the event I was incredibly anxious of what the reaction would be as I haven’t written anything quite as weird as it before, but it was honestly a great experience. Most of the questions were thoughtful and I enjoyed getting to talk about it, discuss it, and listen to what the other playwrights said about their pieces.
But then someone asked about what inspires us to write, how we come up with our ideas, is it through the known and unknown? It was a group question, so when I answered I said it was a mix of both. Pussy Killing deals with a lot of discussion on gender identity, and as a cis straight women I don’t have that perspective from a lived experience. But I have many friends in the queer and trans communities who have, and when I write something like Pussy Killing it is so I can understand better. But I also answered that sometimes I do write about true experiences, like my play Beep is a look at my grief after my mom died of breast cancer.
One of my friends joked that after I said that the mood in the theatre6 shifted, and I felt it too. I’m used to their being a shift in energy when I tell people that my mom’s dead, but it was different this time and it was because of my play. Because while Pussy Killing is a look at gender identity there’s also a focus on mother-daughter relationships, and the mother and daughter in my play have a complicated one. I immediately regretted telling the audience my mom died because I could feel this knowing coming off of them, that there was a chance the audience believed the mother-daughter relationship in my play was the relationship I had with my mom.
Examining an artist’s work biographically isn’t a new concept. Hell, I’m an English major, in high school I wrote an essay on Our Town and mentioned how the reference to one set of character’s being twins reflected Thornton Wilder’s own life as he had a twin sibling who died at birth7. It’s another downfall of artistry, people want to understand motivations and will look to the artist’s life as proof of what creative decisions they made in their work. Did Thornton Wilder put twins in Our Town because he was a twin or did he just do it for no reason? I have no idea, no one will ever really know because he’s dead. But this is what we do, we dissect artists. We crack the spines and pull out the words and meanings until they make sense to us. The play talkback was different though, you have to be dead for your work to be dissected. Vivisection is what happens when you’re alive. Awake for it.
No one asked me outright about my relationship with my mom, so this whole thing could be just in my head8, but I’m also no stranger to it. I’ve had people read my writing and assume certain things about characters or project themselves into things that have no bearing on them. I’ve had people say that I wrote a certain thing a certain way as an homage to X. And some of these people have been correct, some of the things I’ve written have been intentional, but some of them haven’t. It’s not that I don’t like being asked about my work, I love it, but when it gets into the personal, the intimate, when there’s the belief that something I’ve written is a pure reflection of myself, that a fictional story with a character unlike me is somehow a representation of my psyche. For lack of a better word it’s weird, it’s uncomfortable. It’s also unavoidable.
When I mentioned my mom it felt like a betrayal to her, like I was misrepresenting her and out relationship. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write about my relationship with my mom because it’s mine, intimately and wholly mine that I want to keep close to myself. But it was good, and it was filled with so much love. I feel awful for not answering better.
A few hours before the play I looked around the town the performance was taking place at. My sister and I only had half an hour so we hit the stores that looked interesting to us, including a crystal store that looked new. When we went inside I found a small rose quartz elephant on one of the shelves9 . I bought it, and carried it in my purse during the performance.
It felt like having a part of my mom with me.
What Else I’ve Been Doing:
Reading: Finished many books, currently reading The Lost Tarot by Sarah Henstra.
Listening To: Chappelle Roan
Watching: Season Two of Six Feet Under, Season Two of What We Do In the Shadows, One Pace (Arlong Park), Midnight Mass (Lent re-watch).
Let’s be real, I overthink when it comes to a lot of things.
Ba dum tsss!
Repress
Who else survived Berkley’s Open Submission that didn’t actually open?
I love you all so dearly <3
Theatre is a generous word but plays were read and the space was treated as a theatre, so I’m sticking with it!
I didn’t just talk about twins because I’m a twin, I talked about other things do and aced the essay!
Which is likely as an anxious person!
Also a book called A Guide to Seances by Claire Goodchild.
I love this, Sarah!