Press 53

5 Questions, 3 Facts

This week we talk to Pinckney Benedict, author of the collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories, and co-editor (with wife Laura Benedict) of Surreal South, an anthology of creepy stories perfect for cool October nights. 

P53: Who are the people that have most influenced your writing (both in the literary world and outside it)?

PB: First and foremost, Joyce Carol Oates. She was my first (and really, my only important) writing teacher. I took classes from her at Princeton, wrote my thesis— which became my first story collection, Town Smokes—for her. She and her husband, the miraculous Ray Smith, published my first story and my first book. Any time I sit down to write, inevitably I think about Joyce. What would she make of what I’m about to do? I suppose it’s a juvenile impulse, but I still do it, thirty years after first meeting her, and so I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop.

Tons of other folks as well, of course. Terrific teachers, friends who pressed certain books on me at the right time in my life, my parents, who were both terrific readers. My older brother, who was an athlete, and so that route was closed to me. Too many to name.

P53: What have you done with your rejection letters (that is, if you have ever received any)?

PB: Very many. When I was a younger writer, I took them very seriously and tried quite hard to address the weaknesses they adduced in my work, if the letters were more than just form rejections. I’d really put labor into it, fixing whatever those letters said was wrong.

At a certain point I realized that rejection letters were, like bad reviews, not much more than idiosyncratic expressions of the editor’s, or the reviewer’s personal views rather than universal judgments from some all-knowing Overmind. I don’t mean that they’re being cynical when they point out what they say are the reasons they rejected a story: no doubt it seems to them that if you’d submitted a story that did they things they say they wish it did, then they’d have accepted it for publication. If you’d submitted that story, though, I believe that generally they’d find some other problem with it. The reasons an editor—as an editor of an anthology series, I feel in a pretty good position to say this—takes or doesn’t take a story are largely instinctual, unphrasable.

This is all assuming it’s a pretty good story, of course, of publishable quality. If your story isn’t a good one to begin with, then all bets are off.

Same with acceptances: if an editor had a particularly hearty breakfast that morning before reading your submission, then it might get accepted. If, instead, a car hit the editor’s dog, then you are likely to get a rejection, particularly if your story had a dog in it. Should you then avoid writing about dogs or other things that might get hit by cars? How can you know what quirks or eccentricities inform the opinion of the editor, particularly since the editor is probably blind to them, and they likely change from day to day or hour to hour? You can’t, unless you know the editor or are the editor, and even then, probably not. You can only do your work to the best of your ability.

That realization made my life much easier. Now I just put rejections aside and think, Ah well. Wish that person had had a nice cheesy omelet for breakfast, or maybe brioche. And too bad about his dog. And then I go back to work.

P53: Drink of choice?