This is an update on digesting the No I received from my agent on my latest manuscript. I am not sharing this because I am special or deserving of pity. I share it because so many artists hit walls of No regularly.

 

I have no idea what's next. Please know that I write about and organize with artists not because I have everything figured out but exactly because I do not. I do find it helpful hearing an artist work through a challenge. So here’s me puzzling out a (relatively devastating) no.

 

I spoke with my agent.

 

We talked about why she doesn’t see a path to publication for my manuscript. We talked about markets, demographics, and my novel’s difficult (understatement) subject matter.

 

She feels deeply for me and the manuscript, and said repeatedly: Maybe there is an agent who will see a path to publication. She offered to let me look for that new agent with her blessing, and even return to her if no other agents showed interest. That is unusual, to say the least.

 

I asked her: Do you really want me as your author? If we are not a fit, I completely understand, and I’d prefer to hear it directly, and today.

 

I will paraphrase her response.

 

 

 

Okay. 

 

This is a person whose practice is rooted, like mine, in a deep sense of mission.

 

This is a person I feel blessed to work with.

 

 

The No provoked in me a predictable flood of internal questions:

 

I have been through this cycle enough times to register those questions without being derailed by them.

 

As I do when I write or make dances or organize with artists, I am now trying to find a better question.

 

The structures of art and culture (the presenters and funders, the nonprofit museums and for-profit publishers) often provoke limited and limiting questions.

 

 

 

 

Those are not meaningless questions. They are, however, framed by the structures that extract and distribute artist products and insights. They are not questions grounded in artistic practice and process. They are not connected to the root.

 

Today, my better question is: In writing my novels, how can I complete the circuit of creating?

 

 

I come from dance, where the circuit is unavoidable. I was in the room with literally every person who watched my choreography. Many of them I spoke to. Others, I sensed their attention and investment (or lack of).

 

I have never been in the room while someone reads my novel. People keep telling me that would be creepy.

 

 

Even emails like this elicit response, conversation, and energy that inform the next email. There is a circuit, a flow.

 

 

I do not have conversations and connections around my two published novels, Wilder and A Night Twice as Long.

 

I don't have a circuit.

 

I recognize I am describing a fortunate (but not, I think, rare) sort of sorrow. I got what I wanted, and it did not nourish me or my work as I imagined it would.

 

 

I attained the one and it didn’t lead to the other.

 

 

I experienced this cognitive trap many times with my dance company. Once I get X, I’ll be all set. Back then, X was a show in New York, a review in the Times, a grant from Creative Capital.

 

(Fun prompt: Figure out specifically what your X is, then talk with an artist who has it. You may find, as I have, that life post-X is conspicuously similar to life pre-X.)

 

Sometimes my dance company got X, and we would wake up the next day still ourselves, still figuring out our artist journey every day. I felt a deep exhaustion in that moment—Really? Will we never get there?—but also a glimmer of excitement.

 

 

 

It is the chilly elation of freedom.

 

It reminds me—and here is how I know I am connected to the root—of stepping into the dance studio to begin a new work, or writing the first paragraphs of a new novel.

 

I have to—that is, I get to—forge my journey.

 

Not alone. I have people, I have my agent, I have fellow travelers like y’all. I have two published books (quiet in the sales sense, loud as heck in the literary sense) I couldn’t be more proud of.

 

And I have a better question.