Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.”—Marilyn Monroe
We may not like it but rejection is a big part of life for creative people. My late brother Michael was a talented actor who ultimately gave up that career because of rejection. He and I once talked about this subject and he told me the difference between him and me is that casting agents were rejecting him as a person, while publishers were just rejecting my words or photographs, not me. Really? That didn’t make me feel any better. I have stacks of rejection letters (and emails) and just as many times was ghosted by publishers.
Steven King once told the story (perhaps apocryphal) that he drove a nail in the wall to hold all the rejection slips that he received from publishers. When they arrived, he would jam them onto the nail. When someone asked “what happened when you filled up the nail,” he replied “I got a bigger nail.” After my bother finally let rejection get to him, he moved onto a successful career as a baker. He and his partner, Scott Woolley, even wrote a best-selling book, Cakes by Design, with all the photographs in it being shot by Michael. And yes that is a cake on the cover. If you’re an avid baker, you should own this book. It has a five star rating on Amazon, which, I think, is better than any of my own books. Speaking of which…
When people ask why I haven’t written a book in a while my answer is usually, “because nobody asked me.” The reality is that over the past five years I have pitched many book ideas to different publishers and while most of them were rejected some were put into limbo with the publishers “interested but…” It’s the book publishing version of turnaround for a script in the movie business. (Turnaround is where a studio acquires a literary project but decides not to move forward with it and gives the writers an opportunity to sell it elsewhere.) I haven’t given up writing any new books because I really, really enjoy the process but selling a photography book these days is more about the photographer and the number of their social media followers than their photographs. But I’m not a quitter, so…
Book of the Week
Reading Stealing God is a truly magical and wonderful experience. I’m not usually a fan of the short story form but Bruce McAllister may just change my mind. The 18 stories featured in this book are indeed short and vary in length but even the briefest of descriptions for any one of them would contain spoilers, so I’ll keep it short here too.
Here’s a few (spoiler free) highlights of my favorite stories but there’s not a clunker in any of the stories in this book. You can read the stories in any order including from front to back but I didn’t. Instead I jumped around, going first to Hit, the story about the angel, the hit man and the vampire. (I know this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: an angel, a hit man and a vampire walk into a bar…) But the truth is this is a fascinating and interesting story that has a bit of a switcheroo and the end that turns it into a sort-of love story.
Stealing God is a bittersweet nostalgic story about a young Native American boy whose mother makes him steal what seems like a precious and mysterious object. What happens next is a sadly beautiful tale and like many of the stories found within these pages give off the vibe of a classic Twilight Zone episode. Like Hit, this story has an aspect of the spiritual or mystical. The same might be said of Sun and Stone that that is set in a Franciscan grotto in Assisi, Italy. This one has a Tarentino-like time-shifting perspective and is a story that initially seems that it’s about lizards. Oh, yes, lizards. And maybe it is. You won’t see the ending coming and when you get there you’ll be amazed by the wonder of the experience. It’s the perfect way to end this book.
I’ll be honest with you and admit that I had never heard of Bruce McAllister before being contacted to review this book. He’s clearly a magician with words and has a seemingly effortless writing style that you know is not effortless to create—writing is hard. I’m a big fan now and look forward to see what other books of his are available on Amazon or that my library has in its collection.