I had been thinking about failure ever since a phone call with my friend, the poet Divya Victor. I say “friend,” but we’d only just met a month before, when she arrived on Virginia Tech’s campus as our first visiting writer for the 2024-2025 school year. I’d spent maybe a total of thirty minutes with her, escorting her to various locations on campus, and watching with awe an elegant presentation she gave on the image of blackberries in modern poetry, but during that time, she had won me over with her warmth and kindness and humor, and when it was time to say goodbye, we both agreed that we—as directors of creative writing programs—might benefit from future conversations. She proposed a date which she referred to as “embarrassingly far ahead,” indicative of her “scary calendar,” and now, because the date had arrived, I called her. We discussed a number of things during our conversation—Divya is friendly and intelligent and witty and empathetic, the kind of person who, as soon as you meet her, you feel like you’ve known forever—but the thing she’d said that’d stuck with me was her explanation of the series she’d come up with in her home department called “Fail Better.” You know the phrase. From Beckett: “Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. Try again. Fail better.” Divya is of the mind that writers and professors don’t talk enough about failure. I wholeheartedly agreed.

Recently, when I mentioned that I would be writing a column about failure to a younger friend of mine who is also a writer, he exploded in derisive laughter. What could I possibly know about failure? I was a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a full professor at an R1 university, the director of an MFA program, the author of six books and over 200 single-authored publications. A winner of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, I’ve had work in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. All these things are true facts that I’ve trotted out on many occasions when somebody’s asked me for a “bio.” But lurking behind them, like shadows that loom larger the closer you look, are all the failures: the false starts, the unfinished manuscripts, the abandonments, rejections, denials, and, in one case, the refusal of a dream press to publish a manuscript—after they’d led me to believe that acceptance was a done deal.   

Failure, as it turns out, is baked into any writer’s DNA. Back in the beginning, of course, when I was merely a kid who loved stories, I understood precious little about failure. Words came naturally to me, always had, from watching anthropomorphized letters—namely the lonely lower case “n” crying on a hill above the sea—jumping to life on Sesame Street, to the days of listening to my grandmother read a story in the Childcraft anthology about Garnett and Citronella, two girls who’d hitched a ride into town with Mr. Freebody and subsequently got locked inside their local library. Teachers praised my writing. Friends laughed at madcap improvisations I recorded on cassette tape. Later, as I grew into adolescence, my own father proudly shared my poems—effusively romantic and often dramatic rhapsodies featuring moonlight and shattered hearts, printed on dot matrix paper—with his dental patients. Back then, writing wasn’t about trying and failing, and trying again a gazillion times; it was something I simply did. A reflex. A naturally occurring process—no different in kind than a belch or a fart. I mimicked voices, copied the rhythms of poets I admired, and experimented without hesitation. The act of writing felt as effortless as a half-court shot swished during a pickup game—fun, instinctive, unencumbered by doubt.

In college, I discovered that writing could be studied. Students could totally, like, major in it. I could spend years studying language and art and writing and someday, I could be a professional producer and/or studier of language. It wasn't necessarily advisable, if I wanted to make a lot of money, but money wasn't a part of this equation. The only thing that mattered was being able to do what I wanted to do. To do what I was compelled to do: write stories and poems.

Eventually, though, I began to imagine that my writing deserved a larger audience, so I invested in one of those fat Writer's Market books and began preparations for submitting my work. I read about what the most prestigious magazines claimed they were looking for. I read what the least prestigious magazines were looking for. I packaged my manuscripts according to these publications’ specifications—double-spaced, with my name and address and phone number at the top right and the story’s word count on the left—along with an S.A.S.E. (self-addressed, stamped envelope) inside manilla envelopes, dropped them in the nearest mailbox, and began the months-long wait that would end when I opened the mailbox and was greeted by my handwriting, which I would immediately tear open to find… a form rejection.