WINDOWLESS BASEMENT REVIEW
A friend had much good news to tell me yesterday, including that one of her essays had been published. “Of course it’s in the Windowless Basement Review or something,” she said. I laughed a lot.
Some writers have no publications; some have a bajillion; most who have been at it for long enough and care to do the requisite trying and trying and trying and trying to put it out in the world, getting shat on almost constantly for their efforts, have likely come up with a handful of publications, windowless or otherwise. Just as a child with fewer toys will find more reasons and imagine into what’s there, most writers end up at some point gazing at their middling lists of acceptances and wondering “does this constitute success?”
It’s a head-scratcher, if you want it to be—what constitutes (writerly, or any) success. But the short & most useful answer I’ve yet come across is YES THIS IS SUCCESS: to have offered something, and when it was rejected, to have tossed it out a bit farther, and when that crumpled wrapper of effort and dreams drowned in a dogshit puddle, to have really chucked it, hurled it while screaming, still dripping, and then, when someone wandering by finally said “hey, I found this thing you just threw, you know, when you were screaming just now, and it’s interesting to me,” to have responded I am so, so glad. Let us scream together."
“What does it mean to have been seen?”