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Rejection
queen
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Dawn Rae Downton survives Newfoundland and 136 snubs to publish Seldom
by JULIET WATERS
It takes guts to accumulate 87 rejections for short stories and 49 rejections
for a novel. Dawn Rae Downton has acquired enough experience being rejected
that she recently wrote an article for the Globe & Mail comparing
the rejection styles of editors, publishers and agents on both sides
of the border, ocean and planet (Australian and New Zealand rejections
are the most cheerful). What drives her?
“I’ve been competitive all my life and I thought, if I’m
going to get all these rejections, I want more rejections than the next
guy. It was really a matter of saying, I’ve got this many, how
many have you got? And people would be really impressed. Writers risk
rejection all the time—and it’s a rejection of their very
inner self—there’s nothing worse. But a true writer will use
it as material.”
After reading Seldom, Downton’s first published novel/memoir, there’s
no arguing she’s a true writer. An Angela’s Ashes for Newfoundland,
the title is the name of the outport where Downton’s grandparents
were married. But the word “seldom” would be too generous
to describe how many moments of happiness this marriage produced.
Still, life in Newfoundland has a kind of magical severity. Sidney Wiseman
and Ethel Wellon are married within a week of Ethel losing both a niece
and nephew to diphtheria. After disease, drowning and storms have taken
their toll, it seems rare for more than half the children in any turn
of the century Newfoundland family to survive into adulthood. Maybe
that’s why places are named for children who will probably not
live long enough to know anything beyond hardship and fairy tales: Ladle
cove, Burnt Woods, Goat Island, and Big Tickle, where the Wisemans settle
down.
Seldom is Downton’s mother Marion’s memoir. Marion’s
childhood is filled with intense love but even more intense abuse. The
hands that Marion used to warm in her gentle mother’s hair, are
the same frozen hands her father beat into a bloody swollen pulp, when
Marion once disobeyed him, at age five. At six her father tries to cure
her of her terror of the sea by tying a rope around her and throwing
her overboard into subzero water. Not much later. Marion’s baby
brother falls off a wharf and almost drowns. Afraid to admit she might
have pushed him by mistake while playing with the family dog, Sailor,
Marion blames the dog. Sidney shoots Sailor in front of his six children.
All their lives he never allows Sailor’s bed to be removed from
the kitchen, insisting they might get another dog, though they never
do.
Sidney Wiseman is a sick, narcissistic ogre who creates, despite himself,
a family so united in mutual protectiveness that miraculously all the
children do manage to survive.
This survivor mentality must be something Downton has inherited. After
all those rejections, she managed to sell two books to McClelland and
Stewart. Diamond: A Memoir of a Hundred Days, a journal of her grief
over losing a close friend, is due to be published next year.
She’ll admit she’s a true writer, but Downton doesn’t
consider herself a true Newfoundlander. Her forebears were anything
but introspective. They’d prefer to just get on with life than
write memoirs. I ask Downton how she could persevere, not only in writing
two books about death, but to resist the temptation, after all that
rejection, to just shove them into a drawer forever. She laughs.
“Oh no, I could never get tired of death. Sweetie, I’ve only
just started. Death is my thing. I find that I’m probably over-bonded
to things and in a way that other people might not find useful. But
it’s what I got. Death is my subject. Death is a huge insult, especially
when it comes after a life that’s not been fully lived, like my
grandmother’s. I just feel like going on and on about it and have
my say. You should see me at parties.” :
Seldom by Dawn
Rae Downton, McClelland & Stewart, hc, 293pp, $34.99
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