John Jodzio, with two collections published between last year and very recently, with an essay about a particular story acceptance.
My Rabbit Made Gordon Lish Wait
In 1994 there were not really any cell phones and email barely existed and I owned a small gray rabbit named Sinjin. I’d gotten Sinjin from an ex-girlfriend after we broke up. I always felt guilty keeping him in his hutch so I often let him run around my room unattended. This had some consequences. Sinjin loved to chew on things, especially phone cords, and if I didn’t keep a close eye on him I’d pick up my phone and there wouldn’t be a dial tone.
One day, Sinjin chewed through another phone cord. Usually it only took me a day or two to get a replacement, but this time it took me around a week before I bought a new one. A few minutes after I plugged it in, my phone rang.
“This is Gordon Lish,” the voice on the line said. "And I’ve been getting a busy signal every goddamn time I called you.”
I’d submitted a story to The Quarterly a few months before. It was about 100 words long and was basically an expansion of a dumb sex joke about the Maginot Line that my father had told me once. I had sent it on a whim because Amy Hempel was my favorite writer and she was in The Quarterly a lot.
"Oh shit,” I told Gordon, “it was my rabbit’s fault."
I thought he might want some clarification about how this was Sinjin’s fault, how a rabbit might have caused this disconnect between the two of us, but he seemed mostly annoyed that I’d been so hard to reach.
"Is that story you sent still available?" he snapped.
"Yes," I said.
“Great,” he told me, “then I’ll send over the page proofs.”
In a few months the journal arrived. Over the next few years, as rejection after rejection piled up, I would often pull it off my bookshelf and page through it to remind myself I’d once written something decent. Then one day I forgot to put the journal back on my bookshelf and Sinjin chewed a huge hole in the cover. A few weeks later he got some weird fever and died.
John Jodzio's work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney's, and One Story. He's the author of the short story collections, Knockout, Get In If You Want To Live and If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home. He lives in Minneapolis.
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