#0047: Writing Alone Together, One Week at a Time

How the 100 Rejections Club supports a creative community

After more than a month — including last week’s 3 Mindfulness Practices (#0046) —  devoted to how to face and overcome Imposter Syndrome (yet another katana wielded by the Inner Critic), let’s return to the origins of Inlandia’s 100 Rejections Club. 

Could zoom meetups paws-ibly be any cuter? (Source: Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash)

Inlandia

The nonprofit Inlandia Institute serves the 29,000 square mile inland Southern California region, comprising Riverside and San Bernardino Counties and their bordering cities. Inlandia’s mission is to:

recognize, support, and expand literary activity in all of its forms in the Inland Empire by publishing books and sponsoring programs that deepen people’s awareness, understanding, and appreciation of this unique, complex and creatively vibrant region.

Inlandia works to lift up creatives in the region in a multitude of ways, from offering workshops to cosponsoring events.  

100 Rejections

Though the concept of recording and even flaunting rejections of creative work wasn’t new, the idea of rejection tallying combined with nonprofit fundraising was definitely novel. Cati Porter, Inlandia’s executive director, brainstormed the unique membership to support not only the institute but also creatives.

For the $100 annual membership, you try to stack up as many rejections as possible — maybe upwards of 100 Rejections — to win. 

What, exactly, do you win?

We all know our creative work cannot get out to the curated¹ world without submitting, and getting rejections is part of the process. The more we submit to publications, residencies, and agents, the better the chances of receiving acceptances. If we don’t stick with the submission process, we lose momentum. By striving for 100 rejections, we hold ourselves accountable to keep submitting.

Club

Have you noticed how, so often, the most important word of a sentence or title lands at the end? Writers use this trick to give the word extra emphasis, as a way to make readers pause and maybe linger on the word’s significance. So is the case with Inlandia’s membership. 

If all Inlandia wanted to do was raise some money, we’d leave off the club idea completely. A key component of Inlandia’s mission is to support. (Second word in the block quote above.)

By making the membership a Club, the intention was to create a community. A place for creatives to connect and support each other in a crazy race to the top (bottom?) of the rejections pile.

When she conceived Inlandia’s 100 Rejections Club in the summer of 2023, Cati wove community into the perks, from swag and monthly leaderboards to a group Duotrope account. Caught up in the excitement, I got the notion in my noggin to start this free newsletter, which launched in October 2023. 

At the start of 2024 (if memory serves), Cati began to offer another key way to support Inlandia’s 100 Rejections Club members: a weekly meetup. Every Thursday morning at 9 o’clock Pacific, she opens the Zoom portal, briefly greets attendees, then all mute and turn off video to focus for an hour on their creative projects.

Write a poem? Start an illustration? Research a historical figure? Read an article on book marketing? Continue with a WIP (work in progress)? Whatever!

At the end of the hour, Cati unmutes, turns her video back on, and lets everybody know the hour is up. When two or three club members requested an evening meetup, I stepped up this summer to host Thursday evenings, 6:30–7:30pm Pacific (when I often draft these weekly posts!).

We’ve come up with a couple nicknames for this weekly meetup, including Writing Alone Together and Writing In Solidarity.

Wanna share some other potential names? Please leave a comment (silly or serious)!

Gotta say, having a standing weekly date with our creativity and with each other makes a big difference as we embrace rejection together. Please consider joining Inlandia’s 100 Rejections Club.

Next time: Looking ahead to Year 2 of Inlandia’s 100 Rejections Club

1. With relatively easy access to the interwebs — the tremendous exception being those in financial hardship unable to afford to pay for home or smart phone internet access— most creatives can put their work out there. But no one will find it in the overwhelming abundance.

For the longest time, literary journals and magazines would not allow “previously published” creative work to be submitted. (The exception being reprints.) This requirement crushed creatives, never allowing them to share anything anywhere. The requirement to hoard curtailed opportunities to connect and create community.

“Curated” is a term coined by Rattle editor Timothy Green. (See his opinion piece here.) Instead of foregoing previously “published” creative work, he argues for the concept of curated materials, explaining: “The need for curation is immense. And that’s what the publishers and editors of the literary world are actually doing—building and providing access to an audience that appreciates their tastes.”

FYI, Inlandia: A Literary Journey specifically uses “curated” in our guidelines. And we allow reprints with proper attribution/credit to the original publication.