Continued from Adolph
Thanks to the unscrupulous financial habits of Adolph, her father’s business partner, the beautiful home in New Rochelle was sacrificed. I wonder what Grandfather Dillon knew of these goings on. Her father set them up in a nice flat overlooking the Hudson river in the upper West Side. By all rights, they still lived a comfortable and upper class life. But gone were the butler, the maid, and the cook. Concrete replaced her forested knolls and grottoes, cutting her off from the natural world. Granite skyscrapers hugged the marine fog tighter to the earth, painting the entire cityscape in a depressing monochrome for days on end and trapping the stench of diesel, industry, and garbage.
The move coincided with Yry’s journey out of adolescence and into adulthood. Having graduated from New Rochelle High, she now rarely saw her small circle of friends. She was adrift. If she couldn’t live in the natural world, she would write about it. Locked in her room for hours, she meticulously plotted stories and poems. During the summer, she collected her best work, stories that varied from 461 words to over 2,000 words and employed animals as protagonists. She typed and submitted these to the Newspaper Institute of America, Inc., an organization that claimed to launch writing careers for “People Who Want to Write, but can’t get started.”
Early in August an envelope arrived from the editorial department of the Institute. Breathless, she tore it open to find a two-page, typed critique of her efforts. Editor R.M.S. cut her no slack. First he (or was that a she in disguise?) chastised Yry for not following the submission requirement of “one story of not more than eight thousand words.” Then came the assault on her work.
… Each short story regardless of length presents the same problems of construction and requires the same amount of analysis. . . . Frankly none of the stories you submit strike me as real commercial possibilities. . . . They are all too slight to appeal to any magazines I know of that use this sort of story.
R.M.S. goes on to site several specific stories, claiming that they might get by, “if they did not dwell on such sombre matters as bllod and death. (sic)”
Most editors of children’s magazines avoid these subjects as they would the plague. …the real fault is that the stories are just anecdotes. They are too baldly instructive. They lack simple, strong, plots. What you need is some normal problems of young people that require actual solutions through their own actions. These stories you’ve submitted have been done over and over.
After that whipping, I give my mother credit for not laying her pen aside forever. She was indignant at the shallow mentality of “these editors.” She believed she was addressing far more real concerns than these ivory-towered shirts could conceive. The world is a dark and gloomy place, she thought. How are kids ever going to make their way through to adulthood if they are presented with only “pretty” stories about good and evil, where good always wins and everyone knows right up front what is evil and what is not?
A folder containing these stories, with “first serial rights” and word counts marked on the top page, and signed by author, Phyllis Dillon (Nom-de-plume), followed my mother throughout her life. And really, the copy editor was cruel, but correct. The stories about animals and little boys are preachy and dark. The moral comes at you with the force of a pile driver.
Rangewriter 
Linda, how one reacts to criticism and failure matters most as it happens more than success. I am delighted she held onto these criticisms, harsh as they were. They served as a reminder and an impetus. Keith
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That’s an interesting and wise perspective on criticism, Keith. I’m not sure that saving those critiques had a particularly positive effect on Yry, though. I think her saving them was actually more closely tied to her packrat syndrome. I wonder if she ever revisited them as an adult.
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Linda, you would know better, but there is a story about Coach K, the very successful basketball coach of Duke University. After a season ending drubbing, I think by 109 to 66, an alumnus toasted at the end of season party, “Here’s to forgetting tonight’s game.” Coach K spoke up immdediately and said “Here’s is to never forgetting tonight’s game.” He wanted his players to remember how it felt to fall on your face, so they would work hard never to let it happen again. Maybe she saved these letters for that reason. Keith
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Yep, I know that story. Perhaps she used the lesson to pursue the endeavors to come.
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Writers have to make the decision as to whether they write for the market or for themselves. Of course, most of us would like to do both, but it rarely works out that way for the vast majority.
But there is nothing wrong with writing as a hobby. After all, it’s not like football or even chess, as you can enjoy writing for yourself, all by yourself. It can often help sort out problems.
It’s a hard world, and it appears that most readers are reasonably content with the stuff giant publishers, agents and advertisers push on them. However, the internet has made it possible for many more writers to reach global audiences in a way that was never possible before. The down side is that the majority will never get paid for their work, even though they are all doing their little bit to generate the huge amounty of traffic that supplies a few massive internet companies with their vast revenues through sales and advertising.
In a world where everyone is judged by how much money they make, it’s almost impossible to claim you are a writer unless you make an income from writing. Unfortunately, those who are in the position of helping you make an income are not the ones most fit for the task.
We’re in what I call a McDonald’s situation. Just because the restaurant chain moves more meals than any other outlet on the planet doesn’t mean it serves the best food.
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All good points about the writer’s life today. I would add that the internet has opened the field of writing (mostly unpaid) to a lot of really horrendous writing too. I’m often amazed at the caliber of writing on some websites. Self-publishing is both a blessing and a bane. I am so tired of pleas to buy/read books whose covers depict hairless 8-pack abs or DD boobs sprouting above a funnel waist. But as I see from my mother’s experience, the former gatekeepers of the publishing industry weren’t all that erudite either, as evidenced by the really horrible grammar and spelling in the editor’s letter.
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Actually the building they lived in after New Rochelle was on West End Avenue. The one overlooking the Hudson was later, it was the one we were raised in.
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Thanks for that clarification. I think I’ve been to 451 West End Ave. But perhaps it was 110 Riverside Dr that I visited.
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The West End one was only a few blocks away from 110, but it has no view. Your grandfather was in the bottom corner apartment as he was a doctor and that gave his patients easy access to him…oh yes, the medical world was totally different then.
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My grandfather was a doctor? This I never heard. I heard he was in the import/export business. I heard it had been in the shellac business…importing/exporting I would presume. But a doctor? That is totally new to me. Could you elaborate?
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