Finding the one line in a long-awaited email

I saw the email this morning and had a good idea of what it would say.

It was from the Associate Artistic Director of the theater festival where I had submitted White Collar, my first play. I had been waiting for this message since last fall, when I sent in what was, improbably, the fourteenth revision of the script.

The note was about 150 words long. Polite. Professional. Appreciative of the number and quality of submissions. I moved through the first paragraph, then into the second, looking for the sentence that mattered.

It was there, near the end:

“Unfortunately, your play was not selected for the 2026 award.”

No surprise. Not really.

I had followed all the requirements. The play fit the format, the length, and the cast size. But those are only the price of admission. They don’t get you selected.

I’d be lying if I said I felt nothing. There was a brief pause after reading it—a small, quiet deflation. Not enough to ruin the day, but enough to notice.

Then, just as quickly, it passed.

I’ve already moved on to another project, Lines of Memory, a fictionalized history of several generations of my family. That’s the nature of this kind of work. You write, you revise, you send it out, and more often than not, you hear “no.”

If I keep at it, I expect to accumulate a respectable collection of those emails.

But I also hope that one day I’ll read far enough to find a different sentence waiting for me.

And for now, that’s reason enough to keep going.