RICHARD FORD : I don't usually like stories about other people's early failures and rejections. They all sound so much the dreary same, and of course they weren’t successful failures or we wouldn't be hearing much about them. Bur I do love my own. I like to think back from a point of present calm to moments of consuming rage, bitter, gnawing betrayal, glimpses of disaster, hopelessness and defeat. Why I like to think about these is not to gloat. Certainly not. They' II all come around again with conspicuously different outcomes. It's just that I like the lingering notion that I've enjoyed a vigorous, exciting and robust life up to now-vigorous, robust enough to have been consumed by rage, et cetera about something. And second, I like it that no matter how I once felt-scalded, damaged, done in-I didn't go on feeling that way very long. That bad day got over. Another day started. I found other, better things to do. It can seem (almost) funny-all that fuming and raging and the creaking open of the abyss. It's good to remember this cycle of feelings in anticipation of the next round of assaults, due any day. Hard to choose the right rejection-they seem so plentiful and various. Once, Jay McInerney was quoted in a Canadian newspaper as saying that instead of his early meteoric success as a writer he now thought it might've been better for him to have been like Richard Ford, and to have labored for years in obscurity. Those years of obscurity, of course. were the years when I persisted in spite of one or another sort of rejection, slight, betrayal, rage, demeanment, demoralization. Odd to think these should seem salubrious to another. However, I'd be only too happy for Jay to have gotten his wish. I would simply want a trade: my obscurity for his early meteoric success. I believe we'd each be better for it now.