Cheri Johnson was raised in Lake of the Woods County in Minnesota. She has a BA in English from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, an MA in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. She has won the John Engman Literary Prize, the Andrew James Purdy Prize, the Gesell Award, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and a Bush Artist Fellowship. She is currently a fellow in fiction at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has had work included in Clare, Pif, nidus, The Hollins Critic, Rio Grand Review, and Glimmer Train Stories.

Recently a painter friend wrote to me that he was having trouble meeting people he "saw eye to eye with, professionally." He wants a group of colleague-friends who share, to a high degree, his own values and tastes in art: people whose work he can truly admire, and who will, in turn, admire and encourage his own.

I understand my friend's wish, but it reminds me that artists of all kinds need not only support and praise—and they do need these—but also, and just as much, challenge and rejection.

The whole thing put into mind my own search for a literary agent. I began looking for an agent for a simple, practical reason: I want to publish my books, and many publishers accept only agented submissions. I think I understood agents to have a primarily practical interest in the transaction as well; they want to work for authors who will make them money. But as I've spoken with agents and other writers, I've come to understand that the relationship is more complicated than that. It's about money, of course, and publicity, but it's also about taste and value and advocacy; it's about encouragement and trust; and it's about rejection.

I've found that most agents, if they've taken the time to ask to read some of my work, do not fail to offer a few words of explanation if they reject it. These sometimes terse notes can be hard to read but I always read them. They've been very valuable to me, often because of that terseness. It's easy to evade complete honesty if one has a lot of space in which to do so, but the time constraints on agents' lives have, thankfully, helped to provide me with clear and sharp reflections of what my book is, and how I can expect people to see it.

My first reaction when I read these few hard lines must always be—for matters of self-preservation—my own bitter rejection of them: "Can't figure out where you are, or who's who? Rather be spoon-fed, I guess …. Didn't feel emotionally engaged by the characters? Really? Maybe if you want a commercial for Cymbalta, not literature." Always I tell myself, Just remember, they’re not looking only for good books, they're looking for fashionable books … books they think will sell well, right now, not because they’re good or bad, but because of their subject matter, or their titles, or their author's sex or age, or some other factor that almost no one will be able to predict, but everyone will try to.

Later I go back to these notes. I remind myself that this agent didn't have to tell me anything. Since he's already rejected the book, there's nothing in it, anymore, for him. I read the critiques again and again. Without fail they end up making me look hard at my manuscript. Sometimes I come to the awful realization that the agent was right, and my work is not yet done; sometimes I decide that she's wrong, but something about her reaction clues me into a deeper problem with the book that I must fix in my own way; and once or twice I've come to the conclusion—after considerable internal debate over whether I'm just being lazy or silly, and not understanding the difference between changes that really matter and changes that don't—that what the agent has to say is right if I want to write an easily commercial book, and wrong if I want to write a great one.

This can be an awful realization, but also a triumphant one. I want to write a great book. It will be fun if someday I have the publicity, the money, and the clout that can come for literary writers who have some commercial success. But there are other ways to make money, and even publicity, and there is no match for the feeling of sending out into the world—even if, for the moment, "the world" is only a few agents' or publishers' desks—the book you've come to realize, through your own confidence, the support of those who already love you and your work, and the rejection of those who don't, was the one you’ve always wanted to write.

One of my undergraduate professors, John Mitchell, died in 2006, and I miss his praise and his rejection of my ideas ("Soldiers in Iraq? What do you know about that?") terribly. A year or so before he died, he told me probably the most important thing I could hear: "You’re the real thing ... you know how I know that? Because you just keep writing and writing, even when nothing comes of it."