The Sixty-First Time

On Tuesday, May 5, 2026, Kathryn Stockett’s second novel arrived in bookstores across the country. The Calamity Club is set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933, during the grip of the Great Depression. It tells the story of three women — an orphaned girl, an outspoken spinster, and a woman running out of luck — who join forces to take control of their lives. It is 656 pages. It has been named one of the most anticipated books of 2026 by the New York Times, Oprah Daily, and Goodreads, among others.

Stockett’s first novel was The Help, published in 2009. It has sold more than 15 million copies and was translated into 35 languages. The 2011 film adaptation, starring Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Emma Stone, won Spencer an Academy Award.

Before any of that, The Help was rejected sixty times.

Stockett spent five years writing it in the early mornings before her daughter woke up, on her lunch breaks, on weekends. She sent it to literary agents and received sixty rejection letters. She kept the manuscript. She kept revising. She kept submitting.

The sixty-first submission found a yes.

Seventeen years passed between that yes and the publication of The Calamity Club. Years of scrutiny, of living inside the success and the controversy of her debut, of finding her way back to the desk. “I am fascinated by the underestimated woman,” she said, “who, for better or worse, can surprise even herself by how far she’s willing to go to get what she needs to survive.”

She was, in no small part, writing about herself.

In 1960, Madeleine L’Engle finished a novel called A Wrinkle in Time. She had been working on it for two years. It was unlike anything publishers had seen — a science fantasy with a young girl at its center, wrestling with questions of good and evil, time and space, the nature of love. Publishers didn’t know where to put it.

They rejected it. Twenty-six times.

On her birthday in 1962, L’Engle sat down and wrote in her journal that she was done. No publisher was going to take the book. She would give up. She was forty-three years old and had been writing since childhood, and she had reached the moment many writers reach: the moment when the evidence says stop.

While she was writing that journal entry, her phone rang. An editor named John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, had read the manuscript. He wanted to publish it.

L’Engle accepted. A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962 and won the Newbery Medal in 1963. It has never gone out of print. It has sold more than fourteen million copies.

She said: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

She did not say: wait for permission. She did not say: write the book publishers are asking for. She said write the book that wants to be written. The rest is not the writer’s problem to solve in advance.

Stockett and L’Engle are separated by half a century. Both were women writing books the market had not yet decided it wanted. Both kept going anyway. Both wrote from the same conviction, the power of authors is built on: purpose does not require permission.

The rejection letter is not a verdict on the work. It is one editor’s response on one day to one submission. Sixty editors said no to The Help. Twenty-six said no to A Wrinkle in Time. The books did not change. The editors did not change them. What changed was the number of times the authors were willing to try again.

The Power of Authors teaches that writing is not a transaction with the market. It is an act of presence — showing up for the work because the work is worth doing, not because the outcome is guaranteed. Purpose does not calculate odds. Purpose writes the next page. Purpose sends the next submission.

You may be holding a manuscript right now that has been returned more times than you want to count. You may be in the seventeenth year of a project that feels further from done than it did when you started.

Write the book wants to be written. Send it one more time. The sixty-first time is the same work as the sixtieth time was. The only difference is what happens after you send it.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM

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