The O’Shaughnessy presents ‘Letters Aloud: THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, The Greatest Rejection Letters EVER!’
By Leah Keith
On Saturday, Feb. 24, The O'Shaughnessy welcomed “Letters Aloud: THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, The Greatest Rejection Letters EVER!” Founded in 2013, the Letters Aloud production travels the country as they read private letters in public. Performances range from showcasing love letters to war letters, but for this performance, they chose rejection, a theme that everyone can relate to.
The performance included an array of rejection letter recipients, from rejections to authors like Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway to musicians like Prince and Madonna. At one point, the performance even included rejection letter submissions from the audience and St. Kate’s community. The Letters Aloud performance proved that hard work and perseverance pay off, and rejection is often just one step along the way to success.
“Letters Aloud” featured special guest and MPR host Angela Davis, along with founder Paul Morgan Stetler, voice actor Basil Harris and accordionist Dan Newton. Two St. Kate’s students, Melody Her ‘24 and Nayrus Hussein ‘27, also made guest appearances. The night was filled with laughter, music and of course, rejection!
In her talk show, MPR News with Angela Davis, Davis interviewed the founder of Letters Aloud, Paul Morgan Stetler, about the performance. “When I first put this show together, I didn’t know if I could do an entire show based on rejection. It seemed like that might get old pretty quickly,” said Stetler. “But what I found was … it really turned into a show more about perseverance and staying true to your vision and believing in yourself when no one else does.”
MPR News with Angela Davis. Credit: MPR News
Davis interviewed two more guests about rejection during her show, including Dr. Viann Nguyen-Feng, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and director of the Mind-Body Trauma Care Lab, and Cynthia Pong, the founder and CEO of the career coaching firm Embrace Change.
I also had the wonderful opportunity to sit down and chat with Davis a bit more about her personal experience with rejection. One pivotal rejection story that Davis shared involved a college professor who advised against her pursuing television reporting because she didn’t “really have the right look for it.” Davis proved that professor wrong, as she went on to work 25 years in television reporting, where she won five regional Emmy awards for covering breaking news. In 2018, she joined MPR News and now leads conversation on a range of topics in the Twin Cities.
“Rejection is a universal experience. It’s part of being a human being,” said Davis. “My personal journey with rejection, particularly working in journalism, is that it’s a very competitive field. I studied broadcast journalism with a dream of being an on-camera television reporter and news anchor, which I did all over the country, but it took a lot of perseverance, a lot of resilience, a lot of hard work, a lot of ambition and a lot of time spent having success and failures. Rejection is one of those things in my personal experience that has pushed me to try again, to try harder and to be better.”
When asked to be a part of the Letters Aloud production at The O’Shaughnessy, Davis accepted the offer with anticipation and excitement. “The stories that I’ve read in the script for the show are just great,” said Davis. “They’re across history, across time. People who were rejected because of their race. People who were rejected because of their gender. There are people who have been told time and time again what they can’t do because they’re a woman or because they’re Black or because they’re older, who go on to great success and fame.”
Letters Aloud is currently on a nationwide tour, with their next performances in Harrisonburg, Va. and Clayton, N. Y. To learn more about the production, visit lettersaloud.com. To hear the full MPR News episode featuring the discussion on rejection, click here. Special thank you to Irene Green, the executive director of The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University. Visit oshag.stkate.edu to learn about all of the upcoming events at The O’Shaughnessy.
