INTRODUCTION
Before I wrote “Requiem For A Literary Journal”, I had taken the first step towards moving away from my short-story writing by founding, and publishing, the journal night rally. “Requiem” was the first significant piece of non-fiction I had ever written, and it was borne of the demise of night rally. After many years of submitting to, and publishing in, other literary journals – the university-sponsored, the commercial, the seat-of-the-pants independent – publishing night rally had showed me the flip side of that market, and soured me to both sides of it.
Having killed the goose that laid the golden egg, I took on other projects, took a step back, and became not-just-a-short-story writer, hoping that when I emerged from hibernation, not only would I have fresh grist, but, perhaps, the market would have undergone a revolution.
The market had not. In fact, the current “New Release” tables at Borders or Barnes & Noble look more and more to me like toy or candy store displays, with wheedling cover designs and hyperbolic blurbing. “Literary ficton” had been wracked by ego-driven and ultimately picayune scandals in the form of James Frey and JT Leroy, and even grassroots literary efforts and prizes have been sullied. In 2005, writer Brad Vice had his Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction rescinded due to his blatant plagiarism. He, like others, acted as though it could have happened to anybody – that’s how unfamiliar he, and the others, are with the process of writing.
Even without these legal and ethical donnybrooks, in a world where McSweeney’s and chick lit are still so prevalent, I remain out of step.
Over the period of years between my experiment with night rally and writing this introduction, I’ve been party to a series of events that only served to strengthen my commitment to the lessons that night rally, and “Requiem”, taught me. I have tried to think of an artful way to express these, but they seem only capable of being told in a series of modular anecdotes fitting to the screenplay of My Dinner With André II; regardless, here they are.
In the last year that I was working on night rally, I was also working as a telephone operator for the ticketing office of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The office had a relaxed atmosphere, and the job itself had, particularly in summer, a lot of unmonitored down time. I recall with sentimental clarity the shift that began as I set up my desk with all my daily requirements – a bag of cherries from a street vendor, a huge, frozen iced mocha covered in whipped cream, and something to read – that fateful day, an issue of Harper’s magazine.
I had been reading, over the past days, an article in my copy of Harper’s entitled “A Reader’s Manifesto” by B. R. Myers, a methodical yet passionate autopsy of contemporary literary fiction in America. I knew the author was dead-on, and was enjoying his deft scalpel, while with my own right hand, I tapped my terminal keyboard and helped symphony patrons choose their seats for the coming season. Some were more talkative than others, and some occasionally asked “what else” a person who answered phones for the Orchestra did with their time. “I’m a writer, and I also publish a literary journal,” I told one curious gentlemen, who informed me that he, too, was an author. I did not recognize his name. “Well,” he said, “That’s because when I’m here in Philadelphia, I don’t go by the name that I write under.”
“And what name do you write under?” I asked, as at that point to fail to do so would have been intentionally rude.
“Cormac McCarthy,” he answered.
Cormac McCarthy was one of the authors who had been skewered in the Harper’s article I was enjoying, and, in case he himself had missed it, I told him so. He had only a vague response; I’m sure that all the authors thusly flayed in B.R. Myers’ piece each had their own ways of minimizing the “damage” done to them by this upstart article. I shared Myers’ piece in Harper’s with friends and family, and was delighted when, perhaps a year later, it was published as a short, stand-alone volume. I purchased numerous copies and gave them to friends as gifts. The introductory material that Myers included in this new volume only served to strengthen my admiration for the original work, and what it took to create it. There is no question whatever that it influenced my own “Requiem” hugely.
By this time, I had given up on night rally and had spent a year processing the experience in the writing of “Requiem”, which I then, with the help of my husband, posted in a printable format on our personal website. We made no attempts to advertise its existence and sent the link only to friends, and yet, we would often find in our web statistics that the essay was being linked, and discussed with some enthusiasm, on various sites on the Web.
By the end of 2005 and into 2006, my husband had begun researching overseas adoption in Korea. As a step in learning about Korea’s culture, I began to read about the country’s short story writers, and became curious in particular about a story called “The Toy Shop Woman” by a female writer named O Chong-hui. I was at that time myself writing a story about a woman who owned a toy shop, and so decided that to find an English translation of this story would be particularly fortuitous. I could find no translations or sources on the Web itself, so took my question to the editors and publishers of some of the Korean culture publications such as Koreana and Korean Quarterly.
The editor of Korean Quarterly, Stephen Wunrow, took a few months to respond to my request, but when he did, it was to give me the e-mail address of Heinz Insu Fenkl, a professor in Germany whom Wunrow believed might know someone who was translating that particular story. I e–mailed Fenkl, whose reply was swift. He did have a colleague who was, at that very time, providing “The Toy Shop Woman” with its first-ever English translation. Fenkl asked me why I had such an interest in such a raw, gloomy story, from such a raw and gloomy writer. I replied that it was just my kind of story. Fenkl, now having seen my name in the “Reply” field of his e-mail twice, also had this to say: “I knew the name rang a bell –You’re the author of the famous essay, “Requiem for a Literary Journal”. Great essay, which I have all my creative writing students read before going out into the real world.”
He also told me that he would let me know when O Chong-hui’s “The Toy Shop Woman” was in translation, for the promise that I would review it, and the collection, for Korean Quarterly when the book was published.
I sent an e-mail to Stephen Wunrow at Korean Quarterly for putting me in touch with Fenkl, and Wunrow, as well, suggested that perhaps I’d like to do some review work for the Quarterly. My husband and I were still literally years from being placed with a baby from Korea, and I knew almost nothing about the country’s literature, but I said yes.
Writing for KQ soon became very important to me. I wrote not only book and film reviews, but was given carte blanche to research my own points of interest in the Korean and Korean-American communities. I conducted interviews with punk rock photographer Jim Jocoy, pojagi artist Chunghie Lee, and was soon given my own column, for the benefit of documenting the process of our adoption. One day I was at home, e-mailing back and forth with my sister’s boyfriend – likely bemoaning the crappiness of literature, television and movies — and decided to recommend to him – as I had for so many others so many times in the past — B. R. Myers “A Reader’s Manifesto”. And in trying to find some links other than just the link to the book on Amazon.com, I came across a surprise – that B.R. Myers, in addition to being the author of a critical work that had literally helped shape my life, was also an expert in North Korean literature and culture. I made great haste in arranging an interview with him for Korean Quarterly, thus bringing to crescendo the layered, Sondheimesque number-before-the-intermission, where every individual theme is laid one on top of the other to create a rousing anthem, of my experience.
Still, there’s the problem of everything sucking. Part of the problem is that writing is so universally bad these days, but an even bigger part of the problem is that critics, and the media, parse this bad writing into “bad” and “good”, in a way that seems to me – and others I talk to and trust – arbitrary. It’s an Emperor’s-New-Clothes situation, but occasionally, I’ll find someone who says, as though they’ve just discovered that the Earth really does revolve around the sun: “These Harry Potter books are really horrible.” And they have reasons – good reasons – to think so.
Living in such spare times, I am grateful at the very least that I am capable of writing stories to amuse myself, since those who can’t have to depend on Harry Potter, and Augusten Burroughs, and McSweeney’s, and reality television for their entertainment. I truly believe that we are ripe for revolution, but the ripening may continue for thirty years.
Submitting to journals now requires a certain leap of faith and willing suspension of disbelief as well as immurement to regular rejection and simultaneous objectivity about success. After all, here’s what I found on the page of a website for a journal published out of the University of Chicago:
We meet writers the way most editors do – at readings and parties and photo shoots. We recruit them from universities. We hear about them from friends. We get excerpts from agents seeding markets for books. We have our Ezras out beating the bushes for Eliots. Behind every name in our archive is the story of a meeting.
Good fucking God.
I continue to write, and enjoy the honor of readers and writers I admire looking at my work, whether published or unpublished. If one collection of stories under my name is published – self-published – at the end of my writing life, I will see that it is an attractive and representative one. Currently, I can think of only two short stories out of the twenty-seven I have so far published that I would include in it. But I would, also, include this essay.
I. PENT UP ENERGY FOR AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK
Li•derc (14th century): In Hungarian folklore it hatches from the first egg of a black hen placed under the armpit. It carries out tasks such as finding treasure, but eventually grows bothersome because it demands work constantly and is always looking ahead to its next task. It can assume the form of a chicken or human being, but one leg always has a goose’s foot. To get rid of him, one must set him on impossible tasks so he quits or dies in rage.
In 1998, I stopped working, to stay home and write. I had been writing for years, while working full time. I hated my job, and I loved writing, and to have the choice and maybe even obligation to choose one over the other was pleasant.
I had seen my short stories published in journals for years, and settled down to “writing full-time” with no goal more specific than to finish more short stories, mail more short stories out, and see more short stories in print. Maybe, I thought, I would work towards putting together a short story collection. The editors of the journals in which I published often encouraged me to do so, and every year or two I would receive letters from various literary agencies, stating they had seen a story of mine in a journal, and would be interested in representing me, were I to write a novel.
The first few weeks of being a full-time writer were frightening. My husband and I had to live particularly cheap as a result of my choice, and I took satisfaction in doing the food shopping very carefully, sometimes utilizing for our dinners recipes in M.F.K. Fisher’s How To Cook A Wolf, a book written specifically to adapt tables to wartime shortages. Undoubtedly, there was something romantic in all this that my household embraced. I baked banana breads, and, because there was no reason not to, often set the table for supper by eleven in the morning.
For my reading material, I began going to the library, as I could not afford to buy books the way I had when I had been working. I also began using the Internet as a way to communicate, and as a way to garner fresh reading material. I began to write book reviews for online publications, which ensured free books delivered to my home. I also began helping to organize the newsletter of the Tarot Special Interest Group of American Mensa, since the coordinator of the group lived in Philadelphia as well. Working with the little Mensa publication meant that I got free Tarot decks, but after a few very forced meetings in the café of the local Barnes and Noble, I backed out of this venture. My co-coordinator and fellow M was far too creepy and insistent that our personal meetings were of extreme importance to the flimsy hand-stapled newsletter that went out to about four hundred people worldwide (one in Japan).
I loved writing. I liked Tarot. I liked organizing small printed matter. I didn’t like the guy I was doing it with, and I didn’t like sitting in Barnes and Noble.
“Go MFA’s!”
Online with other writers and artists who were between jobs, recovering from jobs, or completely disinterested in jobs, I forged a community of people to talk to. I no longer had office mates, water cooler talk, staff luncheons. If I choked to death on a Cracklin’ Oat Bran at seven forty in the morning, no one would know about it until about six that evening. Strangers from other states became my compatriots, because that is what the Internet is good for. My days were full of e-mails detailing other people’s days, and detailing my days to other people, and in between that and the Instant Messaging, I did a little writing.
I corresponded at that time with a writer who had recently published his second novel. (I had enjoyed a few of his short stories, and he a few of mine.) I received an e-mail from him one day, happily announcing that his friend’s book had been accepted for publication. The friend was of the same college graduating class as the writer sending the e-mail, and apparently they were not the only two in their class to have met with success so far.
“Go MFA’s!” the author wrote at his message’s closing.
The e-mail was not addressed to me personally, but I was included on a list of people, some presumably writers, who were expected to take up the rallying cry of “Go MFA’s!” in the name of literature. I already felt somewhat out of step in a literary world, where Oprah Winfrey told America what to read. I had never gone to school for creative writing. The idea of MFA programs churning out bright new novelists and short story writers as though they were lawyers or doctors gave me a vision of a world in which I was not only sure I would never publish happily, but one in which I was not even sure I would be able to write.
Rampant Careerism in Literary Fiction
I had been satisfied, for as long as I had been writing, with sending out hundreds of my own short story manuscripts a year, often to magazines and journals I had never even seen. I had the bovine and implicit belief that if someone had gone through the trouble of creating a journal, they had worked for and therefore gained the authority to decide whether or not to publish me.
That is not to say that I was fully accepting of the process of submitting to literary journals. I balked when guidelines suggested that submitters “get acquainted” with the journal’s style by subscribing. I suspected that many literary journals were supported for the most part by the contributors themselves; hence longer manuscript reading periods for subscribers, and other incentives for the double duty artist/consumer.
When I received a nomination for a well-known prize for a story I had published, I was never told so by the journal that nominated me. I found out by accident. The editor who had nominated me later explained that it was his policy never to tell writers when they had been nominated, because doing so promoted “rampant careerism”. I would have been taken to dinner by my father, of that I was sure. But “careerism” in the field of literary fiction?
I had always dreamed of a return of the “Golden Age of Magazine Fiction”. I had always loved the idea that a short story that could change someone’s life might be found not in an expensive, hardcover book recommended by Oprah Winfrey or another celebrity, but in a magazine or journal in a doctor’s office; to be discovered, perhaps, between covers considered disposable. I loved reading about the rise and fall of magazines and journals: the raucous rock and roll rise of Lester Bangs at Creem in the 1970′s. The illustrations and occasional writings of Aubrey Beardsley in The Yellow Book in the late nineteenth century. The Paris Expatriates of Eugene Jolas’ transition magazine, where portions of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake were first published, along with photographs by Man Ray, drawings by Paul Klee, and the infamous “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein” pamphlet.
Inspired, I did what I suppose many people do when trying to connect to a better time; I just stepped out the door as though I expected to find it right there in front of me, and went about the tasks that I thought might make it appear.
II. DISILLUSIONMENT
The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who don’t have it.
- George Bernard Shaw
All I had was the nervous energy to give it a shot. It was a Sisyphean task, “sown with difficulties worthy of my powers”, and, for the two and a half year period that it lasted, a time of adventure and of new perspective. To quote Proust twice in one paragraph, “all the humble discoveries of which it was either the fortuitous setting or the direct inspiration and cause” fine-tuned my wants and needs for my life ahead with the written word, and my relationship with the “industry” that supports it. But that is now. Then, what I wanted was to create a literary journal.
This is no how-to essay, so suffice it to say that through a series of slow starts, false starts and good starts, the journal soon had some, although no surplus, of the following: admirable editorial support, subscribers other than my own family members and friends, a membership (not to mention an attentive, supportive relationship) with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, a printer, and a small, but generous and inspiring, Board of Directors.
Of course, it also had submissions, many unsolicited. For the first issue, submissions outnumbered the issues in the print run itself. And while these unsolicited submissions that generated some of what went into the journal itself, a much greater portion of it simply stunk. I had no prior experience intentionally reading lots of fiction that I thought was absolutely awful. Now, there was no way to avoid it.
Unsolicited submissions are not the only way for a journal to garner content. A journal can court an artist or writer it admires, and ask for work. I had been asked for my own work by journals in the past, and I had given it. Now, I did the asking. But what I knew from my own experience on one side of the fence, I failed to apply as knowledge on the other side: if a magazine solicits an author and says “We admire your work, will you please give us a story”, the author will likely give one of their weaker stories. Why wouldn’t they? I know I did. It was an opportunity to get something that might have sat forever in my personal dead-letter-office out in print.
On the editorial side of the fence, I soon saw that I was not the only lazy writer out there. And I soon theorized that a “name” draw on the cover attached to a not-so-hot story inside weakens the arterial walls of any publication.
Arts organizations in the Philadelphia area, specifically those with creative writing programs and literature fellowships, were generous with sharing their direct mailing lists with my journal, at the request of one of my well-connected board members. I wanted to do more direct mailings, and what I wanted to generate with my direct mailings were, unabashedly, subscriptions. What I got was more submissions. When writers and writing students get a postcard in the mail advertising a new literary journal they do NOT think, “Looks great, I’ll support them with a subscription.” They say “I’ll support them by submitting my writing.” I had no problem picturing this, as, once again, it had been what my generous self had done for over a decade.
I was experiencing nothing that had not been experienced before. Reading The Diaries of Dawn Powell, I found this entry for April 27, 1954 which it appears Powell wrote for her own bitter amusement:
- About Our Contributors (for a little magazine)
- Stella Negs, author of Flies On Paper, is the sister of the editor
- Arthur Pugh, author of our novella, is the son of Mrs. R. Pugh, who pays the magazine’s rent.
- Astrid Bean is the editor’s latest girlfriend.
- Vortex Lieber is the nephew of the Foundation Secretary expected to give the magazine a large grant so it can come out twice a month instead of twice a year.
The CLMP Fair
My active e-mail relationship with the staff at the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses led to an invitation to speak at their Literary Magazine Fair in Manhattan, along with the editors of four other literary journals.
Two of the other editors belonged to journals I had never heard of. The third was the editor of a newish, hippish journal that had made my blacklist a year before when, after I had submitted to them, sent back a tiny rejection slip in my large, postage-paid envelope, intended for the copy of my work, which they had not bothered to include. For that matter, even their rejection slip did not have the name of their journal on it, and it was only after going through my ledger – and then hearing of the same thing happening to another writer who had submitted to this journal – that I was able to target the culprit. The fourth editor on the Literary Magazine Fair panel, aside from myself, was George Plimpton of the Paris Review.
Most of those involved in the Fair – editors and representatives of journals — arrived early in the day, to man tables at which we sold below-cost copies of our journals, and gave the proceeds to charity. Editors wore little paper daisies on their nametags, to identify them as such. Throughout the day, I was touched when strangers approached me with their eyes on my nametag, to tell me they had read a story of mine – sometimes years before – that had stayed with them, and which they admired. These moments with these strangers, whether they were other editors or writers or readers, or a hybrid of these, came close to being the most satisfying “recognition” I had ever received for my work. They were certainly more satisfying than finding out secondhand that I had been nominated for an award, and being chided about “rampant careerism” when I called the editor who had nominated me to confirm it.
Still, there was plenty of time in the day for rampant careerism to rear its ugly head. Throughout the two-story bookstore in which the Fair was held, writers with daisies in their sights were handing out manuscripts – manuscripts with no return postage, manuscripts bound up in funny, clumsy ways like high school book reports. I accepted a few, one from a woman named Alix who, upon the arrival of Mr. Plimpton shortly before the panel discussion began, ran to him and kissed him and assured him that they would both be going to the same restaurant later that night. I knew I would never see Alix again, nor would I be able to return her Kinko’s-spiral-bound story to her, since it had no return postage or even an envelope, but it seemed that she was making the most of her day at the Fair.
The panel discussion felt like a let-down. I was tired and frustrated and was as unsure as to whom I was supposed to be communicating as I was of the others on the panel. The guy from the journal that I didn’t like was an asshole. The two people I hadn’t met were interesting, inspired, and full of energy. George Plimpton was equivocal and had clearly lost all memory of what running a literary journal with less money than he currently had was like.
My oldest friend roller-bladed up from Brooklyn for the Fair, with a hatchling parrot shoved into her pocket, because it needed eyedropper-feedings. I looked to her for encouragement after each time I spoke into the microphone. I was glad she was there.
Ruthless and Capricious
Sometimes, the best thing I could do for my journal was grab an extra dinner shift at the café where I worked, wait a few more tables, and make a little more of the money I would need to put the next issue out. I began to feel that I had to keep my face composed as I walked down the street, in case I ran into any one who had given the journal money, or who had subscribed, or who had contributed work. My face was not often composed. The years I spent working on the journal overlapped almost exactly with the period of time in which my marriage was not only crumbling, but necrotizing. As sure as I am that working on the journal during this period kept me sane, I am also sure that what was going on in my private life was apparent to anyone who looked at me.
I was fine-tuning my irritation with insincerity now, not only on the part of journals and editors, but writers. “I have read several issues of your journal and I am very impressed with it,” wrote a would-be contributor from Ohio. Several? We had only published two issues at the time. I checked the database: we had two subscribers in Ohio, one of whom was my father’s high school English teacher. And although the journal was carried in bookstores across the country on consignment – including City Lights in San Francisco and Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan – we had no outlet in Ohio.
I liked what the Ohio writer had submitted, and I accepted it for publication, even as I was aware of how well-trained he was to submit to a journal while falsely asserting that he had spent money on a few copies of it already, and therefore had a certain entitlement.
Belief in entitlement took its toll on my patience. A rough-living contributor from the Carolinas needed to pick up and move out of state, with no employment record that he could take with him; he notified me after the fact that he had used my journal’s name and address as his last place of employment, and if anyone should call for a job reference, he told me the figure I should quote them as the “salary” I paid him, and even suggested what some of his duties for “promoting” the journal might have been.
An artist from Canada sent me a stack of drawings that I did not want to use, and included no return postage or envelope. I e-mailed her that we would not be using the drawings and that since she included no way to return the pieces, they would be recycled. “Please pay to send them back,” she replied. “It is expensive to make copies and I need all of them.” I explained to her that, indeed, it was expensive to send out work and provide for its safe return for any artist, but that my journal was not a retrieval service for her papers. This was met with silence, until a year later, apparently having forgotten our correspondence, the same artist e-mailed the journal, looking again for a verdict on her drawings.
With strings pulled by one of my valiant board members, I was granted, for one year, the “umbrella” of nonprofit status from another Philadelphia arts organization, whose head at the time was also the city’s Arts Commissioner. Monetary gifts to my journal were processed through this organization, and when I needed things paid for out of this gift money, I requested that they be paid. This process was very slow, and I sometimes had to ask three or four times.
When my printer, embarrassed, called and told me that they had never received the check they had been told to look for six weeks previous, I was equally flustered. The arts organization that was doing me the “favor” of processing my gifts admitted the ball had been dropped on their end. They sent the check to the printer promptly, by bike courier, and debited my journal’s account for the cost of that courier.
I was constantly running numbers on the useless things in life that cost more than my journal did to produce. The budget for the sci-fi film Sphere, starring Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone. Advertising campaigns for lipgloss marketed to seven year olds. Diamonique jewelry. These things seemed to exist without struggle. I had used some of my retirement savings to start and perpetuate my journal, and the “reward” now was coming to me in heaps of bad stories and poems for every good one, nasty letters from artists whose “groundbreaking” works I had rejected, and hours and hours of opening, tearing, licking, and sealing of envelopes. I was not writing.
When I was told to come up with an “exciting” agenda for my first official board meeting, I began to crumble. I was supposed to excite these people again? I had met with them separately, wooed them as best I could, with no bait other than the promise inherent in the journal itself. I had thought the reason they came onto the board was because they thought the journal was exciting. Now, on my calendar, I had marked a haircut appointment that was “necessary” for me to get before I met with them. I had also considered buying a new dress. I knew the money for both the haircut and the dress would be better used towards the cost of our next print run, and yet, my presentability –- and ability to excite — was a commodity. This depressed me to the point of paralysis.
Standing in line at the Acme Market on St. Patrick’s Day, 2002, buying a brisket, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “I can’t do the journal anymore. I want to stop.” It was that fast and that sure. Up until that moment, at least six days of every week had been full of work related to night rally, and I knew the coming weeks of active disassociation from it would offer me little relief.
III. QUESTION AUTHORITY
I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them of the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.
-Sinclair Lewis, “Letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee”
The first step was putting an end to a now-stillborn issue that was due at the printer in a week. I had almost all of the editorial content and most of the money to finish the issue and bring it to light, but I didn’t want to work on a funereal mission and I certainly didn’t want to use other people’s money to do so. It was impossible to instill this very personal epiphany in the contributors who were waiting to see their work in print, and to convince them that it didn’t matter at all that I wasn’t “using” their work – they had still created the work, didn’t they? Wasn’t that the most important thing? Even before quitting the journal, I had picked up other literary magazines and quarterlies in the bookstores sometimes, and seen stories in them that had been submitted to us, and which we had passed up. I supposed the things we had liked had just as good a chance.
I heard through the grapevine that a writer who had previously been happy to be published in the journal no longer was so, upon hearing it was ending. He felt, I was told, that “we were no longer significant to his resumé.” For the contributors to night rally’s stillborn issue – having been given the choice between a career track in literature and a place in my personal epiphany – the choice was nearly unanimous. It took mere weeks for my e-mail box to be emptier than it had been in almost three years. I arranged for the remainder of our “live” subscriptions to be taken up by another new journal I admired. “I still wish you’d done it, although I can’t see why you wanted to do it in the first place,” a disappointed contributor to the “lost” issue told me. “Sometimes, not everybody can be happy.” I hoped no one was mistaking me for the happy one.
A particularly thoughtful past contributor scouted around and found out where my favorite sushi restaurant in Philadelphia was, and, from Arizona, had a gift certificate arranged for me. It was an extravagant gesture of kindness, but not the only such gesture. Enough people wished me well that I felt, in a very short time, well. But I was anxious for the dust to settle and to discover what I had learned.
Did the printed word — specifically the printed word as printed by a hand other than the writers’ own, indicating that the work had been (the magic word) chosen — have to be the manifestation that could buoy one, by accumulation of such honors, into being a “real” artist? As a writer, I no longer believed in a nice, neat, accountable hierarchy in the publishing industry that will lead anyone to grace. As an editor, I never had any business believing in it.
I read a then-current novel, a work of “literary fiction” that was getting rave reviews. I didn’t think it was very good, but what concerned me equally was the design of the book itself. In the story, the author used a repeated image of a charm bracelet belonging to a missing child. The bracelet held, it was stated clearly and numerous times, a single charm: a Pennsylvania Keystone.
But the cover of this book, and every edition I have seen of it since, had a picture of a charm bracelet with a little house on it.
It had seemed to me a given that sensitivity to the subject matter of the work itself was supposed to come into play in designing a book. It is not a given.
I wondered what the writer whose words had been thus “authenticated” by the publishing industry thought about seeing the copies of her book, with a completely erroneous representation of one of her core images on its cover. Did she notice it at all, through the luminosity of the proclamations of the book’s “worth” which graced every new edition?
Would future reprints of Breakfast at Tiffany’s feature a rendering of a girl standing outside of a Best Buy outlet? How was that any less ridiculous?
Could things get more ridiculous?
The Mantle
“I am friends with the guy they are calling the next William Faulkner!” a friend told me.
I had never read Faulkner or my friend’s friend. In reviews, this up and coming author – my friend’s friend – had a style that had, yes, been compared to Faulker’s. However, the novel by my friend’s friend ranked 144,382 on Amazon’s list of sales, while Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” ranked 3,780. That seemed to indicate that in at least one way — William Faulkner was still the current William Faulkner.
One day, while knitting, I watched a television biography of Gwyneth Paltrow. “She is a ‘studio actress’ in the grand tradition, like Grace Kelly,” someone close to the actress assured me. “She has a blonde ponytail like Grace Kelly” was all I could see for myself. What Grace Kelly took a lifetime to become on her own, we now invite you to congratulate in someone else, is the dangerous message conveyed. Don’t bother thinking this one out on your own. It isn’t the chemistry between an individual or artistic entity and the world around it that creates a “reputation” anymore; it’s simply a matter of someone renewing the existing lease.
Grey is the new black. Brown is the new black. Drag is the new mime. We have forgotten, it seems, how to cultivate an opinion of our own, and moreover, we feel guilty when we can’t find any thing to fill the vacant top spots in our range. A space in our aesthetics labeled The Best Thing cannot sit empty, so we find something to fill it.
There’s no crime in wanting to live in exciting times, surrounded by crackling talent. But being overly referential does not make it so. Journalists write about the “most exciting new writer since Hemingway” because they want to be the journalists who write about the most exciting writers, and because their other option – telling the truth – will not do much for their careers, not to mention their outlook on life. You can only write so many fantastic negative reviews of anything. And nothing in this day and age could be more boring – and reviled — than a critic who tells the truth all the time. Therefore, a quiet consistent lowering of the bar has occurred, and we cannot depend on the manifest cachet of awards or reputations to give us any indication of the real value of what is at the top of the curve.
Miss Selective Luxury
A talented poet I know – certainly a personal favorite – was taken on as an assistant poetry editor at a well-known review in his state. There, he made what I don’t doubt were accurate and insightful suggestions on some poems in the piles.
The Poetry Editor at this Review liked the suggestions that her new assistant — my poet friend — had made. But she preferred that he not make such suggestions at all. She told him “that was the kind of thing that was done in a workshop.” They at the Review, she explained, had the “luxury” of being more “selective”.
The process of editing is what she was talking about. And the luxury that she felt she had earned – based on the good reputation of the journal for which she edited, although she was not likely the source of that journal’s good reputation – meant that a handwritten rejection with suggestions and comments on it, or encouragement to submit again, was too much to expect.
It’s disheartening enough to realize that there are editors who wish to avoid contact with writers, but it’s far worse to realize there are editors who actually encourage assistants to avail themselves of the “luxurious” experience of not communicating what they want to communicate, to writers to whom they have felt compelled to reach out.
It was clearer to me, day by day, that there was no longer any compass in the publishing industry, and that I had not been able to be a compass myself, because every magnetic filing –- every writer, every editor, every gauge of success -– was charged, it seemed, against me. For a writer with extra hours on her hands, this could have seemed disappointing, but it felt very liberating. There had never been a better time in my life to have an epiphany, and I did not have to spend another dollar to have mine.
IV. THE LITTLE WAY
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust
Giving up my journal left me with the gift of experience that I reference regularly, with new results each time. Before I had begun, I had loudly proclaimed, “If I get five issues out, I will have done what I set out to.” I got four volumes out, one of which was a double issue.
After those five-ish issues had come and gone, I realized how much courage it had required of me to shut down shop and disappoint so many people. I also thought about what it might have been like if I had kept publishing night rally, unhappily, getting haircuts and dresses and creating exciting agendas, all for the sake of having the entire experiment be one issue longer, one issue more “real”, one issue more “significant” to some contributor’s resumé.
I felt like I could now give the advice to others: Let your experience be a small one with a beginning and end, if need be. No individual should attempt to encapsulate his or her worth into a single enterprise. Natural selection and the ability to be fluid in one’s projects are keys to meaningful success. There are always more ways to not only make contributions, but to shake up the whole world, if it’s what you want to do.
Buds
Having made my decision to quit my journal on a Sunday, on Monday, I went to the library. I borrowed the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and began reading it that day. I finished reading it the following September, six months later.
I followed immediately with a biography of Proust, which was almost as interesting. I had not known that Proust, like Salvador Dali, Langston Hughes and others, had begun a short-lived journal himself. In fact, Marcel Proust had suggested to some of his writer friends the idea of a co-op literary journal, where its contributors paid dues for their publication therein. The twisted practicality of this – and the lack of fear of having no true ‘sponsor’ to hide behind – is just one of the many things that I love about Proust.
Proust self-published one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world. Even then, people said it was a bad idea. They suggested, as some still do, that self-publishing devalues a work. It is de rigeur to brand someone who believes in their own work strongly enough to publish it themselves with the sin of “vanity”: and accuse them or deride them for the act of “vanity publishing”. There are no vanity sculptors, no vanity filmmakers – only “independents”. Writers who publish their own work, however, are indulging in the use of a “vanity press”.
Proust engaged me in appreciating the tiny and rare. In the Belle Époque, even though a vanity press was still a vanity press, there was a greater emphasis on the personal, the singular volume. A famous courtesan gifted Proust with a volume of her own poetry, bound with the fabric of one of her own petticoats – a deluxe edition in the truest sense.
When one considers how popular “pamphlet” publishing was in the late-nineteenth century, it is clear that there was room, not only for the mass-produced, but for fine work that existed within small, thin covers. This is a concept I continue to find romantic.
I began to feel that for me, this was “the way”: St. Theresa’s “Little Way”. St. Theresa’s message to me was: Read! Write! Recommend the best book you can to someone whom you believe will be changed by it. Give copies of your work not only to slushpiles at magazines, but to friends, loved ones. Submit to journals that you read cover to cover, if there are any. And, if you really feel those journals are the best, and that you have been treated well by them, don’t look around so quickly for the next rung up if they don’t happen to be the New Yorker. Give a gift subscription of that journal, at holiday time, to your doctor’s office, or to a friend. If you can afford to, write a little check to a journal that you know could use it.
I tried all of these things, and can say only that, for the first time in my writing life, I felt I was living in the world of literature. I did not know that world’s size, or scope, but I knew something about the direction of my entire life had changed. Years later, I continue to believe that it was this experience – two years of running that journal, then dismantling it when the expectations of it were highest, and taking one volume of Proust from the library – that “created” one large facet of my belief system, which continues to exist and flourish, and which has never steered me wrong.
Palming the Diamond
I don’t know what the “pinnacle” of the writing experience is for me, but I do enjoy talking to others about it. Is it that flash of knowing suddenly – sometimes in your sleep -exactly how to say what you want to say? Sometimes those flashes of clarity disappear as quickly as they come, and carrying the precise words, in the precise order, in your mind, can be like those races where you run while carrying an egg on a teaspoon. When I cannot get to a scrap of paper, I remind myself that I have something to jot down by turning the ring on my pinky — my mother’s diamond engagement ring — so that the side with the stone on it is towards my palm. When I feel the setting against my palm, I know I have something good waiting for me, as soon as I get to a pen or to the computer. I love that feeling. But it isn’t the “best” part of the writing experience, since it is vying for attention with the following sublime experiences:
- Being so deep in the writing that there seems no end in sight. Sitting in front of the monitor, legs swinging happily to Graham Parker’s “Squeezing Out Sparks”, nothing but the glass of Diet Coke next to me to tie me to the corporeal world, and hours to go until anyone walks in the door. This is something I call “riffing” and its comedic or rock-and-roll associations are obvious and accurate.
- Reading my own complete first draft for the first time, realizing that, if nothing else, I have managed to finally give accurate description to a friend’s beautiful face, tell a private joke to my father, even the score with the worst boss I ever had, and admit to some of my ugliest faults – or, tell a bunch of lies that could pass for any of the previously mentioned — all in the same compact fifteen pages.
- Sitting down to discuss raw first-drafts with friends. I love that feeling of anticipation and dread that rushes over me when a friend says, “So, I read your story…” , I do, though, despise the game of “I-know-who-this-is-about-and-I-remember-when-this-happened” that some friends can’t seem to let go of. Some of the most exciting, alive moments I can think of in my writing life involve discussing pre-publication drafts of stories with friends, or even sharing drafts with “interested” acquaintances whom might eventually become friends. Or fodder. I’m often happy to share pre-publication work with relative strangers, and or people whom I don’t believe like me very much. You can’t avoid them once the story is published, so why avoid it before? You never know what they’ll give you. Even with close friends, I often direct beforehand, “Read it like you hate me.” It adds to the adventure, and really, it can’t hurt the story.
- Leaving the post office after standing on line for forty five minutes, having explained to a short-tempered postal worker that yes I did have to put postage on the inside envelope enclosed in each package as well as on the outside, and having apologized for the fact that there were ten such packages and no, none of them were the exact same weight. Stepping out of those finger-smeared post office revolving doors and seeing the nine-to-fivers with their furrowed brows, and thinking how much my furrowed brow must look just like theirs, except for the fact that my brow was furrowed with my soul’s work, never to be phoned in, or delegated, and never to be credited, good or bad, to anyone but myself.
The above points in the process each represent an experience to be savored before acceptance for publication is even suggested.
There are disappointments in writing, of course. When one’s expectations for one’s writing are only that it be good and serve one’s own purpose, these disappointments are small and correctable. For those aspiring in the career of literary fiction, I can only imagine how frustrating and even devastating the disappointments must be – since I can’t even stomach the successes. Disappointments in one’s publishing career are not useful disappointments, the way that life’s disappointments can be. Some of the best writing itself is born of those. For myself, like they say of childbirth, that’s the easiest pain to forget. But it was not so for me with publishing and editing the journal. The disappointments I experienced there weren’t the kind of disappointments I was willing to stand for in the long term.
I got out before some people thought I should have. One of the journal’s board members thought that I didn’t give the board a chance to “do more”. But the board couldn’t make better readers out of people, or make writers want something more than what was considered “making it” in the publishing industry. The journal itself would have to have been able to do those things before the board could have helped to do them. And individual writers and readers would have to be willing to accept new standards – of reading, of writing, of success – before a journal could best serve their purpose by culling their fruits.
It is someone’s calling to put together that journal; not mine, but there’s room in my mailbox for the journal that tries. And if I am lucky, there is room in their mailbox for my stories.
I am grateful to the members of the board of night rally magazine, and the would-be contributors and paid-in-full subscribers, who accepted the fallibility of the enterprise with grace and mettle that it had not been my intention to give them an opportunity to demonstrate.
March 17, 2003.
Revised August 2007.
RECOMMENDED READING
Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, Nelson Algren
A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack On The Growing Pretentiousness In American Literary Prose, B.R. Myers
The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931 – 1965
The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies, James Abbott McNeill Whistler
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