I. PENT UP ENERGY FOR AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK

In 1998, I stopped working, to stay home and write. I had been writing for years, while working full time. But I hated my job, and I loved writing, and to claim that I had the luxury and maybe even obligation to choose one over the other was pleasant.

I had been seeing 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 home all day were frightening. My husband and I were going to be living particularly cheap as a result of it. 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, 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 run the Tarot Special Interest Group of American Mensa, the coordinator of which lived in my city as well. This got me free Tarot decks (something else I would have spent money on otherwise), but after a few very forced meetings in the café of the local Barnes and Noble, I backed out of this venture, finding my co-coordinator 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!"

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; 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. A few of the stories I wrote during this time are among what I consider my current best. Others are going to live forever in the compost pile on my hard drive.

I corresponded at that time with a writer who had recently published his second novel. (I had enjoyed a few of his short stories.) The man was apparently good luck to those around him. 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!" is how the e-mail closed.

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. Since the e-mail was not addressed only to me, but to many, I felt free to share it with people on my own list. It made me shudder. "Go MFA's".

I had 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 something as plebian as 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 didn't like it when journals suggested that you "get acquainted" with their style by subscribing. I did not like the sneaking suspicion that many literary journals existed and 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 later told me it was his policy never to tell writers when they had been nominated, because it promoted "rampant careerism". I would have gotten treated 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", and had always loved the idea that a 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, periodical. 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

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 that I would never trade the memory and experience of. 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 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. I must admit a shortcoming in my reporting, in that I don't recall how it was that people knew to send submissions to the journal. The website, or word of mouth; whatever it was, for the first issue, submissions outnumbered the issues in the print run itself. And while it was these submissions that generated some of what went into the journal itself, to be sure, much of it stunk. An editor had told me that "reading bad story after bad story is like inhaling car exhaust-- bad for my health." I was feeling woozy already myself.

Unsolicited submissions were not the only way to get content. A journal can court an artist it admires, and ask for work. I had been asked for my own work by journals in the past, and had given it; now, I did the asking. What I knew from my own experience on one side of the fence, I conveniently failed to apply as knowledge on the other side: if a magazine solicits an author and says "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. 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.

Reading The Diaries of Dawn Powell, I found this entry for April 27, 1954 - as true today as it was then - which Powell perhaps 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 out 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 happen to another writer who had submitted to this journal - that I was able to target the culprit with whom I would be sharing a microphone. The fourth editor, 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 themselves. 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 ago - that had stayed with them. These moments with these strangers, whether they were other editors or writers or readers, came close to being the most satisfying "recognition" I had ever received for my work - certainly more satisfying than finding out secondhand that I had been nominated for an award, and then more or less being chided about calling the journal who had nominated me to confirm it.

Still, there was plenty of time in the day for "rampant careerism in literary fiction" to rear its ugly head. Throughout the two-story bookstore in which the Fair was held, writers with daisies in their eyes 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. Plimpton did seem to recognize her, but his reaction to her could have been interpreted as a well-mannered brush-off as much as satisfaction at seeing her there.

The panel discussion was the most boring part of the day for me. 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, and 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. He was well-shod, and had a neat old NBA watch. He is the Fireworks Commissioner of New York, and has been on The Simpsons, and has written or contributed to very interesting biographies of both Truman Capote and Edie Sedgwick. And he's been a model in Coach leather advertisements. These are not the best of his accomplishments, even, but just the ones I can name off the top of my head.

You can kiss George Plimpton, but if you don't know that it's ungainly to take your short story to Kinko's and have a spiral binding put on it, and then hand it to an editor whose journal you have never heard of, without even giving them an envelope to return it in, then you're on a road that I don't even know about.

Ruthless and Capricious

Sometimes the best thing I could do for my journal was grab an extra dinner shift, 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 much as I am without doubt 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 only had 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, aware now of how well-trained writers were to submit to a journal only while asserting, however falsely, that they had spent money on a few copies of it already and therefore had a certain entitlement.

Belief in entitlement - however ruthless and capricious - was not true of all submitters, not nearly all, but it took its toll on my patience. An apparently 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; it was certainly more to ask that a journal like mine serve as 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 for a verdict on her drawings. I reminded her of how well indeed I did remember her.

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 embarrassed. 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, I now felt I was in a situation from which I could not extricate myself. I was "playing the game". My presentability was a commodity. This depressed me to the point of paralysis.

I was standing in line at the Acme Market on St. Patrick's Day, 2002, buying a brisket, when I turned to my partner and said, "I can't do the journal anymore. I want to stop."

III. QUESTION AUTHORITY

The first step was putting and 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 still had 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."

Still leaving a bad taste in my mouth was the contributor who had talked of the various magazines in which he had published work "looking good on a cover letter". I wondered if, at other journals, cover letters actually got read before the work that the letters supported. I opened and read many submissions in my short journal-editor's career. If I didn't like the work, I didn't read the cover letter.

Given the choice between a career track in literature and my personal epiphany, it didn't take but a few weeks before my e-mail box was 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? Writers can no longer believe in a nice, neat, accountable hierarchy in the publishing industry that will lead them to grace. Editors never had any business believing in it.

Recently, I read a novel, a work of literary fiction that was getting fantastic reviews across the board. I didn't think it was very good, but what concerned me most was the cover. In the text itself, the author used a repeated image of a charm bracelet - a charm bracelet belonging to a missing child. The bracelet had on it, it was stated clearly and numerous times, one charm: a Pennsylvania Keystone.

The cover of this book, and every edition of it I have seen, has a picture of a charm bracelet with a little house on it.

I wonder what the writer whose words have been thus authenticated by the publishing industry thinks about this. I wonder how close we are to living in a world where new reprints of Breakfast at Tiffany's will feature a rendering of a girl standing outside of a Best Buy outlet. I wonder if there is any doubt that sensitivity to the subject matter and the work itself is supposed to come into play in designing a book.

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, but I checked the situation out. 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 - and I did feel safe in assuming there were even more ways to assure oneself of it -- 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" is the truth of the matter. 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 A Fantastic Movie 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 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 my 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 well-targeted and insightful suggestions on the particular poem in the piles.

The Poetry Editor at this review liked the suggestions that her new assistant, my poet friend, had made, but 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. A handwritten rejection with suggestions and comments on it - and maybe even an encouragement to resubmit -- is too much to expect from some journals nowadays. Because to at least one editor, it's a luxury to avoid that kind of contact. I'm sure it is meant to give the impression that the bar at these journals is particularly high.

The Internet creates the ability for every single "vision" of a would-be editor to present itself as an "online magazine". But while it is hygienic for a barrier to entry to exist in some places, it is important that it not exist in others. Weblogs encourage writing, reward with aesthetic feedback of the "printed word" and control over how it is presented, but are also governed, in the attention they receive, by a natural meritocracy (Shirky, 2/2003). Self-expression is not just for those who are can pull it off with style. A budget cannot be the only thing separating artfully produced work read by thousands from a slogan doodled in ballpoint on a brown bag book cover or jeans leg.

IV. THE LITTLE WAY

Giving up my journal gave me freedom. It let me shake off the will-I-or-won't-I, the will-it-succeed -or-won't-it, and left me with the gift of experience that I reference regularly, with new results each time. Before I had begun, I had proclaimed loudly, "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 felt the way that I had felt growing up: learning my own likes and dislikes, extricating myself from the hopeful and well-meant career suggestions made to me by my two-visits-a-year relatives who knew very little about me as an individual. It was liberating when they, too, finally realized that there was no astronaut in me, nor brain surgeon. I tend to think that then, to please, I tried to show at least a passing interest in anything that was suggested. But there is something to be said - and not enough said about - the courage it takes to shut down shop when you are ready to do so.

Sometimes I walk past a small, independently owned restaurant or store that does not seem to be very busy or vibrant. In a few weeks, I'll see that it is closed to the public, but papered in large, vehement signage: WE ARE NOT CLOSED, BUT RENOVATING, TO SERVE OUR GROWING AND ENTHUSIASTIC PATRONAGE. It looks like a lie and I've seen it to be so, when these signs stay up, moldering, until a new tenant takes over the space. I wonder if the people who used to inhabit these spaces have learned: Let your experience be a small one with a beginning and end, if need be. No individual should attempt encapsulate his or her worth into a single enterprise. Natural selection and the ability to be fluid in one's projects are keys to real and lasting success. There are always more ways to not only make contributions, but to shake up the 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 things that I love about Proust.

Proust, as many know, self-published one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world. Even then, people said it was a bad idea, and suggested (and still do) that self-publishing so devalued a work, that it is de rigeur to brand someone believing strongly enough in their own work to do so with the sin of "vanity", as in "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. From a famous courtesan, Proust had been gifted with a volume of her poetry, bound with the fabric of one of her own petticoats - a deluxe edition in the truest sense. In the late nineteenth century, "pamphlet" publishing also seemed popular. There was room not only for the mass produced, but fine work existed within small, thin covers - a concept I have always found romantic.

I began to feel that for me, this was "the way": St. Theresa's "Little Way". 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. 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 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 these things after quitting my journal, and can say only that, for the first time in my writing life, I feel that I am living in the world of literature. I don't know its size, for sure, and I do not know that it leads to anything bigger than what I see day to day. If we were really able to "prove" that the butter-colored shape at the end of the bed some nights is our dead grandmother's ghost, what would it assure us of? It smells like her shampoo. It feels like she is there. If we prove that it is - if the headlines read GHOSTS EXIST - do we expect that all ghosts throughout all time will now capitulate and open the gates to a whole new full-time world of communication?

Of course not. They will still be the same brief and fragmented things they are tonight and every night.

I don't miss the contact with other writers. When I'm reading a short story I love, I often find reasons never to want social contact with its author. I have no doubt the same has been thought of me. I'm sure I've proven it true of me. I do love to edit, and do it when I want to. And I have excellent "first readers" for my own work, some of who are writers, some not. My introduction to some of these people was a direct result of my journal. I am grateful for that. I am grateful to them.

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 lightning feeling of knowing suddenly - sometimes in your sleep -exactly how to say what you want to say? That feeling reminds me of those races where you run while carrying an egg on a teaspoon. Sometimes those flashes of clarity disappear as quickly as they come. 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 experience of:

• Riffing: 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. (Or, failing the opportunities for such comfort, in surreptitious longhand at the dayjob.)
  
  
• 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, exact revenge on the worst boss I ever had, and admit to some of my ugliest faults - and tell a bunch of lies that could pass for any of the previously mentioned -- all in the same compact fifteen pages.
  
  
• Giving drafts to friends, and sitting down with them to discuss. I love that feeling of anticipation-slash-dread that comes with "I read your story…" , although I 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. Still, some of my favorite memories - the most exciting, alive moments I can think of - involve discussing pre-publication drafts of stories with friends, or sharing drafts with "interested" acquaintances who might eventually become friends. Or fodder.
  
  
• 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 smeared 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. Of course, when work is accepted for publication, there is plenty of joy to be had:

• The phone call or letter that lets me know my piece is going to be published. As a writer I always liked to get the phone call best, so, when I had the journal, I made the phone call whenever possible. I liked to think I was catching the writer unawares, at home, possibly at what had been a low moment. I distinctly remember getting a call once from an editor who was accepting my work, and being flattered and excited to talk to him, while sitting in the kitchen of my efficiency looking down into a bowl of clumped, poorly mixed macaroni and cheese. Seeing clotted orange cheese flavored powder still to this day gives me a vague sense of victory.
  
  
• The treat that I give myself to celebrate finding a good home for my work. Even the disappointing discovery of the fact that Riesen's Chocolate Chews are really awful does not keep them from being a longstanding symbol of success in my mind, much like clotted cheese powder is, because there was a time that Riesen's Chocolate Chews were what I could afford to celebrate with.
  
  
• Getting the contributors' copies in the mail. Finding my name spelled correctly. Finding stories other than my own in the issue that make me think, "Damn, I wish I'd written that one."
  
  
• Giving copies to people I care about. Implicit in this pleasure is the failure to give copies to certain other people. "Well," my father will say after finishing one of my stories in a glossy publication, "I won't be sending a copy of that one to (fill in with name of relative)." He's happy to be assured that I didn't expect him to, and didn't plan to myself.
  
  

There are disappointments in writing, of course. Some of the best writing itself is born of them. For myself, like they say of childbirth, it's the easiest pain to forget.

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 world today. 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, 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.

Special thanks to: Marcy Dermansky, Robert Driver, Marcella Durand, Joe Dworetzky, Patricia Lavelle, Ben Levin, Deborah Litwack, Sam Maitin, Dorothy Manou, Brenna McLaughlin, Danielle Ofri, Steve Price, Lisa Tomer Rentz, Ron Spatz, Tim Stopper, and the subscribers, submitters, and supporters of night rally magazine.

March 17, 2003.

RECCOMMENDED 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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