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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.
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.
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:
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.
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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