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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.
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.
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.
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