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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:
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.
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.
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