Litmag editors don’t become rich and famous. To begin with, they purchase only “first North American serial rights,” the right to be the first magazine to publish the work in the U.S. or Canada. All other rights—hardcover, paperback, foreign, film—revert to the author. Which is certainly fair, since our upfront payment is so modest, but it would have been nice to have a piece of the action, for example, for having published Frances Mayes’s notes on her fixer-upper in Italy, in Winter ’93, poetic ramblings that, in 1996, turned into Under the Tuscan Sun.

At best, litmag editors get a bit of reflected glory from the famous writers they were the first to publish. Harriet Monroe of Poetry is remembered as having been the first to publish T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams (and the second to publish Wallace Stevens). Story took pride in having introduced Truman Capote, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and William Saroyan. Rose Styron plucked the much-rejected Philip Roth out of the slush pile at The Paris Review, which also launched Rick Bass, Evan Connell, Michael Cunningham, Jay McInerney, Charlie Smith, Terry Southern....

The real truth is that it’s one thing to recognize a literary diamond in the rough, but another to wait until that promise is fulfilled (and recognized by the world)—the cutting and polishing of a career takes time, often lots of time, and much can go wrong along the way. Yet “quality of discoveries” is a crucial measure of an editor, because it indicates how alert, how sensitive, how gutsy—and how persistent—he really is. When I came to this realization in 1992, I began putting a special section into the table of contents: “First Time in Print.”

And for the July/August ’92 Poets & Writers, I did a survey of a hundred writers, mostly well-known, but a few unknown, whose addresses I found in the Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers, asking them where they were first published and what the experience had been like:

T. Coraghessan Boyle: My first published story was in the Fall ’72 North American Review, Robley Wilson, editor. Effect: it swelled my head to the size of a prize holiday pumpkin.

Wanda Coleman: By my second year in high school I considered myself quite the poet, even though I still hadn’t fully developed my sensibility as a black poet; quite a difference. My first publication was in the local south central L.A. fishrag. I’d learned to imitate dominant culture stuff pretty well, as corn goes. I think most fine lit magazines are narrow and repressive and discourage new voices rather than the other way around. I think local publications treat their local products slightly better than the hoity-toity establishment rags. I also think the editors of most such magazines are racist, regardless of poetic bent.

Robert Creeley: The first poem I published [in 1946] was “Return” and the fact that it was in the mutual enterprise of a college journal, The Harvard Wake, didn’t give it the vividness that came later with “first” publication in Accent or The Kenyon Review. Finally, it’s the finding the company, or having the company that Cid Corman’s Origin provides, which changes everything for me. That all begins in the early fifties. Otherwise I don’t really think much of magazines “spotting new talent” or rather think that it is the fact of the initial company, as Golden Goose then, or Origin, or Merlin in the Paris of that time, which is the point. Whoever “goes on to fame and/or fortune” or not really doesn’t seem then, now, the point.

Harriet Doerr: My first publication came when I was a student in the Stegner program at Stanford in 1978. I had entered Smith as a freshman in 1927, transferred to Stanford, then left to be married in 1930, during my junior year. When I returned, after a lapse of 47 years, a fellow graduate student from Utah liked a story I wrote and published it in Quarterly West, where he was an editor. Oh, happy chance! I marvel still at the ultimate coincidence. Where had it come from anyway, the gene that made me, a 68-year-old novice, reckless enough to match my pen with theirs?

William Kittredge: “Society of Eros,” Northwest Review, 1965. I was ranching in Oregon, writing a story every couple of weeks and sending them out. The NWR sent a postcard saying they’d print this one if I would agree to changes. I think they liked the idea that I was a rancher and not a literary person. I worried but agreed, thinking I was selling out. They didn’t change enough. I thank Ralph Salisbury and John Haislip for getting me started.

Caroline Kizer: My first appearance in print was in the fall of ’41, in The New Yorker. The poem had been rejected by my college literary magazine, and when I told the faculty editor, with some justifiable pride, I believe she said, “Well, we have very high standards here, dear.” Actually, it wasn’t a very good poem; the college magazine was right. I still remember the stunned look on the face of “Cap” Pierce, The New Yorker poetry editor, when I sashayed into his office. He said he was expecting “some desiccated Emily Dickinson” and here came this blond tootsie. He had called me in to point out an unconscious “obscenity.” Blushing, I changed the line.

Lyn Lifshin: To this day, I can remember the exact mailbox I mailed my first poetry submissions from—two versions of the same haiku. It was rejected. But the next submission was accepted. Working on my own, alone, apart from any poetry community or college atmosphere—knowing virtually no one else who wrote or cared about poetry, for me that first acceptance and then, seeing the poem in print, was enormously important.

Clarence Major: A self-published booklet of poems titled The Fires That Burn in Heaven (Chicago: 1954, ten pages), a copy of which recently sold for $150 to a rare book collector in San Diego.

Joyce Carol Oates: My first published story was in Mademoiselle, as a consequence of my having been a winner of the annual short story contest. I believe I was 19 or 20 at the time, a Syracuse University undergraduate. It seemed unreal to me—wonderful, undeserved. In those days, the late fifties and early sixties, I submitted work under the name “J. C. Oates”—not out of shyness regarding my gender, or a desire to seem male, but in the wish to be neutral, unobtrusive. Years later, I am still ambivalent about the attachment of names to words. I know it must be done, and yet—

Ed Ochester: I don’t remember the name of the poem, but it was in a 1957 issue of Epos (Florida), when I was still in high school. I liked the poem on the facing page—“The Roach”—and learned in the next decade that it was pretty cool to have appeared with its author, Charles Bukowski.

Marge Piercy: The first time that I was published was—as is the case with many writers—by myself. I discovered myself when I was the editor of the University of Michigan literary magazine, at that time called Generations.

James Pollack: My first story in print was in Processed World, a Situationist Collective magazine in San Francisco that promotes a bad attitude in the workplace. They don’t respond to writers who send them submissions, even ones they publish, as I discovered when I learned they had published my story only while browsing the anarchist-journal section of City Lights. I was very happy, of course—it was unreal—but I was also pissed, because the issue might have gone out of print and I might have never known that, after seven years of trying to get published, I finally had. A few months later I ran into a member of the collective at a party in Berkeley and asked why they hadn’t told me. “Sometimes we fuck up,” he said, and bought me a beer.

Wallace Stegner: My first was a little story called “Saskatchewan Idyll,” in a little magazine called The Monterey Beacon—the same magazine, incidentally, to which Steinbeck traded a story, I think “The Snake,” for six months of rides on a saddle horse. I didn’t get any rides. This was June 1935. The first that paid me anything ($25) was “Home to Utah,” in Story, August 1936. Especially in tight times, little magazines have been lifesavers for a multitude of us, helping us to break in. God bless them every one.

John Updike: In my midteens I had a few acceptances by small poetry magazines, and in college I was often in the print supplied by the Harvard Lampoon, but my crucial “first time in print” was the acceptance by The New Yorker, the June I got out of college in 1954, of a poem called “Duet, With Muffled Brake Drum.” It appeared in August, and the only place in Reading, PA, where one could buy The New Yorker was the railroad terminal newsstand. I went there, bought a copy, found my poem, and showed it to the girl behind the counter. “I wrote this,” I told her. She said, “Oh my God.”

Mary Michael Wagner: I remember the first weeks after getting my story in ZYZZYVA. I mean I didn’t feel like running screaming through the city holding my published story in my hands like I thought I would. And then nothing happened. I was still getting rejected all over the place, and I had an unexpected feeling of exposure and also pressure. Then I got a letter from a literary agent saying she wanted to see my work. And a few weeks after that I got a letter from Doubleday saying they wanted to include my story in the O. Henry. [Ed. Note: It also appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.]

It may be that none of ZYZZYVA’s discoveries will become household names, but I am proud of the hundred or so writers I’ve introduced over the years, including Apollo (an eighth-grader when I published him; his first collection was published by Anchor Books), Jon Billman, Po Bronson, Lewis Buzbee, Michele T. Clinton, Joshua Clover, Peter Coyote, Chitra Divakaruni, Forrest Hamer, Karen Karbo (whose first story in print became part of a novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, published in 1989 by Putnam, and nominated for a Pulitzer), Avner Mandelman, Jess Mowry, Yxta Maya Murray, Joanna Rose, F. X. Toole, and Joelle Fraser, whose memoir will be published by Villard next year....

And I’m proud to have been a very early publisher of Francisco X. Alarcón, Sherman Alexie, Marilyn Chin, Ben Friedlander, Dagoberto Gilb, Alice Jones, August Kleinzahler, Dorianne Laux, Devorah Major, Brenda Peterson, Kay Ryan, Sallie Tisdale, Kathleen Tyau, Terry Wolverton, Lois-Ann Yamanaka....

May I add, for the record, that my mother compiled a list of the 216 words I’d learned by the time I was a year and ten months, so I guess that was my literary debut. When I was eight, she sent off one of my little stories about the first Thanksgiving to Jack & Jill, and that was my first time in print.