“You’re like the strongman of a former European colony,” I told Poets & Writers, when they profiled ZYZZYVA in 1997. “You have absolute control of your tiny domain, but the great powers could care less and the people would never elect you in a fair election. Worst of all, Amnesty International has plenty of evidence that you torture writers.

“Or else you’re like a high school janitor. Your main job is to keep the floors polished and the wastebaskets emptied. Also, you’re supposed to let the slackers hang out with you in the furnace room. And when you retire, even though nobody ever invited you into a classroom, they dedicate the yearbook to you.”

Actually, I’m much more of a reporter than most litmag editors, who are usually poets or fiction writers—and professors by necessity. I regard myself as a conservative figure, although, when I started, I thought I was avant. I now realize I was misguided. I fell back on this particular dream, because all the others had faded away. It seemed like something I could pull off, because it would return me to an earlier incarnation.

The thing I like about writing is that it is the last bastion of the individual imagination. Untechnologized. Just a person alone with a pen, basically, is the model. You don’t have to fund a big operation to be a writer, just yourself. Of course, we now use computers, and they help. But it’s still just words on the page. And I like that. I like the idea of having a place where thoughts can be carefully worked up until they fit together in a very complex way to powerful effect.

And I like the way bookstores are bigger, more beautiful, more comprehensive, and more widely dispersed than ever. I like today’s bookstore culture: café/readings/classes/CDs/videos—almost everything you might need to fuel your intellectual/aesthetic life. So that helps sustain my faith.

Universities also continue to serve, more than ever, as literary centers, even though so many English departments have fallen into the Slough of Theory. And I sometimes fantasize that some program would adopt ZYZZYVA. But whenever I chat with a creative-writing type, my flesh crawls at the thought of all that departmental rigmarole. Anyway, who would want to take on some old white guy without a Ph.D.? Anyway, the professors already know they know how to put out a litmag better than I do.

Meanwhile, I’ve conducted my own education in public and no one has said, hey, you’re a C-minus guy, get out of here. Nobody’s thrown a brick at me yet, either. There are lots of people who don’t like me, I suppose, for a variety of reasons, some of them legit. And there are certainly lots I don’t like, for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, I’ve been allowed to do it. The police haven’t come. My board hasn’t said, we’re awfully sorry, we know you founded it, but it’s time for a change, we’ve got to get someone in here who can lead us into the E-Age. Nobody has said that. We’re still balancing the budget. I’m still finding interesting stuff to publish, and advertisers are still chipping in.

I now wear glasses for reading. I’m growing gray and bald and a little bit chubby. And I wonder if I will keep on being blessed with good health. Will I still have the energy I need to schlep around and do everything I have to do? Will my already atrophied taste and judgment (and memory) fail utterly and be subjected to universal derision?

I’m lucky that for the next five years I’ll have an in-house teenager to keep me in touch with the real world and to let me know just how embarrassing my thoughts and deeds and even my very presence really are.

I’d like to stay in harness another ten years, until my daughter’s finished college. I’m sure 25 years at ZYZZYVA will seem like enough....