E-mail: slaughlin@csus.com

E-mail: evanrail@hotmail.com

I volunteered for seven months in 1995. I was working on my M.F.A. and lived just a few blocks from the office.

I opened a lot of envelopes, sometimes seeing names go by of writers I liked, but mostly dreaming that someday Howard would pick up one of my pieces, be happy to see it, and put it into the new issue.

I got badly beaten in chess by Howard. Often. Quickly. We had lunch a couple times a week, which was a perk, and every once in a while I got to read a piece he liked—and offer my opinion. I met Madison, his daughter, hitting the punching bag in the entranceway, and played in a few ZYZZYVA softball games.

Then I started Youth Speaks. I had taught 8th grade before graduate school, and I was interested in after-school arts programs. I also wanted to find an alternative route to being a writer. Youth Speaks offers creative writing workshops to teenagers in their high schools and in daily afterschool workshops throughout the Bay Area. We’ve opened chapters in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We present the Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam, the first, and the largest, teen slam in the country. We’re working on an anthology with McSweeney’s, and are revving up to publish six books a year.

There’s certainly something to be said about diving deeply into the harshes of the slush pile before going off to give young writers encouragement and entrance into the writing life.

Howard hasn’t published me yet. Others have, and I’ve been asked to read across the country with many writers of acclaim. But I can’t be mad at him: Howard has always been supportive and an all-around nice guy. Before we got our IRS nonprofit status, Howard served as our fiscal umbrella—he processed our contributions, gave me some advice, even yelled at me a bit when I hadn’t sent out thank-you notes quickly enough. In fact, we even found our space through an ad in ZYZZYVA; The Box Factory, a rehab project in the Mission, was looking for a literary-nonprofit tenant...and took us in!

And, I should add, Howard published the first story by our program director, Paul S. Flores, when he was still in graduate school, and also his first novel, Along the Border Lies, which just won a PEN/Oakland award.

Now that our budget is more than ten times what ZYZZYVA’s was when I worked there, Howard still invites me to play softball. When I can, it’s always a good time. Recently, a few of us upstarts mistakenly set up our own game in the Mission. It was fun, but there was no beer, no sodas. No hot dogs or veggie burgers. Just a bunch of people standing around playing softball. “Where is Howard Junker when you need him?” I heard asked more than once that feckless afternoon.

E-mail: james@youthspeaks.org

In 1994, I was new in town and had vague ideas about being a writer, so vague that I thought I needed to get out of the house (where I was doing a lot of not writing) and find something to do in the company of other people. I owned a pickup truck. This made me especially useful. Howard had me trucking things around town, and not just mail crates full of slush. I remember carrying furniture into his new house one afternoon. The payment for that little job was a cold beer and enough drivetime in Howard’s company for me to work up the nerve to ask him what he thought of the stories I’d given him, about which so far he conspicuously but very understandably had said zero. Even then I knew they were awful, in their way; they were exercises, really, narrativeless rants in the voices of characters I didn’t much like, the product of a period of enforced limbering up. Howard had a unique and effective way of looking pained. He said, after a time, “I think you should keep writing.” Fair enough. I did and I didn’t.

What happened was, after a year in San Francisco I moved back home to New York—to keep up with my girl and maybe get a real job. I drove the pickup truck back across the country. My first week in town, I went out one morning to get the truck, which I’d parked on the street, and found that another car had taken its place. That is, the truck had been stolen. The insurance check helped get me through the winter—another unpaid internship, this one at Harper’s, where if I’m not mistaken we ran a piece from ZYZZYVA in the Readings section. In no time I found myself a little busier than I was accustomed to being, and so put aside writing fiction for a while. Harper’s led to a job as a reporter and editor at the New York Observer, which five years later, led to being hired at The New Yorker to edit and write for the Talk of the Town, among other things. I have written (and rewritten) a lot of Talk pieces by now, but have not once burdened the fiction editor here with any of my short stories, in large part because I don’t have any. I gave that up.

E-mail: Nick_Paumgarten@newyorker.com

Though I never told Howard, the main reason I volunteered in 1987 was because of a rejection note he sent me. “I don’t know what your plans are,” he wrote, “but I do know that the road is long and hard and I wish you luck.”

My first day at ZYZZYVA (all caps, italics—or else!), Howard breezed into the office, which was housed that year in a one-bedroom condo in a highrise-under-construction managed by a board member. In his leather jacket, cup of cocoa in hand, he looked like he was totally in love with the morning and what it might bring. I was led to three drawers in the kitchen—mystical, magical drawers—one for flat-out rejects, another for second reads, the last for possible acceptances. I took an armful and went to a desk in the “bedroom,” where I dutifully read and took notes on each submission. Then the submissions went back into the drawers, where true to promise, Howard read each one.

I saw how a literary magazine got put together from nothing, survived the intensity of the Lila Wallace grant application process (Don’t. Touch. That. Pile!), learned that even good writing doesn’t always get published....

I finished my degree at San Francisco State, though both of the professors on my committee left the world as I knew it. (Michael Rubin died of AIDS, and the late Stan Rice moved to New Orleans and began to paint when his wife hit the bestseller lists). And was hired to teach for a semester. I also worked at the local advertising departments of GQ and Mademoiselle.

Then I left for Japan, inspired by Kerouac and Snyder and by the fact that Japan in the early nineties was a place where someone like me, with a virtually worthless degree, could actually make a living, getting paid to read and write.

Because I’d studied Zazen, martial arts, and Buddhism as a nerdy teenager who got beaten up a lot in Berkeley, I felt comfortable with the people and the culture. After all, the newspapers published haiku on the front page. After I stopped trying to be Japanese and started being myself, things began to happen, almost effortlessly. I met a man in a bookstore, and we struck up a conversation about Paul Auster. I helped him with an anthology about boys, recommending American stories, and he rewarded me with a teaching job at Todai, Japan’s Harvard. It was a job I never could have gotten if I’d tried.

This was a pattern that has repeated itself in my life. Strangers came to my aid, and I helped them the best I could. Through the good graces of Donald Richie, who was my neighbor in Yanaka, a quaint part of Tokyo that hadn’t been destroyed by the firebombs and was home to very few foreigners, I got a job at The Japan Times, reviewing books on Asia. I found myself in the unusual position of being an outsider writing from the inside, and since few people wanted to pursue the thankless task of book reviewing, I discovered my niche. I got free books, got paid to write about them, and learned an enormous amount about Japanese literature.

Through an ad in Poets & Writers, I got a job writing reviews for a new journal at the University of Hawaii, MANOA. Then I got a column on contemporary Japanese art for the Asahi Evening News, The Japan Times’s competitor, but no one cared, since I was a freelancer and a foreigner. When a sculptor friend told me Art in America was looking for a Tokyo correspondent, I stumbled my way through a few art reviews and eventually got that job, too.

Working freelance was rare in high-priced Tokyo, but I was hungry and willing to do almost anything. I answered an ad to transcribe English for executive focus groups, and through that menial job met a Swiss woman who hired me to work at a cosmetics company, where I helped make up product-line names like “Beyond Color” and lipstick hues like “Now or Never Red.” I got a job for a semi-governmental think-tank rewriting bureaucratic treatises on economics, trade, and industry, because I could stand up to my boss and tell him his writing was illogical when no self-respecting Japanese employee could. I wrote a regular diary about neighborhood life for NHK Radio and interviewed Nobel Laureates like Nadine Gordimer, things I would not have been able to do in the States. And I started to think about publishing books.

At the suggestion of Kathleen Fraser, my mentor at San Francisco State, I began to look up Japanese women poets in the effort to find community. I ended up editing and co-translating two anthologies of contemporary women’s poetry. When I started, I had no publisher, no advance, no nothing. But I started anyway, because the work that we were seeing broke stereotypes of the thin-necked geisha and the long-suffering housewife trailing her husband on the cobblestone streets. Because I had a better understanding of the grant application process from my time at ZYZZYVA, we took a month off to fill out an application for an Independent Scholar grant from the NEH, with the firm belief that “someone gets these grants, why not us?” We did, and Peter Goodman of Stone Bridge Press in Berkeley published the book in two volumes. It received the Benjamin Franklin Award, and he keeps it in print.

I began to see my role as a cultural intermediary. In 1995, I guest-edited a special issue of MANOA on Japanese contemporary literature. In 2002, I edited another special feature, this time on the war. I had intended to have “the changing Japanese family” as the theme, but when the work started coming in, so much of it was about the war that we reconsidered. After the emperor died in 1989, a taboo was lifted, and the older generation (both victims and perpetrators) started to look back, thinking and talking about the war years in ways they never could have before.

When the Gulf War broke out in 1991, I began working with Shogo Oketani in translating the poetry of Ayukawa Nobuo, again without a contract or publisher. Ayukawa was a modernist anti-war veteran who had come out against Japanese imperialism in the forties. His poetry is lyrical and political, but never dogmatic. Shogo had read Ayukawa in high school and had been inspired to write because of him. Shogo and I got married, and translating this poetry was definitely a test of our marriage. I’m pleased to report that we received this year’s Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature from the Donald Keene Center of Columbia University for Ayukawa’s America and Other Poems, forthcoming from Kaya Press.

In the 15 years since ZYZZYVA, I’ve sold over 500 articles to magazines and newspapers. My second collection, Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By, was born from culture shock upon returning to America in 1994. Because I was an expatriate in my very own body, I had started practicing yoga and charting that journey in poetry.

I’ve published a travel book with Tuttle, and a co-translation of an art history book with the same house. I’ve published hundreds of poems and translations in literary magazines, including a translation of a proto-feminist tanka in ZYZZYVA, and a dozen short stories, which I sold mostly to Japanese airline magazines. A short story collection, Green Tea to Go, is forthcoming from a small Tokyo press. I now write book reviews for KQED Radio’s “Pacific Time.” Shogo and I have a book on Kanji just out from Stone Bridge Press.

And we’ve moved back to Tokyo. Donald Richie is now in his eighties and I’m editing his journals, to be published by (you guessed it), Stone Bridge Press.

E-mail: leza@xpost.plala.or.jp

I met Howard at a party at Jeremy Larner’s the night before the first issue arrived from the printer. Howard told me how the cockamamie name came about—desperation. I was working for David Fechheimer at the time, an esteemed, enigmatic private investigator who collects books, and since my favorite pastime has always been a good read, the appearance of a new local literary magazine was cause for celebration.

We agreed to meet the next day at the corner of Haight and Masonic, where I received my first copy. I liked it immediately. I even decided to volunteer—I lasted an afternoon—but eventually I joined the Board. Blair Fuller was president. I had loved his memoir in the first Winter issue. The meetings were always in great spaces. Howard knew interesting people. The night Ethan Canin joined the board—he was so cute—I recall Cheryle Wicker asking, “Where’s the nearest flat spot?” She said it was a Southern expression. Meaning, I guess, I’d like to hop into the sack with him right now.

E-mail: pp@well.com

In the spring of 1985, when I happened upon the first issue at City Lights, it felt like just what I needed. I’d recently graduated from Berkeley, spent a few months in the writing program at Iowa, then fled back to my native California. I was full of dreamy notions of what it meant to be a writer. I was also broke, wrestling with family problems, and desperate to publish my first short story. When I saw the bug on the cover and the artful, eclectic stories and poems inside, I thought I’d stumbled onto the antidote to all the beer-and-fishing bullshit I’d read at Iowa.

So I called Howard up and told him that I’d work for him part-time—for free. He seemed a little taken aback—apparently I was his first volunteer—then he invited me over immediately. I expected a Raymond Chandleresque office downtown, a few gin-splashed Underwoods, a few lovely interns buzzing around. What I got was Howard himself, in khakis and a polo shirt, with manuscripts strewn all over the floor of his loft-like apartment near USF.

I quickly discovered that Howard wasn’t interested in my literary opinions—he was interested in me selling ads. Howard would drop me off for an afternoon on Union St., and I’d hoof around, trying to sell restaurants on this new magazine with a strange name. (I did get the restaurant where I was a waiter at night to take a quarter-page.)

And I’d dash into bookstores—Howard was double-parked—delivering copies of the new issue.

In those days, every dollar counted. At one point, Howard instructed me to steal paper clips from the manuscripts before I mailed them back.

Putting out a literary magazine, I discovered, requires a lot of grunt work. I stuffed envelopes, answered phones, and licked stamps until my tongue felt like a mop in a glue factory. I also accompanied Howard to many galleries in search of photos and drawings.

One of the ironies of ZYZZYVA, I quickly learned, was that although the magazine was devoted to West Coast writers and artists, Howard had lived in the East until he was 29; he had a very un-West Coast edginess to him. He never liked to talk too directly about books or writers, always wrapping his thoughts in layers of irony or witty one-liners. Having grown up in Silicon Valley, a place tone-deaf to Art (in the seventies and eighties, anyway), it took me a while to get comfortable with this, but then I began to understand that this is how educated people talk about stories and pictures. I often felt like a rube.

In my six months I learned a great deal about writing and publishing, for example, how important good food is to publishing a high-quality literary quarterly: I recall a beautiful lunch on a sunny spring day at M.F.K. Fisher’s home in Sonoma, as well as many fine sandwiches on Howard’s deck.

Only once did I show Howard one of my short stories, and his reaction to it, though brief, was enough to make me question a career as a fiction writer. As it turned out, it was excellent advice. After I got an M.F.A. at Columbia, I soon abandoned fiction for journalism. I eventually landed a job at Rolling Stone, where I have written for the past ten years. I’ve published three books, including Sunnyvale, a memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley. I live in upstate New York, near the Hudson River, in a small town that reminds me a lot of Palo Alto. In fact, I still consider myself a westerner, and I still feel a mix of pride and amazement when a new issue arrives in the mail.

jg@well.com