Editor’s Note, Winter 2005
75, as in Issue 75, isn’t round enough for much celebration, but we take our milestones as they come. The big one—where a writer we discovered becomes a household name—is still to come.
Almost 200 writers have had their first time in these pages. In the beginning, there was only the occasional debutante, because I wanted to publish writers who were already stars. After a few years, however, I had exhausted the usual suspects and realized I could make a greater contribution by furthering the careers of “new & emerging” writers. So I stopped soliciting manuscripts and threw myself upon the mercy of the slush pile.
Most of my never-befores, I’m afraid, have remained beneath the radar. V. Penelope Pelizzon (Summer ’94) directs the creative writing program at UConn. Lawrence Rinder (Spring ’97) is dean of graduate studies at the California College of the Arts. The second collection of Forrest Hamer (Summer ’93) was included in the California Poetry Series by UC Press. Paul Flores (Fall ’98) won a PEN award with his first novel, Along the Border Lies, which ZYZZYVA, in its brief adventure publishing first-novels, published. Peter Coyote (Winter ’88) went on to publish a memoir and to become the voice-over-of-choice for Public Television documentaries. Jon Billman (Summer ’96), Joelle Fraser (Fall ’98), Karen Karbo (Fall ’86), Felicia Luna Lemus (Fall ’01), Alvin Lu (Fall ’96), Jess Mowry (Winter ’88), Yxta Maya Murray (Spring ’95), Josh Pryor (Fall ’97), Joanna Rose (Spring ’96), Lisa Schiffman (Winter ’94)...published with New York houses and are, I hope, still in the hunt.
Po Bronson (first fiction, Fall ’92) might become huge with his new social documentary about families, Why Do I Love These People? Maybe the film of her novel Mistress of Spices will propel Chitra Divakaruni (first fiction, Spring ’93) into celebrity. Ditto, Jill Soloway (first fiction, Fall ’01), who toured this fall with her funny first book, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants; she has a couple of movie deals in development.
Meanwhile, other ZYZZYVA first-timers continue their dicey trudge toward the bigtime. As I updated the board with e-mails:
October 18: Caron Kamps Widden will publish her first novel, Restoration, with Hilliard & Harris early next year.
October 7: Dan Bern (Summer ’91) sings at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley for two days next week.
October 3: Booklist calls Zanesville, the first novel by Kris Saksnussemm (Fall ’01), “one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels science fiction has spawned in a decade.” (See also his ad on page 23.)
September 14: Christine Fletcher (Fall ’02) will publish her first novel, Tallulah Falls, with Bloomsbury next spring.
September 2: Keith Antar Mason (Winter ’92) has just published From Hip-Hop to Hittite and Other Poetic Healing Rituals for Young Black Men: A Retrospective (Telepoetics, Los Angeles).
August 14: Kevin Bentley (Spring ’94) is profiled on the front page of NY Times Sunday Styles section (“For the Fun of It, Remember? The libertinism of SF in the innocent time before AIDS”).
June 14: NY Times calls Haruki Murakami (first appearance in English, Spring ’88), “the most popular Japanese writer in America.”
June 2: Avner Mandelman (Fall ’93) publishes a collection, Talking to the Enemy, with Seven Stories Press. Publishers Weekly says, “Mandelman, an Israeli living in Toronto, complicates the underside of Israeli culture, teasing out the roots of violence and prejudice in this alternately dark and humorous collection.”
May 12: Mary Guterson (Spring ’02) has published her first novel, We Are All Fine Here, with Putnam.
May 9: Ranbir Sidhu (Spring ’93) will be one of three writers attempting to write a novel while living in a 140-square-foot “box” at the Flux Factory, in Long Island City.
May 5: Eduardo Santiago (Fall ’03) will publish his first novel, Tomorrow They Will Kiss, with Little, Brown next year.
March 1: From Gannon Boyd, whose father, the late F.X. Toole, wrote the stories that inspired Million Dollar Baby: “WE WON! DAD WON! I’d like to thank you again for your trust in publishing my Dad that first time in 1999. Without you, none of this ridiculous snowball would ever have happened.”
The thing to remember about first-timers is that they are, by definition, in process. The Philip Roth plucked by Rose Styron from the Paris Review slush pile 50 years ago is echt Roth, but most writers begin less fully formed. In general, I like their rawness, their innocence, their hopefulness. (Their desperation is not particularly attractive, but, then again, all writers are desperate.)
In the old days, before the creative-writing-program boom, a writer might even hope to break into the “slicks,” general-interest magazines (published on glossy paper). Today, these outlets (that paid well) have either vanished or abjured fiction—even The New Yorker does only one story per issue. However, there are a zillion litmags, plus a googol zines, e-zines & blogs, all fungible. (Thank you, Gentle Reader, I’ve always wanted to use that word in a complete sentence.) Getting published, therefore, like losing one’s virginity, has become relatively easy, though semantically challenged. Conversely, from an editor’s point of view, every submission seems to arrive already festooned with credits, to say nothing of prizes.
Last summer, I surveyed our first-timers to see what had become of them: 20% had moved, forwarding addresses expired; 13% replied; the rest did not, for reasons I can only wonder about. Here are some of the responses:
Bonna Newman Read (Winter ’04, included in the list of 100 “distinguished” stories in this year’s Best American): [What were your pre-ZYZZYVA efforts to get into print?] Short version: none. Long version: In 1981, as a starry-eyed young person, near-graduate of Temple University film school, former assistant editor of industrial films in Philadelphia, and recent transplant to Hollywood, California, I wrote my first short story. Employed then as the personal assistant to a well-known film producer—a job that paid only room-and-board—I showed my boss what I had written. He read my story and told me about a writers-directors-actors workshop currently being formed at Zoetrope Studios. Although membership was restricted to established film writers, directors, and actors, the workshop facilitators needed someone to make coffee each week. I eagerly agreed and became the workshop’s token neophyte.
A couple of other Hollywood tales intertwine with this part of my writer’s-life trajectory, but suffice to say, the workshop’s established talent—some you’ve heard of and some whose flourishing careers have since sputtered out—found the scenes I wrote for the workshop promising, and they encouraged me.
Zoetrope was in serious financial trouble. The workshop ran for several months, then folded. But I was launched; ambitious and ready to hang out at Musso & Frank every night with Scott Fitzgerald’s ghost.
Misadventures in screenwriting followed. Hired to write a “polish” to one script, I was lavishly wined and dined, but never paid. Meeting the rent, keeping my car running, and the general tumult of being 25, made it difficult to settle down to the daily toil of writing. When I did scribble my own thoughts, they appeared stubbornly in paragraph form. Big chunks of prose fell out of me, and when I asked my movie-producer mentor what he thought of my writing a novel, he replied that more novels get sold every year than movies get made.
So I went searching for a means of support and a place to write my opus. I signed on as nanny to the son of a Scientologist actress. Knowing almost nothing about caring for children, I imagined I would write while the kid was in school. Being conscientious, I threw my whole heart into the job and consequently wrote very little: only one short story in six months.
How could I live cheaply, not let others siphon off my emotional energy, be comfortably alone for long stretches of time, and write? I moved out of the city, way out, beyond Malibu and the county line, where I rented a tiny trailer in the mountains. I read about writing. The Paris Review interviews, John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, The Writer on Her Work, The New Yorker (religiously), The New York Review of Books, and Esquire.
I lived like that, monastically, for a couple of years, wrote on a portable typewriter, more short stories—not very good ones—and pages and pages in my novel. I sent one story to the L.A. Reader, an alternative weekly that didn’t publish fiction. I think I knew one of the editors there and he, believing I was well-connected, indulged me without being able to publish what I had written.
Perhaps I sent one more story out somewhere. I can’t remember where, but I seem to recall a rejection letter.
I focused on the novel. It was a huge coming-of-age tale with too many characters. I let it sprawl, thinking I would improve as a writer and eventually find ways of consolidating the avalanche of words. One day, I complained to the man I rented the trailer from, a has-been Hollywood director himself, whose daughter I sometimes looked after, and he reminded me that Rome wasn’t built in a day. So I just kept writing, pretty sure I didn’t want to be famous anyhow.
Eventually, some of the local people noticed me. They were a scattered community of artists and misfits living outside the mainstream. I met the man who would become my husband, and he moved in, proving his love one summer by supporting me for three months while I wrote 200 pages in the novel. It was a triumph, those pages, but “The End” still seemed very far away and I had to get a job. We were out of money.
Ten years passed. I worked erratically, writing between secretarial jobs, working for a psychic, at a real estate office, for a homeowners’ group. I took up bookkeeping because it paid more.
At 35 years old, I decided to have a baby. My novel was not getting finished and therefore was not being published as planned. My characters were still trying to come of age, but I was getting old. For a couple of years, I read a lot about pregnancy and parenting and got no sleep.
When my daughter was three, an acquaintance hired me to rewrite her book about alien abduction. She had an agent, and it seemed like this one would go—it was such as wild story. But then the author—and self-proclaimed abductee—got divorced and disappeared. She later sent me a postcard from Ashland, Oregon, though the book has never been published, as far as I know.
When my daughter entered the fifth grade, I began writing again in earnest. The novel was not dead to me, but still unfinished, a Frankenstein monster of 450 pages, and, meanwhile, it had become a period piece.
I messed around with a couple of favorite chapters and then put it aside and began work on a short story I called “The Cheese Test,” which Howard made me rewrite—and finally published.
Philip Honan Keeley (Winter ’98): [Was your first submission to ZYZZYVA accepted?] Hell no. My friends and I were constantly showing off the form rejection letter Howard sent, always with a little note of encouragement. It was a badge of honor to be dismissed by Howard Junker. It drove us to write more, better, funnier. I won the $50 bet by being the first published. My two confederates, now old and bitter, no longer read ZYZZYVA.
Jorge Saralegui (Winter ’04): [Was there a lot of editorial messing around with your text?] I’m much too diplomatic to call it “messing around.” There were changes I found to be improvements, and others I found arbitrary.
Andrea Sanelli (Spring ’95)[...editorial messing?] Howard suggested that I lose one of the characters in my story, which I did. Great suggestion.
Drew Cushing (Fall ’03) [...editorial messing?] A little. Mostly good cuts that took out a lot of preamble noise and started the story when it should start. The back-and-forth was very helpful, if a little nerve-wracking.
Tracy Cummings (Fall ’03) [...editorial messing?] Yes, we shortened it a lot. To me, one element of the story was gone—it became more emotional, somewhat less philosophical & playful.
Holly Chase Williams (Spring ’04): [Did you receive much feedback?] Good Lord, yes. I got an e-mail from Nat Sobel, who is Richard Russo’s agent. I corresponded with John Keeble (we were in the same issue!), who was my thesis advisor. My story got reviewed online as one of the highlights of the issue & called ‘lyrical.’ I corresponded with another writer in the same issue. And my employer, Auntie’s Bookstore, held a reading for me. My parents came!
Eduardo Santiago (Fall ’03): [...much feedback?] I received an awesome amount of fan mail. One reader wrote me a wonderful letter and we met for lunch. We’ve become good friends. Two agents contacted me, but that came to nothing. I finally did get an agent shortly after, and I believe my story greatly contributed. It gave me credibility. A while later, Michael Mezzo, an editor at Little, Brown read the story in ZYZZYVA and contacted me, because my bio said I was working on a novel. Fortunately, I had just finished writing it. Three weeks later he bought it!
Mia Keyes (Spring ’99): [What is the current stage of your career?] I’ve been working on a novel for a good three years. I’m in the third rewrite and have an agent interested in NYC—if I can ever finish the rewrite. Life has interrupted. I have two small children, one is just seven months, plus I work full-time (as an advertising copywriter)! I will get it done—it’s just a question of when.
Philip Honan Keeley: [What effect did appearing in print have on your life?] I quit my job, moved into a funky studio in the Mission, and wrote a tolerable but by no means spectacular novel. I went broke but wasn’t worried since the dot.com boom was all around me. Except I was a little older and didn’t meet the hyper-young-hipster model of the ideal dot.com employee. I temped. I went to work for Goodwill as a manager of one of their sorting centers.
It was the worst possible time to be employed at Goodwill in San Francisco. Billions of dollars of venture capital money was pouring into The City. This money so distorted things that people stopped shopping at thrift stores. NAFTA had brought the $8 shirt (on sale)—a new shirt—to JCPenney, Target, and Sears. At the same time, donations—in the form of clothes, books, shoes, furniture, etc.—were also pouring in at a historic rate. We didn’t have enough trucks. On some Saturdays, the donation boxes had to be emptied twice and then first thing Sunday morning. Much of it was brought to my sorting center in South San Francisco.
Management was in a tizzy, sales had plummeted, rumors of paychecks bouncing circulated. They pressured the sorting centers to sort faster, discard more, and select only the very best. Everything we delivered to the stores came back unsold, and we had to bale it and ship it to Third World countries. Most of the clothing had been produced in those same countries, and it came back to them in thousand-pound bales, used but affordable. The shoes all went to Africa.
If you are ever in a position where you have to tell 20 developmentally disabled adults to work twice as fast because our quota has just doubled...and don’t get me started on the shoes, tens of thousands of used shoes.
I moved to Chicago a few years ago, and it’s a nice fit. There’s plenty of work, time to write. I traded [Supervisor] Chris Daly for Mayor Richard Daley. I like my graft where I can see it. I blame Howard for all these hardships.
Katherine Taylor (Fall ’01): [What effect...?] It gave me the confidence to call myself a writer, to think of myself as a writer, and, consequently, to go on working with the seriousness of a writer. I was bartending when the story was published, and it’s easy to get into the social whirl of the late, late night and forget why you’re tending bar (with a graduate degree) in the first place. Howard’s endorsement reminded me what it was I was meant to be doing, and the response from that publication—from friends & agents & later the Pushcart Prize—kept me focused when I needed it most.
I’ve published consistently since; I have new stories coming out soon in Shenandoah and Ploughshares. The Southwest Review gave me the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for the best story published in the magazine in 2004. And, finally, I’m very happy to report that HarperCollins will publish my first novel next spring. The second is slated for spring 2008. Surely there will be large ads for each in ZYZZYVA. I owe a great debt to Howard, who realized I was a writer just when I was beginning to doubt it.
Peter Coyote (Winter ’88): [Do you wish you subscribed to ZYZZYVA or made charitable contributions to ZYZZYVA?] Aha, the shoe of the questionnaire drops! I wish I had time to read ZYZZYVA. My life is so full and constricted by work, travel, personal work, children, etc., that the only publication I find time to read cover to cover is The New York Review of Books. I had to let my New Yorker, Granta, and ZYZZYVA subscriptions lapse along with The Nation. I just had no time. And I believe I have made charitable contributions to ZYZZYVA. If not, I will.
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