Sun salutations, you radiant beings:
I would like it to be warmer.
Always.
But that’s not what this newsletter is going to be about.
It is about the vanishing past.
For example - this:
“A few issues back, in collusion with the editorial team, Christopher Fowler and Maura McHugh laid down a challenge to readers, to write an original, scary story in five hundred words. This issue contains the final ten. None of the twenty have been singled out as ‘the best’ or ‘the winner’. It doesn’t matter, as the exercise was intended as a showcase for as-yet-unrecognized talent. Writing something at this length that depends largely upon atmosphere is very difficult. What most of these stories have in common is either an original idea or a new tale on an old one. For me, though, one stood out far above the rest. This was ‘See You Later’ by M.M. DeVoe. It subtly drops the clues that make the narrator mother fear for her children.”
This review was written in 2013 by Pauline Morgan, who can no longer be found on the internet, even after writing several fantasy and sci-fi novels and being a contest judge for many high-visibility and renown genre awards.
The winning piece was supposed to be recorded but never was. The audio-book company that was supposed to record it went out of business.
People vanish from this industry. Businesses close. Magazines that published me are also disappearing (the above-mentioned Black Static is currently working on its final issue, but 80% of the literary journal that have printed my stories, both online and off, have gone under). What do writers do about this? Magazine names are the equivalent of resume listings—I’m guessing that anyone my age probably has listings on their business resumes of closed companies (Bear Stearns, anyone? or at the other end of the spectrum, Kinkos? Borders? Pier 1? Radio Shack? not to mention the millions of startups that were around for a hot minute.)
What are we to do about this evaporating past?
WRITING NEWS:
Maya Lin spoke at Trinity Church Wall Street and I was lucky enough to be there. Her newest installation is an online platform called What is Missing? I made my contribution and so should you. Here’s mine.
Speaking of missing things, I’ve made it easy for you to catch up on the essays I recently published on Medium:
Ode to the First Day of Spring (with avocados)
Music is Extraordinary (but you haven’t thought of it this way)
What it’s Like to Live in NYC (because people keep asking)
So What is the Food of Love, Exactly (about book critics)
Also my little rant “Is Geo Art?” was picked up by Counter Arts Magazine.
Meanwhile, you can still pre-order my “Kafka-femme” story collection, A FLASH OF DARKNESS, or email me to request a review copy if you like to review things…
That’s all.
Is it enough? is it ever enough?
Random Final Thought
A stranger responded to one of my Medium articles with a comment that included a link to his own work. There are a gazillion tools out there that search for a few keywords from one person’s post and create a simple “I loved your post, here’s mine on a similar topic” with a link to generate traffic to their post.
Of course this works! 1) it generates income for the programmer who created the tool 2) it generates comments for the writer who wrote the piece and 3) it generates hits for the writer whose work is being thus bot-recommended.
But also of course, this is a not-nice thing for anyone, since it actually just wastes everyone’s time. I hated being used as a marketing platform for someone else’s blog, and I didn’t click through to the stranger’s piece, nor did I want to ever hear from them again. (Maybe at least the programmer is happily ensconced in a timeshare in Maui?)
Is there any way that humanity can stop chasing dollars and start being genuine again? Or are there simply too many of us now?
Something for you to do:
I recently won a National Endowment for the Arts grant for Pen Parentis (the nonprofit that I founded to help writers stay on creative track after they have kids) but the $10,000 gift requires a match. Since I don’t charge for this newsletter, I wonder if you might consider dropping a few dollars to the campaign? (Gifts to the nonprofit are tax-deductible, so go ahead and be ridiculously generous.)