1.
Next to where our home at Dry Creek now sits are the remains of the old farm. Not much is left of it. The hay barn is gone. The cattle stanchions are gone. The shed and outhouse are gone. The corrugated metal grain silo is gone. The chicken coop is gone. There is a strip of concrete I cling to that runs along the edge of where the great expanse of the hay barn once was. I keep planning a garden path there, a memorial garden of sorts. These losses, and the loss of the old green John Deer combine that sat in the field--they are the only real complaints I have against my stepfather and mother. My parents should have let the old farm stand until it would stand no more. Not bad, I guess, when not keeping up the old farm is the most resentment a child can cling to against his parents. Clearly, I have been blessed. I should just let it go. Perhaps, I have.
Still, when I moved back, I was not willing to lose anymore of the old barnyard than had already been lost. So, when we built our house, I was determined the last farm remnant, the pig shed, would stay. The new road to our home, however, created a problem. It opened up the view into the lean-to shed. We'd always used it as a dry place to stash whatever we didn't know what to do with but didn't want to throw away. Unless one ventured back into the weeded remains of the farm, the mess was dry and out of sight. Now all those piles were in plain view as one circled the barn to approach our new home.
So, one warm day in the early summer, I went out to clean things up. There were old crates and old canning jars, some still filled with rotten fruit. There were boards and tables and tires. I happily went through all of this. However, there were a couple of boxes I dreaded, reminders of old sin. I knew they were there, so it was no surprise. I just didn't want to be confronted by them. They were boxes of envelopes. Submissions. Poems, stories, photographs, even uncashed checks. They were the remnants of Sell-Outs Literary Magazine.
I should have went through them. I now wish I did. With permission, I could include some of the work here, as well as send out some very late apologies to writers and poets who'd put their trust in me and mailed me not only their checks, but their hopes and dreams. Good or bad, what a writer craves most is an audience--someone else to hear the music and nuances the same as what was in his/her head at that moment of creation. I'd made a covenant to read their words, and if I liked what I saw and heard, to do my best to give them that space to let their words take on some little slice of the world and astound the eyes and ears of others.
I had broken that covenant. Twenty-something years later, here were their submissions in a couple of open boxes covered in dust and mice urine in an open-faced lean-to pig shed. I'm sure many of the contributors had just assumed they'd been hooked by some scam, especially the ones whose checks I'd cashed long ago and never sent out a notice of acceptance or rejection.
2.
It wasn't a scam though. George and I had gotten off to a good start, and I intended to go big. If I remember right, the magazine was originally George's idea. After all, he was the one who owned a printing company. He had the means of production. I think for him it was more of a technical challenge. Could he produce a quality magazine in an establishment that was designed primarily for printing labels? George loved to tinker, and he was very good at it. His company could get the same results as other companies with far inferior equipment, which meant at a very competitive cost. The ability to print a magazine on his current equipment opened up new opportunities. Plus, he just loved the challenge.
However, I was the one who really grabbed onto the idea. In my mind, Sell-Outs Literary Magazine would be what I would be doing for the rest of my life. I put my heart and soul into it, put aside my shyness, and went after well-known regional writers, and in the second volume, opened it up to writers nationally. For the third volume, I had my sights set internationally. To go along with our theme of selling-out, we even had t-shirts created. I even dreamed of creating Sell-Outs Literary Soda. It would have the logo and required ingredients and nutrition information on the front label. On the back would be a poem. A pop and a poem.
I don't think I realized this at the time--we were just moving forward intuitively--but I think I was taking my cues from Elton John. Thanks to my brother, I'd been listening to Elton John seriously since I was eight or nine. There are at least two sides to Elton John and Bernie Taupin--the flashy, pop icons and the deep, serious bohemian song writers. The pop image allowed them to hook teens on classical, blues and jazz music, and astonishingly good lyrics, poetry really, that teens wouldn't naturally be drawn too. I know that wasn't the intent. The intent was for Elton John to become big. But the metaphor allowed for the pop image and the artistic integrity to live side-by-side. Yet, I don't think it was a totally crafted thing. Both Elton John and Bernie Taupin loved pop culture, especially TV and movie stars. They also loved jazz, blues and classical music. Reginald Kenneth Dwight easily took on the character of Elton John. Bernie easily immersed himself into the mythical world of the silver screen. Similarly, George and I wanted to expand out the world of serious literature to an audience who wouldn't normally be interested in such works by creating a flashy magazine, that in a sense, was a fictional magazine, which in the myth was one comprised of the work of writer's who'd given up on their ideals and sold out for money. In reality, it was comprised primarily of the work of writers who could only dream of having such an option.
I laugh at it now, thinking back. First off, because we were just undergraduate students with very few writing classes under our belt. Who were we to think we knew what serious literature is in the first place? Who am I now? To be a writer is to live in a world of suspension of belief. Based on your day job, nobody believes you have the talent to make it at all. Everyone plans on writing that novel someday, even if they have never actually read one. They just assume you are the same. Half the time you believe them--that is, when you're not writing. However, when you write, you know you've got what it takes. So, you live a life of fantasy. You drudge your way through the visible, practical life, and then write like the whole world is tuned into what you have to say. You have to do this, or your words would never actually make it to the page. Some, of course, do end up with stardom, or the writer's next best thing--a series of published books. But all serious writers, published or not, hear the greatness in their words and imagine a world where their work matters, or they'd simply give up and die as miserable, loathing creatures who hate the world and everyone in it. It's either dream or die.
Sell-Outs, even with all its very real poems and stories inside, was a fictional world. It was Madonna. What would it be like to be lucky enough as a writer to even get the opportunity to sell-out your ideals for fame and fortune? That was the fiction. What writer gets that choice? Oh so few. So the title was meant to be ironic. An indictment on how little America cares for the arts. But also embracing that. Get over yourself and just write.
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| My own bio as an example of our format. |
It seemed to work. By our second issue, we were receiving three to nine envelopes crammed with submissions each day. It was getting very difficult keep up with all of the reading, especially as I began to drink more and more. Towards the end, we even started pulling in $200 to $300 a month in magazine sales and contest fees, which isn't bad for such a young enterprise by two undergraduate students who didn't have a clue about what they were doing. The time was right, and I think if we'd kept going, it would have lasted. The momentum was there. I just wasn't in a place where I could follow it.
Perhaps, the introduction best captures the mood and tone of the enterprise:
About our format. We've received strong views about it from two camps. The first camp doesn't really have an argument, just a strong enthusiasm that boils down to this: "God it looks great, and I got so interested in the biographies, I had to read the literature too." Of course, since most of our letters come from contributors, writers, men and women of letters, kneelers before Dostoevsky, Eliot and Pound, they're not worded just that way, but there is an open, honest love of the photograph and biography. Who is the person who made this? One contributor was even honest enough to say, "It's the first magazine I've read all the way through." She got even bolder: "Usually I only read my own work."
Isn't there something wrong with this? Shouldn't a literary magazine be about the writing rather than celebrating the writer? The second camp thinks so. Andrei Codrescu could be their spokesperson. In his introduction to Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, Codrescu takes on academics for taking themselves too seriously. He damns American Poetry Review, saying, "every poet, big or small, whether represented by one or twenty poems, has his or her photograph above the poems." Then he hits hard: "All issues have ceased. In their place we have the photograph, the grant and the degree."
Wow! I jumped back. Was Sell-Outs guilty of this? I didn't eat for a day or so. Then it hit me, "Shit, no." Hell, I've never even read American Poetry Review. And I just learned the second generation of gods--Robert Lowell to Robert Bly--a year ago. Now, I was onto Codrescu and his anthology of outsiders, which by the way, is read in the universities. And frankly, it's just another "ism". If anyone is an outsider, it's me. And Lloyd and George too. Lloyd and I come from a family who basically doesn't read. And Popular Mechanics is what fills the bookcase at George's parents' home. I learned to write listening to John Lennon. That's not knocking education. I love it. Eat as many books as I can stomach. But who is taking literature too seriously? In the end Andre Codrescu is A. Poulin Jr. (Contemporary American Poetry). Literature is a sacred thing to be guarded, kept clean.
I think a good poem is a good poem, on fine parchment or on the bathroom wall. If the photos and bios get someone, anyone, to read even one page of work, we've done our job. Poets and writers are the scum of America. We work without pay. Our parents wonder, "Where did we go wrong?" For those of us who don't become professors, Sell-Outs provides a format that says, "Hey, Look Mom, I'm important; I've got my picture in this book; I'm more than just a burger flipper."
In the end, anyone doing anything, has got to take the advise of Frank O'Hara: "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep'". And so, fans and critics alike, here's your copy of Sell-Outs, hot off the press. Stick a fork in it. Turn it over. It's done.
3.
Standing in the pig shed that day staring over two big apple boxes covered in dust and mice urine and busting at the seems with old unopened submissions was like finding the corpse of a loved one in a dream and looking closer and realizing the corpse was me.
It was an admission of failure, of walking away from something so important because at the time I didn't have what it took to carry on. I didn't realize it that day, but I think I do now. I think I felt something similar to how my real dad felt when he looked at us, his kids. I had always thought he felt I didn't live up to his expectations. I realize now that nothing could be further from the truth. No, I was a reminder that he couldn't live up to his expectations. His love for me may have came without expectations, but his love for himself did not. He wasn't disappointed me; he was disappointed in himself. And because he never got over it, he could never fully accept me. I was a dirty apple box filled with uncompleted work covered in rat urine, along with my siblings, a reminder of what he left behind because he wasn't up to doing hard things. I imagine that was especially hard on him as he himself came from a broken home and once promised my mother that his children would never have to go through what he went through.
That day staring down at the remains of Sell-Outs Literary Magazine I was no more courageous than my father. Instead of digging through the pile, and writing an apology, one by one, to all the writers whose work and submission fees disappeared with no explanation, I simply hauled them off to the dump. I was too young to remember it, but the story goes, Dad did the same with us. He hauled us to my grandmother's, his mom's, told a few lies, and then was gone.
I wish I'd been in a place to not give up on my magazine. I loved it, believed in it, as I did my own writing. I couldn't stand any reminder of my defeat. So, first I hauled it to a pig shed and then, finally, to the dump.
If only divorced parents could honestly and successfully communicate one thing to their spouse and kids, there would be so many less broken people in this word: This isn't about you. It's about me. I wasn't strong enough to follow through with what it took to be your husband, your parent. I'm sorry. Please forgive me.
When those words don't come, we just stand there in the wind wondering why we don't have what it takes to follow through with our own dreams, whatever they be.
I forgive you Dad. Let's both move on.
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Back Cover, Sell-Outs Literary Magazine, Vol 2, Issue 1, 1993 |
