On Accidentally Finding Your Way

Just up on the Glimmer Train website, my piece about research and the novel.

I should mention hear that Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown are my favorite editors of any literary magazine, anywhere. Back in 1999, they called a completely unknown writer and made her day by telling her that they would be publishing the short story “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right.” I remember standing in our small one-bedroom sublet on the Upper West Side, talking to Linda, absolutely stunned and jubilant at the news. When you’re starting out as a writer, encouragement can be hard to come by. All those rejections, all those stories that end up in the trash. A phone call by an editor can turn it all around, remind you that there is some hope for your life as a writer.

Glimmer Train, The Tanning Salon, & My Love Life: the first time I ever picked up an issue of Glimmer Train, when I was living in Atlanta, making five dollars an hour as a receptionist at a tanning salon, I read a short story by an Albanian writer named Jiri Kajane, translated by Kevin P. and Bill U’Ren. I loved the story, and I flipped to the back of the magazine to see the Last Pages, which feature personal notes written by contributors, accompanied by an old photograph. There I saw a fetching baby picture of one Kevin P., dressed as Bam Bam from the Flintstones.

A few months later, I moved to Arkansas to pursue an MFA in creative writing. On my first day of orientation, a very handsome fellow from San Francisco walked into the room. Weeks or months later–it all runs together now–I realized that he was the translator of the Albanian story, the one whose baby picture I’d admired while manning the desk at the tanning salon in Atlanta. Long story short, we’ve been together for 15 years, married for 10 of them. So you might say that Glimmer Train did some preliminary matchmaking.

And, to complete the loop, I just launched a new press, Fiction Attic. Our first book is Jiri Kajane’s story collection, Winter in Tirane. Co-translated, of course, by Kevin P. AKA Bam Bam

Here’s to another 20 years of Glimmer Train.

Sidenote: “Down the Shore” ended up being the lead story in my first book, the 2001 collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Later, Linda and Susan published two more of my stories, “The Hero of Queens Boulevard” and “The Boulevard of Heroes.”