SILENT & WIFE RECOGNIZED FOR ZINE AND DIDN'T KNOW IT

Had a pleasant surprise last night. To further our aim of getting someone other than myself to publish the best selling novel, Manning, I'm currently writing, I decided to get myself on the "Directory of Poets" listed by the prestigious Poets & Writers Magazine. To qualify for the list, a poet (or writer) must have earned twelve points. Poets earn 1 point for every recognized anthology or journal their work has appeared in.

The key word is "recognized". I have enough publications (caution—still in process), but the application took hours of entering data and scanning the table of contents of publications not on the web when my work went in. In the process, I had to go to Poets & Writers list of authorized publications each time, and there was our pleasant surprise. Out of curiosity, I looked up the monthly microzine that Mertie and I published and I edited for 6 years from 1995 thru 2000. George & Mertie's Place: rooms with a view was on their list of authorized publications. 

"Of course it is," I happily told myself. It was a fine production with little resources. I created funny cartoons and wrote a comedic "Horroscope" [sic] for it, and we laid out the microzine carefully. Eventually, we were getting work from new, now established, writers and established names too. At first, we paid our writers a pittance. The checks we wrote were little more than symbolic gestures. Eventually we offered a $50 prize (instead of little sums to each) which we named the "Diver Award" (after F. Scott's Dick Diver in Tender Is The Night). 

Finding our microzine on Poets & Writers Magazine was a happy moment. Being pleased as punch, as the archaic saying goes, we want to thank those among you who submitted the microzine to the list and to Poets & Writers for recognizing our work in the list.

F. SCOTT AND THE SILENT BOOMER

F. Scott himself

I see blog readership is down. The holiday weekend? Even I would be bored by the constant drum of "writing steadily, writing steadily, writing steadily" that I'm producing lately on this blog about the novel I call Manning. I think creative writing is harder to sell with a blog than a product like "wedding cakes" or "toilet paper" or the skills of those who want to teach you how to write. I see a comparison between those who used to sell get quick rich schemes and those who are trying to cash in on everybody's secret desire to be poets and writers. Well who can blame them? Only poets aren't the romantic dreamers most people think they are. They just keep writing and writing, and that's all they have to sell...is the product of those long hours of sitting alone over a pine desk that may soon supply material for their coffins. Pity the poor novelist, then, as his ordeal is longer. 

Speaking of novelists, ladies, listen to this bit of fudge from F. Scott Fitzgerald in my favorite novel of his, Tender Is The Night. Dr. Richard Diver is touring WWI trenches with friends and a 17 year old who is enamored of him. Dick waxes philosophical through much of this scene, then he observes, 

"...Rosemary burst into tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick's telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad."

Don't get mad, my friends. Perhaps this is only a situation that a very young girl can put herself into while following after a famous older psychiatrist, but Diver does say "women"? Too much Zelda, do you think?