The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before

On this day twenty years ago, because I did not use my Brandeis address for self-addressed stamped envelopes or standard-formatted manuscript submissions, my parents' house in Lexington received my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #26, containing my short story "Shade and Shadow." It was my first published work. The record of what I called at the time submissions and rejections, which I had kept since the summer of 1998, noted the receipt of the small saddle-stapled black-and-white 'zine and a check for $16.75. After the exclamation point was added a still-rare emotional notation: "Deliriously happy."

It was not my first accepted work. I had had two poems accepted by different markets earlier that year; one would see print later in the fall and the other early the next year. It was not my first submission to Not One of Us. I had had two stories rejected previously; one was accepted by another magazine right around the same time and the other took the next three years to find a home. With almost absurdly liminal aptness for its original title of "Thresholds," the story had been written over the weekend of New Year's, but I had to edit it significantly for publication, which was fine because I had never been satisfied with the original ending and couldn't figure out how to fix it until John Benson told me in so many words that the story needed to end more obliquely, at which point I cut the entire last scene and another few hundred words and the revision came in at both an acceptable word count and a pleasingly quieter, more open-ended resolution. I liked it better in its final form. I did not mind changing the title, either; the original had the virtue of unsubtlety, but it had also been something of a placeholder. I appreciate now that my first experience of editing was such a rewarding one. It prepared me nicely for the two rounds of rewrites I had to do on the next story to be accepted.

In hindsight, "Shade and Shadow" looks almost like a calling card for my entire oeuvre: the protagonist summons ghosts with her blood by the sea, where one winter morning she finds the severed head of Orpheus singing in the tide; she takes it home, sustains its voice and memory with her blood and sketches it rather badly, and eventually, inevitably, one night she summons the ghost of Eurydike. Only if the protagonist were canonically queer and Jewish could it have been more obviously mine. (I don't know if she's Jewish. She is totally non-observant, not even yahrzeit candles if so. Romantically-sexually, I believe she is not interested in people. One of the things wrong with the original ending was that it suggested a rapprochement with living in the form of meeting a dude.) The ghosts operate by the laws of the Greek underworld: the spilling of blood calls them and they must drink it to regain themselves even temporarily. I could read classical Greek by then, but I don't believe I would begin reading the Odyssey in the original until the fall when I was living in a different dormitory, North as opposed to East Quad, and used to listen to Eleftheria Arvanitaki while translating hexameters. I had not, as I was occasionally, unavoidably asked, cut myself in adolescence. I had not read Neil Gaiman's Fables & Reflections (1993) or Brief Lives (1994), either, although I got into Sandman more or less promptly afterward. I had dreamed the protagonist's name. Specifically, I had drifted into sleep dreaming of writing a story called "The Ninth or Tenth Incarnation of Cairo Pritchard," which this story was completely not. I worried for years that I had accidentally named her after a real person. As far as I can tell, I hadn't.

Strictly speaking, NOU #26 was the September issue, which I just happened to receive a few days early. Given the event horizon of illness and not actually recovery this August has devolved into, this relevance of this fact is that it gives me another month to organize something commemorative, as I finally decided this summer I wanted to do. I have never done anything to celebrate a writing anniverary before, but twenty years is not inconsequential time. I have been a published writer for slightly more than half my life now. I don't think I expected to live long enough for that to be true. And now I have to go on with it, because the alternative is irony. I wrote someone who has to, after all.

I think it is worth the commemoration. The calling up of ghosts in classical Greek myth and ritual is the nekyia.