A to Misc

About twenty-five years ago I moved from Texas to the Bronx and found work at a newspaper in Manhattan. I took the D train every morning to 23rd street, turned down Fifth Avenue, and entered the Scribners Building. My office, five floors up, was a windowless room that had once belonged to Max Perkins, where he had tried to sober up Scott Fitzgerald, calm down Ernest Hemingway, and prune back the ramblings of Thomas Wolfe.

I retyped edited copy, passed it to the assistant editor, who passed it to the editor, who passed it back to me. I then edited it, retyped it again, and sent it on for another round. And another. And another. When more than a year passes between numbers of a quarterly there is really nothing else to do. I doubt if there was any another publication of its type that was as finely polished as The United Synagogue Review—so finely polished, it turns out, as to be almost invisible.

If you can learn to write only by writing, the same thing goes for editing. During my year and a half tenure at the USR I learned that there was always another way to put any particular thoughts into words—not necessarily a better way, but, at least, a different way. And if you didn’t try every possibility, how could you really be sure you had chosen the most effective sentence or built the most successful paragraph?

Between writing notices and editing articles in Max Perkins’s office—I recall one announcement that started as an election of a regional chairman and then was changed into a eulogy—I had plenty of time to write and edit my own stories and essays. Perhaps I learned my lesson too well, for, over the years, when I had to find, or make, time, I spent it on writing, editing and polishing, not marketing, networking, and publishing.

Now publishing means something different than it used to. There is no more Max Perkins to coddle a writer, and big advances for first novels seem to be more fiction than real. So what do I do with my highly-polished jewels?

I’ve done two things. One is to put them here, online, so you may enjoy them. I hope you do.

And for those of you who like real paper in real bindings, you can buy the best of them here.