Editor’s Notes

(2020 – 2021. For earlier Notes, visit Eclectica Magazine)

October/November 2021

Simone Biles and Olympic gymnastics. Naomi Osaka and tennis. Representative Anthony Gonzalez and politics. The US military and Afghanistan. My son and taekwondo. They all, like Renee in that song by The Left Banke, walked away. Quit. Or took a break, an extended leave of absence. With these words, my final editor’s note, I join their ranks. This is my last issue as the Nonfiction, Travel, and Miscellany editor for Eclectica Magazine. It’s been a great run, and I want to give a huge shout out and hearty thanks to Tom Dooley for having me aboard.

Nine years ago, in the summer of 2012, when I was younger and childless and dangerously ambitious, I answered Tom’s call for a nonfiction editor. It was the right move at that time in my life, and I threw myself into the work. I accepted many, rejected many more, wrote many an editor’s note, created and ran Eclectica’s blog when it made sense to have one, created and managed Eclectica’s Twitter feed—and did it all with a sense of purpose and faith in the future of my online life.

And then this past summer, still in the pandemic, my father’s death still in my heart, traveling with my family, I realized the truth: I was living two lives. One life, my online life, had existed since the mid-2000s. In this life I was an emerging (always emerging) writer who had published several works of fiction and nonfiction and was always a day, a week, a month, a year away from making it—landing the agent, signing the book deal, seeing that screenplay picked up. In this life, my online life of writing and editing, my family was secondary, an afterthought. Some days I might as well not have had a family.

And then there was my other life, my real life, the life I’ve decided on, that of my wife and sons and teaching and traveling. In this life what I am is what I truly am; no pretending, no fooling, only the right kind of struggling. This summer I saw I could no longer sustain my two lives, and my online life had to go.

I will miss Eclectica. I will miss the Eclectica readers. I will miss the submissions, the gems, the diamonds I helped cut and polish. These past nine years have taught me so much about writing and about myself, knowledge I wish I’d gained ten years before I took the position with Eclectica.

But it’s time to walk away. My priorities have shifted. My sons are older now, headed for a crucial time. I want to be there for them. I don’t want to live online.

And with that I take my leave. I wish you all the best. You have sustained me for so long. This will be a difficult walk, but it will be a walk worth taking.

July/August 2021

Suddenly it’s summer, unlike the last, and I find myself on the road more often than not. As is my habit, I made my selections early, edited and sent in the finalized versions by mid-June. I knew I had a strong septet, confirmed by our choice for this issue’s Spotlight Author. Hearty congratulations go to Andrea Bianchi for her ultimately life-affirming and, what I suspect will be for many, life-altering essay “On Resignation.” In her piece, Ms. Bianchi begins with death but ends with life, and I for one have a new perspective on the details that make up my own short time here on Earth, the events and habits and sensory flashes so many of us rarely bother to notice, let alone write down. By the end of “On Resignation” I was greatly moved; I trust you will be, too.

This wouldn’t be Eclectica if, in addition to an essay on resigning oneself to the inevitability of one’s own passing, the nonfiction section didn’t include musings on the threat of a workplace mass shooting (“To Live and Die in LA” by Guinotte Wise), an account of early- to mid-70s loafing in Southern California while waiting to punch a ticket to the political big-time in DC (“One Year After the Break-in” by Anthony Mohr), the prescient expression that Nature calls to us even as we call to it—and it’s trying to tell us something urgent (“Auspices” by Evan Silver); a brief pointed memory of the past that connects strongly to a present experience (“Familiar Stranger” by Sydney Lea), and a piece that encompasses fable, academia, gender and pronouns (“Trans Origin Story of the Jackelope” by Margaret Speer). For the finishing quirk, in the travel section Susan Hatters Friedman cleverly recounts the raising of her children into worldly adults through a list (“Get Your Kids to Leave the Country in Under 50 Easy Steps”) that ends with a blessing, a yearning. To call or not to call. To pick up or not to pick up. We have no time for that now. We think we’ve moved on. We’re on the road and may not be home for some time.

April/May 2021

Of all the board books I used to read to my sons when they were young, one in particular remains in memory: Richard Scarry’s I Am a Bunny. It’s a book about the seasons, and about change. Richard Scarry’s bunny observes his environment changing from winter to spring to summer to fall and finally to winter again, at which point he curls up in his warm and cozy hovel and waits for spring.

Seven years from the time I first opened that book, I still think about it. I think about all the moments—moments of joy and moments of frustration—I had with my sons, and of how I’d like that time back because of how, like the book, innocent it seemed.

But it only seemed innocent. I was a different person then, much less of a father than I am now, and certain afternoons when my sons returned home from their early days of preschool they would play the Lockdown Game with me. With all three of us in their bedroom, they would ask me to make the place as dark as possible, and they would then “lock” the window and door before telling me to hide with them in the closet, which too would be “locked” for reasons only I fully comprehended.

It’s spring again now, in what should be a different, a transformative time, and yet in many ways we’re stuck. A colleague of mine died of complications brought about by Covid-19 toward the end of March. With the numbers still the numbers, the deaths still the deaths, there of course would be a desire to go back to what once was, and what could have been. Nostalgia is the best friend of so many. Was it ever an innocent time? Is it ever?

Sometimes I feel the need to step aside with my commentary on the pieces I’ve published and let the work speak for itself. This is one of those times. I will offer that reading the five pieces, nonfiction and miscellany, you will be taken forward, you will be taken back, and you may well even be taken aback. Sex, yearning, regret, art as a reflection of life—that creation—and possible destruction, hope—in this singular spring, what could be more appropriate.

January/February 2021

I wasn’t going to write anything this time around, but then January 6th happened, and now I feel compelled to express a few words here:

Why write? Why create? Why submit one’s work for publication when the chances of rejection are so real and, for a great many, painful, if even just a little so? For a long time I used to submit my writing consistently. Over time I came to the decision that enough was enough, I had done enough. I used to often write to myself the words, “Never give up.” Yet I felt little shame when I went cold turkey.

Despite my past, I look to the future as an editor, and I commend those who continue to submit. I know it’s not easy. But I also know now why we write, why we create. The answer is to push back on and combat the alternative, the antithesis of creation: destruction, chaos, lies and distortions, and the cult of personality so many have embraced through fear stemming from a lack of critical thinking and an inability or unwillingness to create. It’s easier to break a window than it is to write an essay. It’s easier to taunt, to heckle, to throw insults and fists, than it is to use words in a way that will ensure those words last. It’s easier to be the bully and the opportunist than it is to be doing the hard work of bringing truth, any kind of truth, to light.

In the last two months of 2020, I became a true News Junky. One of my few reprieves from the insanity and the inanity of it all were the submissions I read for Eclectica. Many pieces had something to offer, but the five that made the cut did what the best nonfiction does: take me out of the world I’m inhabiting and place me in the world of another for a time. I entered the world of Marianna Marlowe, who writes of her mother, a border crossing, being caught between two countries, and an apology of sorts in “The Raffle Prize Winner.” Joe Bardin (“Netflix Jew”) is back to draw us into his world of binge-watching, Judaism, Israel, and immortalism—and the connections therein. A special citation goes to Alison Iglehart, whose memoir of her time at Austen Riggs in late 1974 and early 1975, “The Experience of Absence,” is the longest piece I’ve ever accepted. Iglehart’s work is notable for its dialogue, much of which is unexpected, unusual, even haunting. In the end, the origins of Iglehart’s problems may remain obscure, but perhaps that’s the point. To me this piece, though set in the mid-1970s, speaks much to our time now. The struggle to connect, the rush to judgment, the mistrust of those who might be of assistance, the breakdown of verbal communication, the absence of an explanation for why one feels the way one feels and does what one does—it’s possible “The Experience of Absence” serves as a kind of metaphor for early 2021 when, just as in 1974, there was a changeover in a presidential administration, and the country’s psyche was fragile, volatile.

Finishing off the five, we have David Raney returning with another sharp essay, this one concerning identity (“No Thyself”), and my nominee for Spotlight Author, Wade Bell (“Father and Son”), a northerly neighbor who provides timely perspective (and introspection) on my country while bringing to mind my own father—and what possible words the two of us have left to exchange, beyond.

In this new year, this new decade, as an administration of hate gives way to an administration with at least the potential for healing, I urge you to keep writing. Keep sending out your work. Keep fighting. Don’t give up. Never give up.

October/November 2020

Yesterday I attended my father’s service; it is to his memory that I dedicate the nonfiction and travel sections of this issue.

When I accepted “Death and Distance” by Spotlight Author Georgia San Li in early September, I was unaware of just how much her piece reflected not just countless lives but my and my father’s as well. For though we lived close by, distance separated us, and after 15 years of his body deteriorating, death was the inevitable outcome for my father this year. He didn’t make it, as so many have not. Ms. Li captures such a profound sense of her own loss in but a thousand words; her voice speaks for the nation, for the world, for all of us.

On the lighter side, David Brabec paints a story of a father and son at school, when it was much safer to be on the premises (“Picasso”), and the blessedly prolific Kat Meads (“Mary McCarthy Performs Mary McCarthy”) returns with an essay my father, who preferred to read about the lives of others, would have enjoyed.

In the travel section, Hantian Zhang accompanies his father and mother to the village in China where his mother lived and worked under Mao’s communist regime. Zhang’s final sentence is a question—and an appropriate one: how well do we know our parents? How well did I know my father? One of his favorite quotes was an Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter I found within me an invincible summer.” The year 2020 proved to be my father’s winter, but in his final days he found the invincible summer that had always been within him. May each of us find such a summer, someday.

July/August 2020

This summer marks my eighth year with Eclectica Magazine. In all those years I never received so many submissions in the nonfiction category as I did in these past four months. Understandably, with a global pandemic in full swing, a reckoning on race in the US that’s long overdue, and a presidential election that could very well—and it does not seem hyperbolic writing this—determine the fate of a nation, if not the world, a lot of people have a lot on their minds. Understandably, a lot of people have a lot to say.

I was grateful to read so many strong submissions. Several of the pieces that ultimately didn’t make the cut were close contenders. Some pieces I returned to more than once, and, as is the case with many editors, the feel and fit of a piece were the ultimate factors in my decision.

Feel and fit. While COVID-19 is in the news every day, nearly all the pieces that dealt directly with the virus didn’t feel right; they didn’t fit. The one exception—the only essay I selected that mentions the pandemic—comes courtesy of former Spotlight Author Peter Bridges. What sets “A Memoir of Picking and Planting” apart from the other coronavirus-related essays I read is that in it the virus serves as the catalyst for a host of the author’s memories from childhood through late adulthood. The coronavirus is only tangential to Mr. Bridges’s essay, and he continues to hold our attention with his nimble style and intimate voice. His writing serves as a valuable historical document in the making.

Scudder Parker, who until now has published only poetry in the pages of Eclectica, returns this time with reminiscences of a pair of cousins and their connections when he was a minister in Vermont (“The Abbots Lawrence”). It’s nonfiction focused very much on the subjects rather than the author himself, and for that generosity and vision Mr. Parker is to be commended.

I’d be remiss if I were not to give a nod each to Andrew Bertaina (Unrequited Love: How Before Sunrise Shaped My Love Life”) and Alexander Blum (“All the Most Beautiful Girls are in Sikkim”), two authors whose work spoke to me on a personal level. Mr. Blum’s piece, to be found in the travel section, concludes with some of the most prescient, haunting words I’ve read in a good while. To overlook their truth is to shy away from a dangerous symptom that is becoming more common among men.

The above are all great reads, but taken as a whole, this issue emphasizes the women authors of Eclectica. I have made it a point over the years to remain as apolitical as possible; I could no longer maintain that stance for this latest issue, however, given the pair of exceptional pieces submitted by two young women in their early 20s. Reading for the first time “Letter to a Friend” by my nominee for Spotlight Author, Kassidy McIntosh, I was struck by the passion, the intensity, and the urgency of this young woman’s writing. Reminiscent of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, “Letter to a Friend” is literature that demands to be read now. It’s a piece whose author does the absolute best thing a writer can do: just write one’s heart out.

So too does Hannah-Marie Nelson (“In Defense of Democrats and Middle School Girls”) take on the current socio-political climate—in this case addressing our present commander in chief and the enduring trauma inflicted on those assaulted by letting “boys be boys.” Ms. Nelson is equally honest with herself in these matters. I sincerely hope to read more work by young writers like Ms. McIntosh and Ms. Nelson in the future.

Rounding out this issue we have former Spotlight Author Alice Lowe (“My Hair, Myself”) and Mary Zelinka (“In My Skin”), both of whom narrate fragmented personal histories through descriptions focusing on certain areas of their bodies. We have Susan St. Aubin (“To Tell or Not to Tell”) dealing with the truth of her memories of her family versus the embellishments of her aspiring author mother—and in the process raises a crucial question for all writers: how much should an author give away about her or his own family to the public for the sake of art, keeping in mind that those revelations will likely outlive the author and be left for the surviving family members to pick up like shattered bits of glass long after the author who made such a fateful decision has passed?

We have a brief but revealing memoir of an ex-partner from Carroll Susco (“My First Fiance”), and, finally, we have a gonzo piece by Juliana Staveley-O’Carroll (“Yelps from the Brink”). Eclectica wouldn’t be Eclectica if writers like Ms. Staveley-O’Carroll didn’t take risks with their work and produce the eclectic, the zany, the good.

Aside from these 11 pieces of nonfiction, I leave you with this, for now: Wherever you are, however you feel, I hope you are still reading, I hope your mind is still sharp and your mood still up and your body still strong. And if some—or all—of these things are no longer possible or true, at least know that you meant something to me, for the little time in this life you gave me, the words, the feelings, the memories.

January/February 2020

As an editor deciding on what to publish, I’m taken with the unfamiliar, but I’d be lying if I didn’t also write here that I appreciate the familiar as well. For me, Kafka is familiar, and it was my good fortune to accept two essays for this issue that deal with Kafka in different ways—one more directly than the other. In “After Kafka in Berlin,” Elana Wolff spends an inordinate amount of time at the second coming of a Berlin hotel Kafka frequented while courting his muse and producing early masterpieces. The level of detail in Wolff’s essay is impressive; her research presents Kafka as more than a literary figure. Through her words as well as his, Kakfa is rendered human, a lover negotiating his desires for his work alongside those of his woman. Taking a briefer but no less important role is the Kafka in “Those People,” the essay by my nominee for this issue’s Spotlight Author, David Raney. In his piece Raney examines the concept of contagion and how it’s expressed through language—and how that language of disease and fear can in turn be used against certain “other,” undesirable groups. With the US presidential election now months away and the possibility of war with Iran quite real, Raney’s essay strikes a nerve.

Continuing on the European front, we have another infectiously delightful essay by Peter Bridges (“Diplomacy, with Kids”), and to finish up the nonfiction section for winter ’20, we have two powerful pieces that defy easy classification: “Legion” by Jessica Ripka and “Bad Bells” by Margaret Donovan Bauer. Hindsight in 2020 begins and ends with the body, the self, the leaving, the loathing, the letting go—and you can read it all here in the pages of Eclectica.