Foxes and Editors

I owe a lot to EPOCH. My first published story appeared there in 1963, when I was 21. I’d written it for Jim McConkey’s Cornell undergraduate writing class; he asked if he could submit it for me to the magazine. (Our friendship, which continued for almost 70 years until he died at 98, was interrupted only by my years living overseas.) When I saw my story, “Galina,” in print in EPOCH, I suddenly stepped up onto a plateau—an exhilarating place from which to look out on my limitless future: I was now a writer, my career aspirations indisputable.

Years later, I discovered, when we became friends, that Joyce Carol Oates’s first fiction had been published in EPOCH, too. By now, there must be hundreds or thousands of authors who are as grateful to EPOCH as Joyce and I are.

Jim invited me to become an EPOCH editor, telling me that I was the only undergraduate who had been taken on staff besides Thomas Pynchon, who had graduated the year before I’d entered Cornell as a freshman. His first published story had appeared in EPOCH, too.

So I was a major hot-shot; all I had to do was finish my novel and take another step upwards onto a yet higher level, probably a place called the canon. In fact, it took me another 17 years and 49 rejections to get that first novel published. I have yet to hear the blast of any literary artillery, but that’s all right.

I remember the EPOCH office as a very smokey place. Everyone puffed on cigarettes or pipes, except David Ray, who cursed at everyone else for ruining the air quality.  He was a great encouragement to me, too—a wonderful poet whom I’ve also kept up with for almost 70 years. (He’s still writing, in his 90s, in Arizona). The most dedicated smoker in the office was Baxter Hathaway, the irascible editor-in-chief, who barely tolerated me. I discovered that he barely tolerated anyone on staff, not just me, which made me breathe easier. (I smoked, too, and felt privileged to add to the clouds of stench.) Baxter’s collegial attitude extended to writers of submitted manuscripts.  His highest praise for a story or poem was, “Oh, all right. It’s not too bad, I suppose.”

He tried to impose an iron hand on the editors, but few paid attention to his efforts. All the young professors were writing their own books and did the editing mostly for fun: the office was a clubhouse where you could sit around and read new stuff, make fun of some of it, be happily surprised by some of it. We kept “discovering” tomorrow’s literary lions as we drank coffee and smoked.  Manuscripts in their brown manila envelopes were stacked all over the place: on the venerable big table (still there, I think [editor’s note: still here!]), the shelves, the drawers, under the coffee machine.

I found envelopes that were years old. “Oh, yeah, let’s get those the hell out of here!” Baxter grumped. Someone, I think it was Walter Slatoff (my other writing teacher) said, “But what if the author’s dead by now?” Baxter cracked a 1.2-second grin. “Send it back to the guy’s family,” he said out of the side of his mouth, his cigarette wagging. Baxter assumed that all the writers would be guys; women weren’t supposed to write much that amounted to anything in those days.  The editors were all white males, so what could be the problem? I’m sorry to say that there was no one in the office to say there might be a problem.

One lower shelf was entirely crammed with manila envelopes all with the return address of someone called Alfred Starr Hamilton, from Montclair, NJ. He’d been sending in crazy poems for ten years, I was told, which we’d never published. Since the author never included self-addressed stamped envelopes, we’d never returned any of his manuscripts. For ten years? Actually, it was eleven; I checked the postmarks. All the poems had been carefully typed on onionskin pages, with tiny holes in them where the middles of o’s and d’s and b’s had fallen into the bottom of the envelopes. When you removed the poems, they were always followed by a little sprinkle of snowflake-like confetti.

The poetry was indeed strange, the early ones at least. There were whole poems that consisted of one line repeated over and over a dozen or so times—something like:

I could not spot the fox behind the stone wall.
I could not spot the fox behind the stone wall.
I could not spot the fox behind the stone wall.

And so on down to the bottom of the page. I kind of liked it, though. I liked the sound of spot the fox and by the time I got to the last line, I was deeply invested in both the fox’s wiliness and the viewer’s frustration, but also his optimism about one day spotting the fox. Otherwise why would the hapless poet have sat there for so long looking for the fox, a numinous figure of elusive holy mystery? (I was, remember, an undergraduate.)

Later poems got even better. Not every line was the same. Sometimes there were startling revelations along the way to the bottom of the page, where the lines broke into verses and came to thundering climaxes. You still couldn’t quite tell what the verses meant but you had to applaud their enthusiasm to get wherever it was they got to. I showed the poems to other editors, most of whom cocked their heads at me for a moment and went back to their reading. Baxter dismissed Mr. Starr’s poems with a shrug and a snarl.

But David Ray liked Alfred Starr Hamilton’s work. Then so did Jim, and the other editors came around, flushed with amazement as the manilla envelopes were opened, onion-skin snowflakes were dusted from laps, and verses were read aloud to almost everyone’s great enjoyment.

So we started publishing a few of the poems in every issue. One of the editors paid for the publication of a small book of Alfred Staff Hamilton’s works. Did he understand what Mr. Hamilton’s poems meant any more than I had? Well, some of the editors claimed that they did. Words like “numinous” and “elusive” were tossed around the office. In the end, Baxter was heard to say, “Oh, all right. Meanings aren’t all that important, I suppose.”

I’m the most grateful to EPOCH for being the place where I met a writer and Cornell professor named Alison Lurie. I had been working as a counselor in a local reform school, years out of any literary loops, when I re-joined the staff (with Jim’s encouragement) in 1974, eleven years after I’d left Cornell as a student. I wanted to get back to some kind of creative place in my life.

I’d just broken up with my spouse. Alison, it turned out, was doing the same.  You might say that we noticed each other. We chatted in the hall; I walked her to her car.  She was bright, attractive, funny.  At a meeting where Baxter asked who would volunteer to be the next fiction editor, Alison raised her hand and said she would do it, if someone else became the co-editor to help her with the work. My hand rose in the air as if it were attached by a string to a hydrogen balloon.

She always laughingly denied that she’d been signaling to me to join her as fiction editor. But the incident became the folkloric origin story of our relationship. It did necessitate a great many intense meetings to make decisions about manuscripts. Somehow, we always easily agreed on the ones we liked.

Reader, I married her, and our next 45 years together were the happiest of my life. She died in 2020 at 94. At her memorial service at Cornell, I sang one of the country songs she’d loved the best, Kris Kristofferson’s “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends.” We’d started off reading stories for EPOCH together and found every reason to keep enthusiastically creating our own story as it went along to the very end.

I’ve never written anything else about Alison for publication and doubt I ever will again—but my short story “Skyros” is somewhat based on incidents that took place in Greece, where we gave creative writing workshops to vacationing Brits several years ago. It appears in Volume 70, Number 1 of EPOCH. That’s 60 years after my first publication in the magazine. The story goes on.

After she died, I found the manuscript of a young adult novel, The Cat Agent, which she had written a few years earlier but never published. I remembered liking it, and still did. So now I’ve published it with the small local press I run with several editor friends, Cayuga Lake Books. All profits will go to the Tompkins County Public Library, which Alison and I both supported over the years.