Treasures from the Past

Mining for Gold

One of them is not like the others . . .

This week the Beatles, as it were, released a new song, “Now and Then,” which they recorded 46 years ago but never released. The song is weak lyrically and musically, but the video is brilliant.

Well do I understand the impulse to explore one’s back catalogue to resurrect projects that were never completed! At a certain point in life (at age 50? 60? 75?), we cast an eye back to see if there are any treasures in our past, or on our computers, that might be viable now. Certainly, my writer friends and I are exhuming and examining our unpublished novels and essays to see what might, with revision, be relevant today.

This might seem like a pathetic attempt to coax past failures into blossom, but I am here to tell you that sometimes you succeed! Fishing in the past can be a pleasure when a small source of shame (it never got published!) becomes a big source of pride (it finally did!)

Like most writers, I have many failed projects (unfinished or unpublished), but I also have three examples of how decades later, work I’d abandoned got a new life. So, writers and artists, hang on to everything you produce: you might find a way to use it 20 or 30 years from now. I would guess that Covid-related writing might be especially valuable in the future.

The John Updike Interview

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on John Updike, so it seemed natural for me to suggest to the New York Times Magazine that I interview him for his 40^th birthday. Without making any promises, they agreed I could see him under their aegis. I was 25 and thrilled to meet my idol. I thought our interview went very well. But the piece was rejected (the vote was 3-2) for not being edgy enough—perhaps for not piercing through his bright bumpkin persona. I sometimes considered that I might have launched a career in journalism if that piece had been accepted, but it was not to be.

A few years later, a journalist (alas, I’ve forgotten his name) came to visit me before writing his own profile on Updike, also for the New York Times Magazine (which accepted his article). Upon hearing of this visit many years later, Updike’s biographer,  Adam Begley, also got in touch with me. I sent him the interview, and there are 16 footnotes in his book Updike citing my unpublished article. Because of that, after Updike’s death in 2009, Jack A. De Bellis, who was editing John Updike Remembered, asked if I’d like to contribute to a collection of commemorative essays on the author.

And so at last, 42 years after I had written it, I finally got the piece published!

Big Mother is Watching

About two years ago, I got an email through my website from a stranger. Over the years, he had kept the 1981 copy of Penthouse that contained my satire, “The Embryo Patrol,” which posited a world where Big Mother was watching to make sure pregnancies were carried to term.  He thought I should try to get it published again, because it was newly relevant since Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned. I no longer had a copy of the piece, so he faxed it to me.

I made it half as long as it had been and submitted it to Ms.com, which published it 41 years after it was first published in Penthouse!  I’m guessing that this is the only piece published in both of these publications!

https://msmagazine.com/2022/06/07/embryo-patrol-short-story-overturn-roe-v-wade-history-abortion/

The Sonnet

I occasionally read poetry, but only rarely do I write it. (Birthday jingles don’t count.) However, when I was a very young woman, I wrote a traditional sonnet I thought was pretty good. The rhymes worked, the emotion was strong, and there was even a little wordplay.  But nobody publishes sonnets, I thought, so I never bothered submitting it. Still, when I got a computer, I typed the sonnet into it so I wouldn’t lose or forget it. The file name was “Sonnet.” I never wrote another; I doubt I’ve written a dozen poems in my entire life.

A few years ago, I read about a contest with two categories: traditional sonnet and modern sonnet. So I submitted my old poem. In each category, they offered three prizes and some honorable mentions. I never thought I’d get an honorable mention. I thought the judges would either love my poem or reject it completely. In 2020, it won First Prize for a traditional sonnet in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, fifty years after I had written it.

In case you’re curious . . .

The Senses

If your entire skin was as your tongue

And everything you touched you tasted too

Or if your ears behind your eyelids hung

And you could only hear what was in view

Then you would think two senses were the same

And have no way of knowing you weren’t right

And normal folks would smile but none would blame

Your fusing taste with touch or sound with sight

So I cannot distinguish love from loss

The utter loss of self I always feel

When I start loving, clinging like the moss

To one who makes my mind and body reel

It’s real for me this total integration

I lack the sense to make the separation