Introduction
There was something secretive about it.
When I walked into the library and turned right and kept walking, they were there. Had I ever seen a magazine before I got to college? I had. Had I ever seen a literary journal? I had not. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who left high school a year early, not because I was some whiz kid, but because of the unremarkable and simple reason that I hated being there. So I was glad a college accepted me. But those first weeks on campus, I was certain that every person I passed by on the tree-lined quad was much smarter than I was, knew much more about everything. Even my class in music intimidated me. The professor was unsmiling. Students raised their hands. They had things to say about Mozart. I kept my head down. When I went into the library, I kept my head down because the place was dotted with confident-looking students, reading in the chairs that overlooked the quad, or sprawled with books in a carrel.
It was on one of those first fraught days that I walked into the library, and immediately turned right so as to get out of sight of anyone who might glance at me and recognize my sense of discomfort. That’s when I saw, attached to a stack and sticking out with quiet authority, a sign that stated the lovely word: periodicals. I would go find The Atlantic, and The New Yorker; their familiarity would comfort me. But I found a whole row of other things. Journals, some thick, others quite thin, lay on a tilting shelf with their faces toward me. Some had colorful covers, some had very simple and unassuming covers. Inside them–the type pressed into the paper, so that even touching them brought a certain thrill–I found story after story, poem after poem. Who knew? I had not known.
That first year in college the discovery of those literary journals seemed like my secret alone. No one seemed to talk about them! And so I didn’t either. But I would slip one from the holder and go over by the window and read with hungry happiness.
There were stories of love. A young woman named Sarah was adored by the narrator. They went hiking together. They were intimate. They split up. But he loved her, and she loved him. Still, they split up. I thought about it back in my dorm room. I was deeply affected, and received from it an odd courage, knowing that my own heartbreak would happen someday, as of course it did. People lived through it. I learned something of that by reading that story. I learned from reading the poems that I was not the only one who inwardly groaned at the way sun fell across the snow; I learned that a parent’s death caused a terrifying silence.
Of course I could have, and probably did, learn these things from the stories and poems read in my various English classes, or from the books I had read before college. But there was something about that array of literary magazines off to the right in the library that seemed to reach inside me the most. Over the next months and the following years, I learned to recognize the names of some of the writers and poets as they published in one place and then another, and they felt like my friends, even though I had never met them. Abundance is the word I think of now. Such an abundance of life: the tiny and the huge-all there. Waiting.
