I’m about to submit a short story (called Silica Ruby — "magical realism", my former writing teacher describes it as) to Narrative Magazine, an excellent literary magazine that publishes extremely well-written essays, interviews and fictional pieces. (If it’s so high-quality, why am I submitting to it? you ask, with validity. Because you can’t win any chocolates if you don’t step onto the field, I reply.)
As part of my submission, the editors require that I include a "brief biographical note". Not sure what to write, I read the short bios that accompany pieces in the current issue, and have to laugh. They all contain phrases like "has published two novels", "teaches Creative Writing at Columbia", "is working on her third book of short stories"…
… Jane Mackay (my maiden name, which I have decided shall henceforth be my writing name) is a bum masquerading as a highly responsible & respectable office manager/bookkeeper/journalist/photographer, who has enrolled in a graduate journalism course she has no idea how to pay for and writes fiction on a severely sporadic basis. ha ha. Oh, and one of her idols is a brilliant journalist who decimated his brain with drugs and alcohol then, to finish off the job, blew out said brain with a pistol.
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor so writing is the only recourse left for me. — Hunter S. Thompson.
