You Don't Know How Good This Feels: Introduction

This issue of
Ploughshares engages in an old ritual, an occasion that can be confusing to anyone not close to literary careers: literary discovery. What? An issue about discoveries? Columbus? An issue of stories and poems in which someone has to discover something? One of those party-game types of thing?

Well, no. This is an issue that looks at new or emerging talent, fiction writers and poets defined as those who have not yet published a nationally distributed book in their genre.
Ploughshares tried to invigorate the process by appointing as joint editors a fiction writer and a poet who may both, more or less fairly, be claimed as
Ploughshares discoveries themselves. And then, for the fiction, I tilted the odds somewhat further by closing the door to names known or should-be-known, and concentrated on what was left.

We will get to the results of this effort in a moment or two. Lest anyone lose heart and begin to wonder why he or she should read a literary magazine filled with novices, let me say that there is no lowering of standards implied. In my editorial opinion, the work in this issue demonstrates that clearly enough. I offer, as private proof of the earnestness of this statement, the fact that every one of the stories in this magazine is a better, stronger, and more interesting piece of fiction than some that I have published in other places, with or without benefit of discovery.

Given the strength of the work, one might well ask why any of it, or any of the authors, needed promotion in this fashion. Would they not have been found out by the literary establishment by more conventional routes? Of course they would, and will, as they, like the rest of us, trudge upward on our writing careers, step by step, an infinite number of steps, staircases that sometimes lead somewhere but just as often go nowhere, or worse, send one back to the beginning. There is no career path for writers of literature, no orderly succession through the minor leagues -- as some people call the quarterlies -- and then, at last, into the Show. A literary career is a Byzantine palace or a Minoan labyrinth, Escher illusion.

So the point of a discovery issue of
Ploughshares is not to accomplish something that wouldn't happen otherwise, but to do it differently. The question remains: Why? The answer, not surprisingly, depends upon the constituency, of which there are three:
Ploughshares itself, the readers, and the authors.

For
Ploughshares, the answer is routed deep in self-interest. Discovering writers is good business. From
Ploughshares' point of view, the discovery occurs not when the guest editor makes his or her selections, and not when the issue is published and read, but months and years later when a few of the writers finish with aspiring and begin to be noticed. Everyone plays this game with new talent: magazines, former teachers, publishers, agents, book blurbers, book reviewers, readers. Ideally, one tries to snag a writer just as momentum is beginning to build, give a little shove, and then jump on for the ride. There is an element of timeliness to this. Discover someone too early, and by the time the promise begins to fulfilled, everyone -- including the magazine -- has forgotten; come on board too late, and the discovery claim starts to sound rather hollow and undignified, if not dishonest.

Fortunately, success in this venture depends on chance and none of it can be manipulated, as hard as some may try. Speaking for
Ploughshares in this instance, I would make it clear that honest practitioners of literary discovery operate from the work outwards, looking for the distinctive voice, a promising mother lode of unusual material, or -- quite a bit more rare -- a natural gift for storytelling. One makes the selections, and then waits patiently to see what happens.

I included readers in my list of those who play the discovery game out of self-interest, and I don't fault them for it. It's nice to be able to say you knew him or her, when. But it seems to me that there is a good deal more to it. Investigating new talent offers an entry into a quite distinct culture, which is to say, the tens of thousands of men and women across the country who have -- God help them -- been bitten by the bug and are trying to write literature for publication. Through the discovery game, readers travel to kitchen tables, to early-morning desks, to stolen lunch hours, to summer writers' workshops and to suburban weekly writers' groups, to the places and artifacts and lexicon of a quest that often has not a chance in hell of being rewarded.

There's nothing exclusive about this culture; we're talking not about cozying up with celebrities, but rather, associating with people who, to the outside world, may appear to be utter flops. For the reader (and here, of course, I'm talking about those readers -- the few -- who are not also writers), there is little to be gained. Nothing except a kind of spiritual food. Nothing except writing that, transformed through the mysteries of literary faith, speaks less as a single author's work and more as the sum of
all aspiring writers. When a reader picks up a book by an author known to him or recommended through the usual means, he picks up an individual. The reader picks up this issue and sees about forty names, in all likelihood brand-new, and reads literature in its purest form, literature that is written almost anonymously or, collectively, as an offering into the silence.

Moving finally to the authors included here, we come upon the constituency that, ironically, is least involved and perhaps even the least interested in the discovery game. I cannot speak for them all, and would not want to substitute my own feelings for theirs, but I would suggest that none of them look upon this occasion as a career break. We've already looked at the notion of career; discovery, if it truly comes, remains out of their hands. It might happen (as it did for me) that an agent or editor likes what he or she sees here and drops the author a note. But none of these writers, informed of their inclusion by telephone or by mail, exclaimed that the way was now clear to
The New Yorker. One of them, indeed, has already appeared in that distinguished magazine (albeit as a poet) and several of the writers I selected have published work in fine quarterlies.

Instead, in these phone calls and letters, they spoke to me of gratitude and of a moment's joy. They spoke for themselves, and for everyone. They wrote of "a thrill that I have already shared with many of my friends and family members." They said, "I feel as if I've won the lottery," and "I'm looking forward to buying about a hundred copies."

They also wrote of "four years of publishing desolation." They admitted, "The timing is right -- this week my teaching contract ran out, tomorrow I sign up for unemployment." And they observed, "I worry about money more than I worry about writing because worrying about money is less frightening."

And they said, finally, in what sounded on the phone like near tears from a person with a very big heart, "You don't know how good this feels."

Well, I remember how good it felt for me, when DeWitt Henry called to tell me George Garrett had selected my story for his
Ploughshares Fiction Discoveries issue. I remember how grateful I felt that someone out there was listening. This, finally, is what this issue means for these new writers. A moment when it all comes together. You can bank on that moment, you can revisit again and again when you are once again struggling up -- or down: who knows? -- those staircases. It can sustain you for many more months, maybe even save you.

As for the individual works included here, we will let them speak for themselves. Looked at as a whole, however, this editor was thrilled to discover the range of tone and form that he had selected. I had assumed, in anticipation, that I would be attracted to a narrower band. The fact is, powerful writing announces itself with enough force to bust through a thousand biases. On the basis of the work selected and the approximately 150 other manuscripts I read (screened for me by the
Ploughshares staff, who consider thousands of submissions for each issue), I am also thrilled to report that those who declaim on the homogeneity of American fiction, of the stultifying effect of the M.F.A. assembly line, are fools. If they are bored by their reading, they have only themselves to blame.

So, with gratitude to everyone involved in this enterprise, I move along to my own staircases. But I take away something unexpected; I might even call it a discovery. The voice on the phone said I didn't know how good it felt to get the news, and perhaps, in terms of her own private experience, a rotten week or a fight with a teenaged daughter maybe, I
didn't know how good it felt to receive the call. But I know now how good it feels to make the call.