Surprise! You've Been Published!

Last month, Becky Tuch wrote about anthology and lit mag editors absolutely needing to inform us when they had accepted our work, and it brought back an experience near the beginning of my publishing career.

In the early 1980s I was trying to keep my nerve during a publication drought that had lasted five years after my big debut in Redbook. That short story not only won first prize in my MFA program’s writing contest which was judged by a famous editor. Adding together the prize and what Redbook paid for fiction, I also ended up earning around $7,000 in today’s money—pretty good for a graduate student who wanted a writing career.

I felt I was surely on my way.

Not so. I was going nowhere year after year and was seriously contemplating giving up writing and changing my career path entirely.

Lines from a poem by Joseph Brodsky have often sustained me in bad times and this was one of them: “But, as we know precisely at the moment/when our despair is deepest, fresh winds stir.”

This time, the winds stirred for me in a very weird way. An editor who had published a personal essay of mine published a short story without letting me know. I was a subscriber to his magazine and found out when it arrived in my mailbox.

Now, that wouldn’t have bothered me so much except that it had been accepted elsewhere before I had a chance to let this editor know.

There was one more complication: both editors who liked the story knew each other and the first to accept it called me to say she had seen “her” story in print. She did not sound amused.

I apologized profusely and she ended up being more than kind. She printed the story after a decent interval and so I got paid twice, for a total of something like $1,000 in 2024 dollars.

Then, soon after the surprise publication, I received three copies of a lovely glossy magazine in Ohio with an erotic prose poem I had submitted that riffed off D.H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox.

When I told a good friend about this second unexpected publication coming only weeks after the first one, she laughed. “Lev, you better go to the closest book store, check the literary magazines to see where else you might have been printed without notice!”

Well, I thought about it—I really did.

Lev Raphael has recently published personal essays and short stories in over seventy-five online and print publications. The author of twenty-seven books in many genres, he’s taught creative writing at Michigan State University. MSU’s has library purchased his literary papers. He currently mentors, coaches, and edits writers at https://writewithoutborders.com.

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