Sallie Tisdale Presentation Introduction by Abe Peck November 24, 1997 Abe Peck Introduction: I was trying to think of a way to get at Sallie's work and the word "bravery" came to mind...when we think of bravery in journalism we think of reporters in Chechnya or Afghanistan and those reporters were certainly brave enough...Her work ...work such as pornography or "We Do Abortions Here" or the weight that women carry...all the right clips from all the right magazines: Harpers' and now a web version of Salon and also more books...but they all come from the same place. The kind of bravery in writing that would help you here at Medill. Sallie Tisdale: I would like to say thank you very much...I am going to read a story that actually relates to the title. I guess its' partially from David...addresses some of this directly...I hope that there's time for questions afterwards. And I also hope to read from one of my...from one of the magazines that nobody ever reads: The Antioch Review which I prodded and punched to be published here more than a lot of places...so since none of you have actually read it...Robert ..., the editor, one of the great editors...from a piece called "Great (sic) Ideas," published last summer. Reading Text begins ---------------------: I meet Steve. He is depressed. "How are you" he asks. "Are you writing?" This is often the first questions we ask each other. "Yes," I answer, and even I am surprised at the exultation in my voice -- the lust. "That's good," says Steve, and his own voice is like the confession, of disease. He isn't writing. He is fifty years old, a good poet, a poet with decades of work behind him. He says he has forgotten how to write, has lost the simplest lessons of construction and sound, and wakes in a rage. When he was gone last summer, he sent me some of his oldest poems to read, and before I could reply, another letter came. "Why haven't you said anything about my poems?" he wrote. "They're my heart." My son's best friend's mother calls me for advice on her memoirs. The bank clerk tells me he's taking a class in the novel. The carpenter I hired to build a closet says shyly that he is writing a children's book. My neighbor says, wistfully, "It seems like everyone wants to be a writer but me." I wish I were a painter. I haven't the slightest talent for line or color, so I dream of painting. I imagine the room I would have: a big, empty studio, with light falling on an empty canvas, tilted and ready. I would work on the grand scale, with big ideas and splashes of surprising color. I would be organized and deliberate and keep everything clean. Instead, I work in a collection of debris -- most of it invisible, all of it mine. Sometimes I'm happy in my study, and then I'm very happy. Happy as dogs and babies are happy -- stupidly content. My cat watches a bird on a branch above his head; "bird," his body sings, "bird bird bird." Sometimes I write like that, staccato words forming on the page like the twitching eyelids of REM sleep, the sign of new dreams. I wake up and there they are, hinting of lost wisdom, and I don't know how they got there and I don't know how to make it happen again. They are someone else's words. I climb slowly back up the scaffold of old work, yesterday's good sentences or two. I'm stuck with the chore, the workaday rhythm, like pulling rocks from the soil, a job never done. I run the pen across the page just to make the shape of the letters, massage the knots from a single sentence, then stare at the page until, thank God, the doorbell rings and I can leave. I sweep or look at maps or file letters, and then come back to fluff the story's pillow, make it tea. I want it like me, but we aren't friends yet. Finally, Steve calls. Without saying hello, he asks: "What's the point?" "You're a good writer," I reply. "If only people would stop saying that," he says, and hangs up. So, I hang up, too, and go stare at the page until the debris disappears and the paper turns into canvas, big and empty and clean. One sentence appears and is followed by another; everything is syncopated punctuated high fidelity, and I'm singing "bird" with my whole body, bird bird bird. The glorious surge comes to a halt. For weeks, nothing comes. Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool. I argue loudly with an editor who wants yet another draft of a story I barely remember writing. "Make if more left field," he says, and I haven't the faintest idea what he's talking about. I'm afraid, afraid all the time, afraid and I can't tell anyone: that I did too much at once, put in too much, wore out the gift. Life's big surprise. At first, I don't call Steve. I call another friend, a novelist who's writing for money these days, magazine stuff, anything cool and nonchalant she can find. The raw memoir that makes her cry at the dining table is buried in the drawer. "I'm in deadline hell," she says. "I'm having a breakdown," she says. "Did you know Baudelaire died caffeine poisoning?" she asks. We hang up at the same time and I stare at my desk, and leave the room. Finally, Steve and I have coffee and slices of gooey day-old pie in the middle of the day, surrounded by the other unemployed, the students, the rootless, the old. I cuss at the restaurant and all that surrounds me, distracts me, reminds me. Steve is solicitous, full of advice. The oblivious waitress cleans the carpet, and the vacuum cleaner roars in the narrow room. She runs the hose right beneath our table and I find myself shouting through the noise at Steve, who has just told me he's started writing again. "Don't you dare!" I yell, but he can't hear me. I have to leave town, go teach for six weeks at a giant university where no one know I'm an impostor. It turns out no one, in fact, wants to know me at all. Budgets are tight, jobs threatened; visiting writers are not welcome here. Most of the required writing classes here are taught by computer programs. I pass classrooms cluttered with silent students facing screens and hear only the clacking of keys and the occasional reedy beep when the Macintosh issues praise. I am given half a borrowed office heaped with duty books and xeroxed syllabuses from 1989. The office belongs to Professor Baxter. Professor Baxter teaches "Classics of English Literature," once a week for the ten-week term; three of the nights are spent the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. He shuffles in and out, calls me a different name each time he sees me. He is the only professor who speaks to me. There are no welcoming notes in my box, no handshake from the dean. No map, no roster, no syllabus. The department secretary tells me to stop making so many copies. I move into a blank apartment by a shimmering pool no once uses, the land in all directions flat and fallow and dry. The students are my only hope. I don't know where to begin, exactly; I have clearly been mistaken for someone else. The only writing I've been doing myself is in my journal late at night, brief fits of irritation and quavering Dutch courage. But the students don't know this, and I decide they don't need to know. I talk about what holds us back -- the ungentle voices in our heads, the secrets waiting to trip us up. You must have no morals, I tell them. You must use everything. You must be quiescent, patient, willing. I stride the room, cheerful and firm; they watch me, and take dutiful notes. Most of them are writing majors, and at first all they give me are commonplace essays and short stories about the tribulations of earnest college students. They want to know how to get published, and how I grade. What are you afraid of? I ask one day. After a silence, a young woman says, "Sentimentality." And another says , "Being thought young." Mariano, my oldest student, almost middle-aged, names anger and Catholicism, not necessarily in that order. Anna, a pale young woman with short blond hair who wears men's neckties, tells us wearily that her father is a well-known writer. When she was raped he wrote a poem about it. She writes about cooking. A tall boy in the campus uniform of shorts and tank top and baseball cap comes in for office hours. Like many of the students, he wants me to tell him what to do, what to write, who to be. Their days are filled with fords of choice, little wavelets in a surging sea, running forward much too fast. "I don't think I want to be a writer because I don't want to think too much," he says. "I want to stay normal." I have then do timed exercises, and write about each other, spy on strangers, invent sex scenes, violent scenes, stories about things they don't believe in . Phoenix wears very short shorts and stretches out her long thing legs covered with thick, feathery, golden hair. She is thoughtlessly athletic, and wears a Dallas Cowboys cap squashed down on her long blond hair. Her scenes of southern California girlhood are devastating and sad. "Last term I was, like, I'm going to be a writer because it was all I was doing all the time," she tells the class. "But now I'm, like, there's a lot of stuff out there, and I'm not ready to settle down." She draws stick figures on her stories, petroglyphs bending, running, jumping high. I make them write letters to their writer's block, draw pictures of it. Lori makes a cartoon of herself whacking her children and husband on their heads with a book titled "Me." One boy draws a monster with gleaming red eyes. Carol, alone in a corner, spends an hour covering a page in black crayon and then writes across it in red ink: "I will be judged and found wanting, and jettisoned from the circle of warmth." Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class. After a few weeks I realize I'm half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her talent. She's not a writer, she tells me one day. She's a painter. She likes big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only "for fun." Her wild stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessing of not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students. the rule-bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention. Over the weeks, the stories get better and better, softer, unpredictable, surprising. Anna stops being polite. Mariano gets mad. Phoenix throws her gorgeous legs across the table, and writes a story about her mother's affair. One of the handsome fraternity boys reads a masturbatory fantasy involving corn on the cob and the students applaud and cheer. I being to wonder if I'll be fired, but the fact is no one but my students and I care what we do or say. No one ever asks, no one ever comes to see what happens between us here. But I realize that what happens is enough for me. Outside class, I'm God's own forgotten gimcrack, sitting alone by the sparkling pool. The story in front of me is as light as the wind, it means nothing, it flies away from my hands. I'm fighting panic, the fear of having nothing to say, praying, Please, and lie all night with nothing but the steady tick of the clock and the murmuring seashell roar of my ear against the pillow. All I want to convey is what happens to ordinary things, the journey of grime and wonder through the world, that's all. And I can't. At the end of the term, so soon, I leave my students and the blank apartment and go home. Steve gives me his manuscript, at last, with an air of grand tragedy. It's badly typed, full of punctuation errors and missing words. He hasn't put his name on it. I read it, and call him up to say: "It's good. It's good, but it's not enough. You need to put more of yourself in there, you need to give us more." If I have one good day, a good hour, even a single good sentence, I turn into a world-beater, the ice queen. Make my day. I lie in bed and imagine waking from a worthless sleep, crawling to the study, starting in the middle of the sentence that ended in exhaustion the night before, typing until the electricity goes off because I forgot to pay the bill. I imagine being a famous narcissist who abandons her children and dies for the holy flaming book, who gets her face on a postage stamp and doesn't live to regret it. Then I fall asleep, and waking up, I don't know how. I've been told what I told Steve: This isn't the story you meant to writ, this isn't how your story really ends, this isn't what you mean to say. I know what a childish grief this is: I don't know how. I know the rage, the rising cry How dare you, I know the terror, I can't , I know that often nothing matters the way this matters. He listens to me and then he says, "It's all I've got, the whispering demons filling the air." I tentatively begin again, circling the desk like a boxer pacing a ring. One night, after two glasses of wine, I get up at midnight to scribble in pencil on a sheet torn out of a yellow legal pad because the pressure is so strong I don't want to take time to sit down and type, the words are big and cockeyed on the page, veering sideways, getting smaller toward the bottom where I run out of space and turn the page on its end to write in the margins. This is the half-heard, faraway roar, the mumble of voices too low to distinguish the words. I suddenly hear language -- the rise and fall of conversation, the fading in and out of whispers and confidences and narration, and oh, this is how it begins, how I start to be allowed to be able to write. This pressure of "words coming," "words coming," like a train in the distance, the first hint of the whistle. The chuffing roar. I'm unsettled and restless, all I know is "words coming" and no idea what the words might be and now it's just a matter of time, getting ready, ready to pounce. Steve isn't writing. We can't have coffee because he won't leave his apartment, won't even answer the phone. The last time we talked he said he was too small for all his big ideas. I had said to him, brutally, It's not enough, and he replied, It's all I've got, and the words bounced off his work, his walls his world. How could I ask him for more? And finally, I start writing by just writing, putting one word after the other on the page, and then all at once I'm writing like a rabbit going to ground, with a sudden leap. I remember Baudelaire, dead of too little time, and Flaubert, who paced his studio weeping at the beauty of his own words. The sky is a dark dark blue, powdered lightly with thin high clouds and the moon is pearly chip thrust into fine blue sand. From that direction I hear no sounds. Shadowed by the world, by the stubborn focus of the words, it seems I can see everything, I can see the lines of gravity holding the moon against the sky, I can see its spinning and resistance and the correct position of the most ordinary things, against the spotlight of our ordinary lives. I call Steve to tell him that all our ideas are big ideas. Everything is too much. He doesn't answer the phone, and I imagine him standing in the center of the room, alone, watching it shiver with every ring. Reading Text ends ---------------------: Sallie Tisdale: Steve was still very proud of this story. He said, "I finally made it to Antioch Review." The other thing that Steve said to me one time that I thought was so smart and neurotic-- we have a mutual friend who wrote to an agent with an idea and the agent had written back and said, "Great. I'd love to work with you on this, I'd love to see the query on this book...." And then our friend refused to respond, he wouldn't write back. And I said, "Oh Steve, I feel so bad..." and Steve said, "Well, I know better. I know better than to write to an agent in the first place." So Steve had basically avoided ...taking any chances by not doing it. Anyway, now you know why I laughed when David showed me the title of this talk. The first part, "The Politics of the Personal," I think goes without saying. I believe the two are so entwined as to be almost inseparable and we like to leave them separate. Personal problems also have political repercussions and vice-versa and what's interesting to me, and what I think comes up a lot in my work, is solutions always are both very political and personal, too. Everything we do is like ripples in a pond...whether they're inside or outside. And the kind of writing I want and hope to do is really about this, about the ambiguities in our lives and our ability to separate whether we like ambiguity or not, the fact that very little is really certain or simple...I think that writing is kind of about trying to find a place where it is personal (?) and simple but in order to get there we have to work our way through...But ...does it really matter, ..well of course it doesn't. Why in the world would writing matter? There are no good stories in the world, there is nobody reading any books anymore. I am going to go through this list of things. Even if people were reading it, it's not particularly important. There are a lot more important things: being kind to each other, raising healthy children, standing up for the weak, in immediate, direct ways, really important things. And writing stories is a much more subtle way of having an impact on the world. Being honest with ourselves, which you have to be to be a good writer, is more important. ...But...that there are more words out there than there have ever been in the world, fewer readers, readers who tend to spend is getting smaller, pretty shockingly small actually. The kind of thing that is being bought by those editors, publishers and by readers tend to be shorter, snappier and lighter weight than it used to be and even ...you see people with these enormous heavy tomes, these great best-sellers, they're following they're not reading, simply picking up what you tell us to pick up. I didn't want to believe it for a long time but I've had enough experience with the world of publishing at this point to really believe that books are ....at this point. A lot of the people who are big dogs in publishing don't read, they don't know books, they don't know writers, they don't know writing. Some of them are quite proud of that fact. I didn't want to believe it and I was quite shocked by some of the things ...the heads of publishing houses said, "This is a profit-margin business." That's why I'm very resistant of ...some of the best writing being published these days is being published on-line. I was very resistant being published on-line myself. There is something so fragmented and ... about it and I have such a kinetic relationship with language, a physical relationship to words as objects. I write by hand a lot of the time and I move a lot when I write and the idea of having my writing appear and disappear and having no physical life is very difficult for me. And the crimes of plagiarism and piracy ...on-line go along with it, it's much worse than in print and yet there is some terrific work being done there. I've tried to create this new voice, fill up with more words and more writing. But there are more books and magazines being made, more people doing it, more words being processed. I was part of this project, it's a great project, everybody should be part of this project: to invent a word for something there is no word for. There's a book called In the Word by Jack... ? And there are a couple of words from this book that I really like. The one of them is mimibok which is a combination for the roots of mimicry and book and it ...looks and feels like a book and is treated like a book but isn't actually a book like a novel adaptations of movies, self-help books, 100 Ways To Make Your Life More Simple -- these are mimiboks to me. So, some coffee table books. A lot of books in this world are what I think of as mimiboks...and the price is being paid: more money for fewer books means less money for fewer people. And I have friends who are really, really good writers and they can't get anything in print now. But you know what the difference is ...and that's where I live and it's pretty scary. Well, does writing really matter? It never really mattered. In a lot of ways, in a lot of cultural sense, it doesn't matter...But writers whose works seem immortal to us now were obscure. ...we all know..James Thurber today. Where is he? Where are...? He started in obscurity, he had his moment in the sun...Does his work matter? It does to me. What ...didn't matter at all. Immortality never mattered anyway so I like that face on the postage stamp, I always get a kick out of whose face is on the postage stamp that I've never heard of. ... But sometimes I've thought that my work matters because it's had effects on other people that mattered But not all my work has had effect on other people. Most of my work has not made a single ripple in the pond. Again, there are so many more ways to have an effective impact on people so why do this? Why waste my time doing this? And all of our greatest efforts fall so far short of our...All of those big ideas are so much bigger than anything we can come near. The...is always there. There is a saying: Every word comes between a devil and a Buddha act. You can't say a word without saying a lie. But you can't speak without being ...at the same time. Sometimes I think "devil act, devil act, devil act"... If anybody can verify this, I'm sure there...and has not ever verified this....You said why should I write? Why should you write? And I could just imagine walking to school ... and saying, "Don't write unless you have to." I was very young when I heard that, a lot younger than now, and I was very unsure of what it meant to be a writer. I was really unsure of what I was capable of doing and had a lot of distractions and I was so discouraged when I saw that. There were times when I didn't think that I had anything to say let alone that I had to write. There were a lot of other things that I wanted to do. There were times when I didn't feel like I had any ideas, when ...I felt like all grasp of language was gone. I had no sense of clarity. And always a lot of other things looked easier to do. So, off and on for years, I really mulled over this question: What does it mean to have to write? And I thought that if I really had to write, I wouldn't even be able to mull it over, I wouldn't even have to think about it, I would just be doing it. I wouldn't be discouraged because there wouldn't be any other options. And so maybe I didn't really have to write and therefore I shouldn't be. I talked today, I talked about the great secret of being exposed as an impostor-- that's part of it. "He's a real writer," "I'm not a real writer, I'm exposed as an impostor here." It takes a lot of forms but the root word "pose" ... So, after these years when I kept wondering, "Do I have to do this?" "What is this for?" "What does this mean?" I kept writing anyway and I went through discouragement and I was encouraged at times, I was ashamed at times and I was proud at times. And went into despair at times and felt that ice cream top-of-the-world feeling at times. And I would, on a pretty regular basis, found the whole system of sending these stories off to some stranger in New York who was going to mess with the title and send me check, really stupid. A really stupid system. Ridiculous. But what can you do? But one day, I realized that I was essentially unemployable in any other way, so I kept writing. At this point, I'm supposed to tell you that I got over all that. Writing my notes, I thought, "Well, okay, this is where I tell them ...and tell them that writing matters, that it illuminates the soul and ..precious.. and sort of. I could sort of say that but ...that I get rejected...I still get my paychecks....It's still a ridiculous system. And still, a lot of the time I think it really doesn't matter at all. At this point, I write because that's what I do. I write because it's like reading to me. I reached a point where I couldn't not write. And I think that I misunderstood all along what ...was pointing at...I write because I can't stop breathing. And if you took away my eyes and you took away my hands, I would write in my head. At that point, it has nothing to do with all this stuff. That's just stuff. Thanks you. (Applause) SQ inaudible: ST: In terms of practical success? There's more work in magazines. You make more money that way. That's where people learn your name. It's a very similar group of people...So, in terms of practical business, pay the rent this way....There are very few magazines that really allow you to exert your voice...Balancing the paycheck with exerting your voice. SQ inaudible: ST: I know very few writers who don't...I think there maybe something very dangerous about being successful that way. I think it's really important to get out of it. Get out of ..that part of your mind and allow...It could be very deadly. Almost as deadly as reading 100 English 101 papers ... I have no qualms about that. SQ: (asks about anger from feminists over her piece on pornography) ST: The feminist movement is a very big thing and I'm perfectly comfortable being inside of it and have many friends and supporters in that part of it. In its simplest form, I like to call it the sex-positive and sex-negative-- there is a really strong movement not within academic feminism but very strongly within the younger feminism, being very pro-sex. We're testing ...come all the way around. ...factor these other feminist women, at the beginning of the book, I dedicated it to a number of women who I really admire who I think they're much more..than I am, scholarly women whose works in the 60s and 70s, really... SQ inaudible: ST: Memoir? SQ inaudible: ST: I read that. SQ: I don't consider myself a confessional writer. That's a very good question. That is one of the questions I encounter everywhere I speak has to do with how far do you go in confabulating, composing or reinventing memories, events. And I'm sure dialogue you don't quite remember or things where ...what really happened. And what goes? What goes? And it's a question among the writers, the non-fiction writers who are out there. Talking and disagreeing at length about how far you should go. ...You put yourself in the box of creative non-fiction and you stay in the box. And I find it a very big and freeing box, you know, there are infinite rooms going through your own experience, including your experience of ..and ..and...There are infinite depths to the rooms in terms of your reaction to things. You don't need to confabulate. The desire is...but to do it, you must come out of the box. SQ inaudible: ST: I try to, I ask the students on the place...I think sometimes if you can't get at it by "Is it true?" ...because of an awful lot of...just to make money or simply because ....construct a story...what's missing in a story...and that's my personal opinion. And I am in the conservative school. But the confessional memoir, the confessional memoir where you tell everybody all of your secrets, doesn't work for me except to the extent that it is about universal experiences. And so much secret-telling loses you, the reader. And too little secret-telling does too. There's this little place where your experience invites me into my experience. But if it's 100 percent your experience than there's no place for me to enter the story. So, I always go back to ...I agree there probably is an anti-woman edge to it...I through a lot of ... SQ inaudible: ST: ...I'm almost mature enough now at 40 that I can say, "...can you tell me what it needs and send it back?" and not cry. But I get hurt. (SQ) It depends on what you want. It entirely depends on what you think is missing...and sometimes an editor's comments will really spark a great revision for you and sometimes they miss it...not everybody is a good reader for you. But when you find a good reader, stick like glue to them and I have a couple of people that I always know are going to read me the way I mean. I have an editor friend who has this blessed ability to know what I'm trying to say and if you ever find someone like that, it's really important. ..and not take the reader along on all my own mental.. so I need someone who will recognize...Because I've never worked with an editor too much...I'll survive....A real painful experience. I've learned how gratifying it is to solve problems but the only way I get there is by really staying there for a while---being really...empty-headed, stupid, foolish. I'm getting more patient with that phase. My husband actually has ...when I'm really bitchy, and really complaining and really stupid-feeling and really unhappy, he's learned to say, "Oh, this is good. You're going to start writing." It's the only thing he can say that won't send me off because it's that little bit of hope. So, I go through a difficult period but when a solution appears, it's the most exciting. It's like tying the knot and untying it. But when I get through that, it's not resistant, no use to force it....This is the problem with deadline writing. Deadline writing can be really hard on your inner voice. You don't get the down time, the regenerating time when you can work on something else. I saw my students generally two weeks between drafts-- it's very rare that you get that luxury in college or in newspapers. But I go through a lot of criticism because I'm not usually good on deadlines. I just finally published a piece last year that took almost 22 years to write. So, I believe in revision. This piece probably had about 30 revisions, complete revisions. And each time, it was sort of getting there but not quite. Perseverance, relaxation. ...it's a technical term, it's a really emotional experience. Caffeine is your friend. ...just a little too much caffeine pushes me... SQ: Do you have any other ideas for exercises? ST: In the third class, that you weren't there for-- this one sentence with fill in the blank. And the sentence says, "I can't write about --------- because ---------." What you do with that exercise, do it in your mind now. The second blank, because I'm afraid it will hurt somebody, I'm stupid, I don't understand it -- -whatever it is, you know. Because my parents are still alive, is a big one. Because I'll never make a living that way. It takes a lot of forms. Because it's boring. Whatever that is actually a theme. It actually helps to have a whole list of the things that a group of people generate on the board, you start realizing that the good stories are all about being unclear, learning, being bored, being ignorant-- those are our themes. We throw...but that's an invitation to the reader: "Come in and see that I've had this experience that you've had." The biggest problem with magazine writing today is that you don't get to meet narrators who grow over the course of the story. You have a lot of very glib, clever, articulate stories by people who are very good at presenting themselves in a good light and who never take you on a journey where a person matures, you learn something. Look at the classic stories, those are the Greek myths, that's...I can't write about-----because ------ Identify that is good, it changes over the time. You could do free-writing for yourself by picking up a book of poetry and opening it at random and dragging the first line off the page and using that as your opening line for a free write. ..I do a lot of drawing. I cannot draw a stick figure so I do a lot of abstract coloring and maps and little daffodils...colors. ...gets you out of focus...is useful....I have a little map game...and all of... SQ inaudible: ST: All for publishing in the Antioch Review....moving forward. I started it when I was 17 or 18. It's about a ...that I loved very much. She was mentally dying. I thought at the time that ...that it was a political allegory. ...it changed- this person got sick, this person died while my relationship to the story changed so I kept re-approaching it from a new point of view. But I kept trying to make it be a political allegory for about 10 years. I was very attached to that idea. So first I had to let that go. ..I believe now that I had mature to this person's death, had to be in this death before I could... Now the fact that the story was first born before the death... is very interesting. It became about the secret of the fact that he was sick and nobody knew. It became about the secret of death and pain ...life and joy. So, all of these images I'd had ..allegory ended up working purely a ...process. The way I finally got that last revision, I .... I had been really pushing a group of students to do really personal work...personal essays, and they'd grown really intimate with each other. They were a really strong group of teens. And I was frustrated and I tried...which was really scary for me. They did a great job. They did a great job. And I was like "Okay." I knew it was them that could do a good job. ...revision doesn't mean, you know, how many words in the story. How long this should be? You don't know...That's why I'm always saying about 20 times a day, "Don't think you know where it's going." It might go somewhere else. You really could be surprised. SQ inaudible: ST: Salon is really quite good. It has excellent writing. It's Salon Magazine.com. It's a ...piece, special issues, cultural issues, criticism. The advantage of the internet is it can be quite big. Really good writers. They have what I think one of the best collections around right now, a section called Mothers Who Think, which I think is an extremely patronizing title and it should be Mothers Who Think Because Nobody Else Does. But they don't. ...But it's women...women writing about children of the world today --- brilliant stuff. There's a magazine called Nerve on-line, which is called a magazine of literate smut, a smut magazine....a lot of criticism, book reviews. Those are the ones I'm really familiar with....you can't get to every issue. Copyright 1997 Sallie Tisdale. All rights reserved.