I have a piece – an excerpt from my memoir – in the summer issue of The American Scholar. It is my first appearance in the quarterly since the last century, and my first appearance in a quarterly in a decade. Recently my work has generally appeared in online publications, and it’s nice to see it on a page, in a physical object that was printed and pasted together, something concrete.
Also, online you’re here one day and gone the next. Same with a newspaper (I was in the Wall Street Journal twice last year). With weeklies, you have seven days of glory – especially if you’re in The New Yorker – and then you’re history. You go by the newsstand and the issue that featured your deathless prose is extinct. Quarterlies, on the other hand, hang around for three months, an entire season. And if the season is summer, with its long, lazy, seemingly endless days, your stay feels longer. It doesn’t necessarily translate into more readers – though people enjoy more free time in summer – but it does allow for the closest thing the world of periodicals has to longevity. From now until the end of August I can drop by any bookstore that carries magazines and see the one that has my words inside (as well as a vintage photo of my wife). Fish are jumpin’, and the quarterly’s there.
