Vanity Press

We are not courageous knights, those of us immortalized in Volume III, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1984. We paid good money to be there—many of us unedited. As I recall, I was downing beers in a bar the day I decided I would plant a flag in the literary world. A poem, I reasoned, is a terrible thing to waste—even a bad one like mine.

A certain number of us (looking at you, Mitchell Hegman) paid extra fees to have our photographs included in the volume. A photograph seemed important at the time, even though I cleverly hid behind a facemask in mine.

Funny how I can never recall the page number where I’m featured. Instead, I always resort to using the index. But there I am in 1984—unmarried, drinking too much, scratching out morose bits and pieces on scraps of paper, and hiding behind a facemask.

You’d think I might have paid good money to publish a good poem instead of, well, this.

—Mitchell Hegman