Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

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

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