A couple of years ago, I began receiving Tiny Lights, a publication out of Northern California that is dedicated to the personal essay.  I was struck by the caliber of the essays in each issue and contacted the publisher of the journal to find out more about her publishing vision and dedication to the genre.  She was happy to hear from a fellow advocate of the intra- and interpersonal value of this literary form.  Here are her thoughts on essay writing as well as the story of starting a publication for the genre.

The thoughts of an editor are valuable to those who submit work for publication and wonder about what happens on the receiving end of the process.  For those who have yet to submit their work for consideration, reading what Susan Bono thinks and considers when reading essays and helping others write them will help make the act of sending in work for publication a little bit easier.

How Tiny Lights Began

The idea for Tiny Lights came to me at a time when I needed to make one of the biggest creative leaps of my life, though I didn’t see it that way then. It was 1994 and I’d been home with kids for nearly ten years. I was about to turn 40.  I was taking my first personal essay class at nearby Sonoma State from Gerald Haslam, a prolific writer whose productivity is coupled with a total lack of pretension.  When I’d majored in English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State in the 70s, there were no courses offered in Creative Non-fiction. As far as I could tell, courses on essay writing emphasized the expository variety, so I managed to steer clear of them.

At the urging of my friend, Carrie, who sensed my growing dissatisfaction with life, I found myself back in college after almost 20 years. One afternoon, she brought me a course catalog and started singing the praises of Professor Haslam, and suddenly I wanted to study with him.  I let myself get giddy with the sudden freedom that came with leaving my sons with a babysitter two afternoons a week. I could hardly believe I could just show up for a class called “Personal Essay” and be allowed in. This euphoria counteracted the horror of feeling hopelessly out of place, and the pain of being the oldest girl in the room. Fortunately, my crone status served me well. I’m not saying that younger people can’t write personal essay and memoir, but the form requires a maturity many of my classmates had not yet cultivated. Plus, I had my own years of writing and teaching and participating in writing groups to bring to the table.

 I was lucky to have a teacher whose approach engendered my confidence and enthusiasm, the kind of teacher I tried to be during the eight years I had taught high school English. Gerry liked me, encouraged my writing, and listened attentively to feedback I gave other students. Under his nurturing guidance, I reconnected with the desire to teach, but not at the high school level. I didn’t have an advanced degree, nor did I think I was in a good position to pursue one. Although I had enough experience and talent to try my hand at editing, the path to that career didn’t readily present itself. Instead, my longing manifested in a seemingly simple, slightly nutty idea—why not create a writing community by holding a personal essay contest and printing the winners?

I could tell you I jumped at that notion, but I really believe I was led. Because that’s the feeling I’ve had from the moment I gave myself permission to do this thing I knew nothing about. I had no journalism or business background, and I have always had a hard time promoting myself. Looking back at my lack of qualifications, I wonder what possessed me.

But bit by bit, the pieces started falling into place. For some weird reason, I never felt overwhelmed by the Big Picture, which is completely out of character for me. It was almost as if some force kept me concentrating on taking one small step at a time. People and supplies would show up just when I needed them. From the very beginning, the universe seemed willing to offer me some breaks. I still find that my rate of frustration and failure with this project is nothing compared to what I’ve experienced in trying to get my own work published.

At the risk of sounding smug, I attribute the success of Tiny Lights to the purity of my intentions. My work with this magazine has taught me that my greatest talents emerge when I am facilitating good writing through teaching, editing, and publishing. It’s where I’ve seen my biggest return on the investment of my time and energy. I created the magazine as a haven for essay writers, many of whom have been unable to find venues for their work. It has allowed me to establish my editor’s credentials. TL is a good way for new writers to break into the market, I think.

I have remained a very small publication because my focus remains on the ministry of teaching. I see myself as a teacher when I personally acknowledge the efforts of writers who submit material to my annual contests. In preparing manuscripts for publication, I encourage writers to take their work to new levels. My goal is to establish a trusted teacher/student intimacy with those I work with, allowing each of us to learn from one another. I think proof of that is the number of writers who have gone out of their way to thank me for my considerate rejections! Staying modest has also enabled me to slowly learn some business skills at a rate that suits my family-oriented lifestyle. I enjoy being in a position to take all the credit for the quality of this publication (though I’m always looking for someplace to lay the blame!).

As often as I apologize for the magazine’s small size (16 pages) and its “newsletter” format, I personally think it is quite elegant, and I remind myself that its modesty has been its saving grace. By that I mean I have been able to afford to keep it going all these years by keeping costs at a bare minimum. I have never invested more than I could comfortably afford to lose.

I started calling myself Editor-in-Chief as a joke—and as a way of fooling myself into thinking I had a staff to manage. But it’s just me wearing a bunch of different hats. I do just about everything myself—the editing and proofing, the page layout and addressing, the worrying and the schlepping. That might seem crazy to some, but this has allowed me to develop the publication in an utterly personal way. It’s a way to pay myself for my efforts. It has also lulled me into avoiding things like selling advertising, which I hate. This is where I’d like to make changes. I think the magazine is ready to benefit from better business practices.

Tiny Lights now has about 200 paying subscribers (I send it out to about 400 readers) and is self-sufficient. It has stayed at this size for several years because adding more paper would dramatically increase production and postage costs. It currently costs about $600 an issue for a run of 600, not including the $800 in annual prize money. I feel kind of funny going on about the money, but my work with TL has given me such respect for small press publishers. Readers’ support is crucial to the health of the small press community; there’s a reason they pay $10 for a 3-issue subscription.

I’m happy to be discovering ways in which the Tiny Lights website can extend my little empire. I started the magazine as a contest—the participants paid a reading fee, which was intended to cover the prize money. Then I decided to publish a second issue by soliciting writers whose work I admired. This is the pattern that emerged: Summer Contest issue, Fall Invitational. Unfortunately, I have never had much time or room for unsolicited material, and I’ve felt bad about all the good writing that I’ve had to turn down during the contest. I have finally figured out that I can create an online quarterly from some of the wonderful contest entries I get. So, between the hard copy and online venues, I now manage to publish about 25 personal essays a year, which may actually be more than many larger quarterlies do.

I wish that I had the power to facilitate more writers, so the need to grow without getting in over my head continually nags at me. I feel the urge to do more, but I often make things hard for myself. I am not a multi-tasker, nor a delegator. I still lay out each issue myself in Word (though I no longer have to type in every piece by hand, like I did in pre-email and scanner days). I know I should use a program like PageMaker, but I am too intimidated to learn it. I have too much work to comfortably handle on my own, but I have a hard time paying for helping hands. It’s the chicken or the egg thing—How can I make this magazine more financially successful without spending money I don’t have?  Might be time for another leap, and I just don’t know it yet.

What I’ve Learned About the Power and Potential of the Personal Essay

The personal essay is not going to go away. I know that there are some who claim the memoir craze is over, but the personal voice crops up everywhere—“I” is no longer a dirty word in most circles. I think the proliferation of personal stories and articles that use a first person narrator is a result of the increasingly impersonal nature of daily living. We are becoming more isolated in our cars and at our workplaces. We don’t have to interact with humans when we bank or buy gas. We can shop online. We can get movies via pay-per-view. And this makes us lonely for human voices. It’s such a relief to get a sense of a real person behind all the layers of artificiality we have to push through every day. I can’t look at a TV show or magazine without wondering if the images I’m seeing have been doctored—everything seems like a fiction of some sort. And so if a story is purported to be true, well, there is something deeply satisfying, almost medicinal, in that, an antidote for all the fluff and lies in the world

Our stories have the power to touch people’s lives. They are messages that move from one heart to the next. And not to sound sexist, but I think women are particularly suited to this means of expression. History, culture and biology have kept their concerns more intimate and immediate. Women have been trained to entering the Big World through little doors.

What I Look for in the Personal Essay

What drew me to personal essays in the first place—what astounds me still—is the willingness of the writer to stand revealed. Essayists seem even more naked than poets, less likely to take refuge behind some noble emotion. I am always moved when a writer has enough confidence to say to the world, “This is who I am and how I think about things.” This can be someone whose life is even less exciting than mine, and here they are, letting me see their passions, flaws and failings. I love the combination of courage and vulnerability this form demands.

Of course it helps if these brave folks have secrets to confess or obstacles to overcome. I’m not talking about gratuitous drama, but there has to be some tension, which translates into a reason for telling the story. I think there has to be a question the narrator is trying to explore or some feelings being sorted out. I need to feel the writer’s search for understanding, almost as if I am experiencing it with him or her. I agree with Philip Lopate when he says in The Art of the Personal Essay (Anchor Books) that the essay is “a mode of inquiry. “ My favorite definition, though, is Tristine Rainer’s “progression towards personal truth.”(Your Life as Story; J.P. Tarcher, 1998) Nothing is more disappointing to me than really talented writers who write as if they’ve gotten everything figured out. An essay is a voyage of discovery.

It can also help if the narrator turns out to be an exceptionally quirky person. For example, in The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade (Penguin Books), Thomas Lynch chronicles his experiences as a small town undertaker. No one I know can claim as he does in his opening chapter, “Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.” Or there’s poet Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind (Dial Press, 1998), in which a child born with 20/200 vision in only one eye spends much of his life masquerading as a sighted person. Not that a writer can depend on a dramatic situation to carry the story. He or she has to have command of the language, and deep knowledge of the craft of writing. I want to be wowed by vivid writing, such as this from Kussisto: “My eyes dance in a private, rising field of silver threads, teeming greens, roses, and smoke.”

If a writer has both craft and a story to tell, I am thrilled when an essay includes specialized vocabulary. This is not a requirement, but is certainly a bonus. One of my current favorites is a collection of essays called, Reading Water: Lessons from the River by Rebecca Lawton (Capitol Books). Becca, whose work has appeared in Tiny Lights, was one of America’s first white water rafting guides, and her essays bring me into a world I have only dreamed about visiting. Her narratives hook me, but she has also managed to teach me river-specific terms like “thalweg” and “imbricated cobbles.” My understanding of these concepts takes me deeper into her life, and also helps me feel smart. I’ve noticed that writers who are good at this don’t expect you to learn new terms by osmosis. They work the words’ meanings into the text and use them to illuminate the themes in their stories. This is why I love medical essayists, such as Richard Selzer (Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, Harcourt Brace), who will ask me, “What is the size of a pumpernickel, has the shape of Diana’s helmet, and crouches like a thundercloud above its bellymates, turgid with nourishment?” as a way of introducing me to the liver. I don’t particularly love to cook, but am fascinated by the vocabulary of food. In the 2002 Tiny Lights contest issue (Vol. 8, No. 1), I was particularly pleased to feature an essay by pastry chef Melinda Misuraca (“Beer, Butt Pinching and Bavarois: Confessions of a Deviant Pastry Chef”) as well as “The Lightning in my Eyes,” by Jean Hanson, an essay on migraine that includes an historical overview of the affliction. [Click here to see all the contest winners from this issue.]

But in spite of the appeal of those kinds of essays, the real power for me is in the small story. The first personal essays I discovered and loved (without knowing what they were) were Erma Bombeck’s. She wrote with humor and tenderness about laundry and messy kids and other details of daily life in her “At Wit’s End” column that ran in our town’s newspapers during my childhood. I confess that I didn’t really understand Erma’s influence until recently. I had always credited Joan Didion with my initiation into the magic of the small story.

In the fall of 1973, the shock of leaving home for San Francisco State and turning 18 alone in my college dorm room was still numbing me. I remember sitting on my narrow bed, opening Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Dell) and finding the essay, “On Going Home.” It begins, “I am home for my daughter’s first birthday. By ‘home’ I do not mean the house in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my family, is, in the Central Valley of California.” She goes on to talk about the way the people and objects of her childhood continue to exert a pull that is both tragic and sweet. This startlingly intelligent, sometimes painfully sophisticated writer came from Sacramento, about 20 miles from my hometown. And even though I was single and childless and appallingly naive when I read her essay, she was telling a story that felt like my own.

Some of my favorite essays in Tiny Lights have been built around very ordinary topics: braces and softball, middle-aged weight gain, children’s nightmares, a trip to a rural cemetery.  I like this idea:

The mere mention of color, sound, smell, taste, or touch awakens a sense of deep involvement in readers and allows them to step over a threshold and cross a boundary that previously separated reader from writer

— H. Z. Bennett, Write From The Heart

Some Things That Turn Me Off When I See Them In Submissions

I am constantly trumpeting something I heard Kat Meads, author of the essay collection, Born Southern and Restless (Duquesne University Press, 1996) say at the  Mendocino Writer’s Conference: “People aren’t interested in your memories. They’re interested in your conflicts.” I can think of no statement more helpful to writers of memoir and personal essay.

Take a look at the first lines of your favorite essays and memoirs. Most of them set up a conflict immediately. Some examples:

 “’You must not tell anyone’, my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’”
–Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (Vintage)

“I am here against my good judgment.”
–Annie Dillard, “Aces and Eights” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row)

On a glittering August morning in 1979, at the edge of a salt marsh in Kennebunkport, Maine, I made a psychic sick.
–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House (Harper & Row)

Don’t be too neat and tidy with emotions. Ambivalence is a powerful tool for essayists. Exploring our conflicting emotions can help us discover how we really feel, and the energy of that search conveys momentum and a sense of purpose to our readers.

I have just finished reading Cristina Nehring’s article on the state of the essay in the May 2003 Harper’s I am more tolerant than she is of the popularity of the narrative essay. I think Tiny Lights essays have more in common with short stories than they do with essays in ages past whose authors philosophized, like Montaigne, on “how to die well and live well.” I believe personal essay benefits from the techniques of fiction—dialogue, plot, detail, etc. But I love Nehring’s crankiness with writers who are too complacent to use “personal experience as a wedge with which to pry open the door to general insight.” Unless a narrator has a superhuman flair for language or a truly unusual topic to describe, I find it hard to read work that seems to have no point. If the narrator is concentrating on facts instead of on themes, I lose interest. As a writer, always ask yourself, “What does this story mean to me? What do these arrangements of incidents and details symbolize?”

I think most writers are familiar with the notion of “showing not telling,” but I am currently fascinated by the differences between “personal” and “private” in our writing. I first became aware of the distinction after reading an interview with John D’Agata, one of the editors of the Seneca Review and author of Halls of Fame (Graywolf Press). He had said that he thought his essays were more private than personal, and after reading them and thinking about that statement I’ve sort of boiled it down to this: Writing that is too personal seems to reveal more than we need to know about the narrator. These revelations make us feel squirmy, as if we’ve seen something we shouldn’t (which could include the writer’s narcissism). Writing that is too private makes us feel excluded, as if the narrator is addressing an exclusive crowd that does not include us. (Sometimes the writer is the club’s only member.) Most of the writing I see tends to err on the side of being too private—the writer can’t seem to be bothered to explain things, especially when the situation involves a failed love affair. Common and easily correctable omissions include neglecting to establish the characters’ ages or where and when incidents are taking place. It’s important to imagine being read by a stranger several thousand miles away—one who thinks California is all about surfer girls and warm beaches, Texas is full of cow punchers and oil rigs, that all of Iowa is as bland as a soda cracker. It’s your job to set them straight.

How Do I Know a Good Essay When I’ve Found It?

Emily Dickinson said something about a good poem making her feel as if the top of her head were coming off. I just found something by E.L Doctorow that I can vouchsafe as accurate: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining, but the feel of being rained upon.” But I’m more like Emily in that I experience good writing as a physical sensation. I feel as if the writing lifts off the page and becomes a space I enter. It is a warm dark place, filled only with the writer’s voice. The same thing happens when I’m having a great phone conversation—I feel as if my friend and I are meeting in a little room inside the wires. I always forget about this gut reaction until I experience it. So I tend to say about good essays, “I know one when I see one,” when it’s really more like, “I know one when I hear one.”

My Advice to Those Who Wish to Publish

We’ve all read those articles about making the quest for publication one of your priorities, how you can’t win if you don’t enter. This is so true. I know a few writers who are so savvy (and their writing so extraordinary) that they are rarely rejected. They seem to have a sixth sense as to who will want their work. But these people are rare. Most successful writers I know are tireless in their pursuit of publication. And they get rejected frequently. It is simply another step in the writing process for them. (I envy them, by the way, and vow to learn by their example. I am a terrible coward when it comes to sending work out.)

We’ve also heard that it’s good to keep trying particular markets, and there is a method in that seeming madness. There have been writers whose work I have rejected again and again, and each time it gets harder to turn them down. I find myself trying to find places for them, and it isn’t really out of guilt. I know I’m a softie, but I think editors become invested in writers who are known to them and brave and interested enough to keep trying. Gerry Haslam, the professor I mentioned earlier, used to say to his writing students, “I just kept knocking and knocking at those publishers’ doors until they got tired of saying ‘no.’” I used to think he was kidding, but now I know he wasn’t.

And don’t dismiss the idea of online journals. They count as publishing credits, and some of them are becoming quite prestigious. Chris Dodge, who does the “Street Librarian” column in Utne Magazine, contacted me recently. He reviews interesting zines, and his directories list an amazing number of online publications.

There’s also the Small Press Review as well as the biggies like Writer’s Market.

Nothing I can say about dealing with editors will sound new or exciting. Personally, I don’t care if the writer doesn’t call me by name—this seems to be a traditional bugaboo for many editors—and at contest time, writers who send me material not suited for my magazine deserve to lose their entry fee. I am not impressed by long cover letters that list a million obscure publication credits. Please don’t use the cover letter to tell me what your essay’s all about. I do enjoy a brief and personable note that includes the name of the piece(s) and any pertinent info, but you don’t have to exhaust yourself being too creative, at least not in my neck of the woods. Writers who don’t list their names and contact info prominently in logical places put me off. Unless guidelines state otherwise (good to check), ALWAYS put your contact info on the manuscript. Don’t expect the cover letter to stay with your material. One more thing about guidelines, I’m being petty, I know it, but I list mine on my website, so as far as I’m concerned, no one should be requesting hard copy guidelines. Ok, I’ve revealed another prejudice. I think a writer who doesn’t have email is a pain in the butt. I depend on electronic transmission of manuscript text. Those who deal only in hard copy are making more work for their editors. It’s an act of self-sabotage.

Lastly, burn no bridges if you can help it. Never vent your frustrations on an editor by sending them hate mail! You are not going to teach anyone a lesson, and you will be dismissed as a fool and an amateur. I have, on rare occasion, forgiven badly behaved writers, but the older I get, the less inclined I am to tolerate poor sports. I understand that writers are busy and don’t have time to write those thank-you’s they’ve read about in “how-to” articles, even if the editor has given personal feedback. But I’ll tell you, it is wonderfully gratifying to receive the occasional acknowledgment—and in this age of email, it doesn’t take much time. Whenever I get a gracious note from a writer, I know that he or she is looking at the Big Picture and has what it takes to keep going in the face of disappointment. It’s not a bad attitude to cultivate. And just think how happy it would make your mother.