"The Pink Poodle" began as a real story which I related to my friend, Charles Martin, one summer's day in New York City. We had met for lunch at a small dark bar in the West Village and, being poets, had a long, peripatetic conversation about words and literature and sex: a poet's three favorite subjects.

Being a man of letters, Charles told me an interesting literary story; and, being a woman of flesh, I told him an interesting personal one.

Charles, at the time, was working on his translation of Catullus (The Poems of Catullus, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990). In one of the poems, he had come across an interesting quandary: all former translators of the work had misread one of the letters in one of the words, and thus assigned various incorrect translations to it. After much research, Charles felt certain he had, at last, unraveled the mystery. This was really quite exciting, at least for poets. Perhaps scientists feel the same way when they discover the answer to some scientific enigma which eluded their predecessors. Also, it opened up paths to ideas--most prominent among them, ideas about reality and particularly the minutiae which shape reality. Those minutiae are at once irrelevant and vastly significant: they may have no meaning to anyone but the person engaged with them; yet, reality itself is a tapestry of minutiae.

We pondered the ontological implications for a while and then, drunk on our conversation, I drifted onto my own tale of minutiae. I told Charles the rather incredible history of the beginning of my life in cyberspace and the end of my second marriage.

I began the giddy monologue at the bar and continued it as we walked slowly along Hudson Street's wide sidewalks. I was still talking when we sat down for a cup of coffee at my kitchen table. When the soliloquy at last was over, I was almost as surprised as Charles at how much I had spoken and how many embarrassing details I had given him; there was a long and dreadful pause as we recovered our sangfroid.

"You should write that down," Charles finally said.

That seemed like a good idea. So I did. Of course, by the time I was done, all of the names and most of the incidents had changed. But that's fiction.

The second story to my story is the story of its publication. In 1990, someone visited the Literary Forum on Compuserve where I regularly participated in the message base, and solicited work for a new magazine. I have, on principle, always felt a certain obligation to encourage new literary magazines. A close friend, poet Judson Jerome, who I had met in LitForum and who was a kind of spiritual leader in the Poetry Section, said he too would contribute something. So he submitted a poem and I submitted "The Pink Poodle" and ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum accepted both works. They ran in ELFs debut issue.

At the time, I was a poetry editor for Boulevard magazine and ELF asked if they could "pick my brain" about the business side of running a small magazine. About a year after listening to me opine on growing a little magazine, they asked me to be an Advisory Editor.

In just under six years, and without university sponsorship, wealthy benefactors, or major funding source, ELF has become one of the most widely-distributed and highest-circulation literary journals in the US. In 1996, it was chosen as a "top mainstream poetry market" by Writer's Digest. If you'd like to know more about the magazine, visit ELF on the Web. Or jump to my Arts Interviews page to read a couple of the interviews with poets that I have done for them.

Although ELF began small, it has always had wonderful friends and fans. Some time after the story appeared, ELFs publisher, Sue Neubauer, emailed me to say that the actress Julie Harris had recently done a benefit at the Hudson Guild Theater in NYC . She read two short stories from ELF to an enthusiastic audience. "The Pink Poodle" was one of the stories. It is eerie to imagine the gifted, theatrical grande dame, Julie Harris, recreating the sordid tale I told Charles over glasses of beer.

The Video Tape

The potato chip bribe is true, too.

Frankly, I was surprised when this story was accepted. Authors are never the best judges of their own writing, still I am sure that I've written much better ones which have been are roundly rejected time and again. Perhaps this simply demonstrates the whimsicality of the publishing business. In her acceptance letter, the editor remarked that the story reminded her of her own family trips to the Catskills when she was a child. Although I might have preferred a comment on the quality of the writing, I suppose that flattering a reader's vanity takes a little skill, after all

There is an interesting side-note. When I received my copy of the anthology in which "The Video Tape" appears, I saw it also had a story by Jud Jerome. By then, Jud had died, fairly suddenly, of lung cancer. I was unaware that he had, in his last months, contributed to this book. It reminded me of our other literary co-habitation, years earlier, in ELF. It was nice to share a publication's pages with my friend one final time.