When I was invited to be on
the editorial board of VIA I was happy to say yes. When I
found out that it didn’t mean I’d have anything to say about what
they published, that all they wanted was lots of names on their
masthead, I didn’t know how to feel. On the one hand, I felt left
out; on the other hand I felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to do
any work. I could just mention in my curriculum that I was on their
editorial board and it would make me look good.
Fred Gardaphe and Anthony
Tamburri and the third founding editor, whose name I can never
remember and who I always thought of as the shadow man because he
never did anything for the magazine that I could see, immediately
began offending me. I think that half the time they were unaware that
they were offending me partly they were oblivious to the ethics of
small press publishing and partly because they were just too arrogant
towards someone as unimportant as I was.
They sent me a copy of each
issue of VIA and so I sent them a copy of each issue of la
bella figura. My little magazine, what you might call a zine,
consisted of ten sheets of letter size paper stapled in the corner
and then folded in half so that some pages were presented in the
common size of a little magazine and some pages were presented in the
common size of a letter. It certainly didn’t measure up to VIA
in regard to visible prestige. VIA was bigger, thicker,
printed on glossy paper, lots of full color illustrations and
full-page, half-page, and quarter-page ads.
I always had the impression
that they were more concerned with power than with literature and it
took a while before I realized that VIA wasn’t a small press
publication; it was an academic publication. It took even longer
before I realized that these three men wanted to be the mafia bosses
of Italian-American literature and didn’t want to be contradicted
by a little lady nobody. They demanded compliance, sniveling ass
kissing, and flattery from everyone around them, which they
apparently got from everyone around them, except me, and which they
thought was respect, and saw no need to show any respect to me and my
crappy little two-bit zine.
I folded la bella figura
to go live in Italy, leaving for my second trip here. My first time
here I was a tourist. The second time I was here, for almost a year
and a half, I was an illegal alien. This time I’ve got citizenship.
They had a special page in
which they claimed to want Italian-Americans to write in about
whatever was on their mind. But nothing ever appeared on that page
except their lament—Why don’t Italian-Americans write?
They said in VIA that
lbf had folded for lack of subscriptions. They never bothered
to ask me why I had folded. I guess they thought that a crappy little
zine couldn’t make it and you had to be a real magazine, bigger,
thicker, printed on glossy paper, lots of full color illustrations
and full-page, half-page, and quarter-page ads. It was their idea of
a sales pitch—subscribe to VIA to keep it from folding.
I wrote and told them that I
folded lbf because I wanted to live in Italy, thinking they
would publish it in VIA on their special page.
When I started lbf, I
bought a copy of The Directory of Poets and Writers, or
whatever it’s called, and I sent flyers to everyone listed who had
an Italian last name. Not only did I get a lot of submissions but I
had 200 subscribers before the first issue came out. This number was
maintained throughout its run and I ended with a mailing list of 800.
This is very successful for a zine of its kind.
I mentioned this when I
wrote to them, also saying that I didn’t think that preventing a
magazine from folding would serve as an incentive for people to
subscribe.
They never printed what I
had sent them for their special page. Instead, they just continued to
say on that page, issue after issue—Why don’t Italian-Americans
write?
When I mentioned this to
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, who, like me, was on their editorial board,
she said that they received lots of things for that page; they just
didn’t want to print them. She also mentioned to me that, at that
time, VIA had only 100 subscribers, something that they never
mentioned when they asked people to buy ads. An ad that reaches only
100 people, at $1,000, is way overpriced.
The policy at VIA was
to print only unpublished work. When I noticed in one issue that they
had included a poem by Maria Gillan which had previously appeared in
lbf, I wrote to Fred Gardaphe. He wrote back in anger, wanting
to know why I hadn’t told him. (Excuse me, Fred, but I just told
you. That’s how you found out and why you’re writing to me now.)
In the small press
community, and I’ll bet in the academic community, it’s the
writer’s responsability to inform, in his cover letter, the editors
of the magazines to which he’s submitting work, whether or not the
work being submitted has already been published. Little magazines
especially, not having too much money and wanting to publish as much
unrecognized stuff as possible, often don’t like to reprint work.
But sometimes this isn’t mentioned in their calls for manuscripts
and the writer is expected to mention it just in case.
Did Fred make up this rule
just for me? Did he mean to ask why I hadn’t told him, before they
had agreed to publish it, that Gillan’s poem had already been
published? Did he even wonder how I would have known that? Did he
actually think that all editors follow their writers around to see
whether they’re sending out work that they had already published in
their magazines?
A normal editor would have
printed, in the next issue, a little notice saying that Gillan’s
poem had been previously published in lbf, with a reminder
that VIA prints only previously unpublished work, and a little
apology for the oversight. But they printed nothing.
Fred Gardaphe doesn’t seem
to know the difference between power (Gillan could do things to help
his career along and I couldn’t. Therefore, she was right and I was
wrong.) and reality.
This was a slap in my face,
one among many. But I didn’t say anything.
Although $1,000 was a lot of
money for me to spend on any one thing, including advertising, I had
a full-page ad put in VIA for my first book of poetry,
Vendetta. It wasn’t as impressive looking as the other ads
but it said what it needed to say. That’s been a big part of my
goal as a writer—not to impress on a superficial level but to say
what needs to be said.
I noticed that they moved
the other ads around, each ad getting a chance to be in a more
visible space, while my ad was always stuck in the back where people
rarely look. I wrote to them and asked whether they could please put
my ad in a more visible space once in a while, as they did with all
the others.
I received a letter from
Anthony Tamburri saying that if I didn’t like where they were
placing my ad they’d be glad to drop my ad and refund my money.
Apparently, he was offended by my gall in requesting the same
treatment that they gave to others who had ads in their magazine. I
thought it was a completely unjustified response and even abnormal.
I was unemployed at the time
and I could find other uses for that money. So I wrote back and said,
okay, drop the ad and refund my money. In any case, I added, that ad
had only sold about two or three copies of the book.
They dropped the ad and
refunded my money. Tamburri sent me what I thought was a strangely
worded letter, saying something about how he was sorry that I had
chosen to leave them. He also said that they would be reporting this
expense when they did their taxes and so I’d better be sure to
report this income on my own tax returns to be sure that I didn’t
get into any trouble.
But that $1,000 was the only
money I had received that calender year so I wasn’t required to pay
income taxes. I just laughed and threw the letter into the trash.
A few months later I
received the usual letter they sent out to everyone on their
editorial board asking me to vote for what I thought was the best
piece in the most recent issue.
I looked at the list of the
names of everyone on their editorial board, printed on the left hand
side of their letterhead. My name was no longer on the list.
Apparently they had sent me this letter using the
accidently-on-purpose method of getting even.
Accidently-on-purpose was
what we, as children in the neighborhood, called subconscious
revenge. For example, if someone you were playing stickball with
insulted you, the next time you threw the ball you’d hit him on the
head with it. When he complained, you’d say, “I did it
accidently,” and he would say, “Yeah, accidently on purpose.”
I guess that that $1,000 I
paid was not only for my ad but for the honor of being on their
editorial boad, although I’d bet that no one else had to pay $1,000
to be listed on their editorial board.
One of the first times I
spoke to Fred, he asked me whether I had a university degree. I said
no. He said, “Well, it doesn’t matter.” If it didn’t matter,
why did he ask? Because he wanted to know whether I belonged to their
little club.
Anthony Tamburri very
rarely spoke to me first and very rarely even answered me when I
spoke to him. He would usually just grunt or ignore me completely.
And he always did it with a look that seemed like a combination of
self-satisfaction and disgust.
But once, when he saw me at
a conference of the American Italian Historical Association, he ran
up to me and with a gleeful look in his eyes, happily told me that an
Italian-American newspaper had laughed at the idea of an
Italian-American radical poet.
He also advised me not to
write so much about prejudice against Italian-Americans. This is very
important in both Italian and Italian-American culture: forget the
past if it’s negative.
For both these reasons, the
lack of fancy initials after my name and my complaining, one of the
most serious sins in both Italian and Italian-American culture, I was
becoming an embarrassment to them.
They did other things to
offend me. I guess they were expecting me to complain, giving them an
excuse to take me off their editorial board. But I didn’t complain
about those things. Apparently, my request to have my ad rotated as
all the other ones were, seemed like a good excuse to them.
So they kicked me off the
board, pretending it was my choice to leave, and didn’t even bother
to tell me.
Maybe they’re unaware that
in the small press community there are a lot of editors who publish
their little magazines because they think that certain work, which
they thought was worthy of being published, would not be published in
the mainstream press. These people have integrity and they’re
honest. They make up reasonable rules and expect everyone to follow
them.
One rule is that, if you lie
in your cover letter in the hope of impressing them, they will not
publish your work and they rarely bother to tell writers why their
work is being rejected. If I had put in my cover letters that I was
on the editorial board of VIA, and these editors found out
that I wasn’t, I would have my work automatically rejected. It
might have even spread around that I was a liar and my work would
always be rejected and I would never know why.
Maybe they didn’t know
that. Or maybe they did.
If I had complained about
those other times that they had offended me, I probably would have
been kicked off their board a lot sooner. It just goes to show you
that you should never keep your mouth shut when you’ve been
insulted.
