An Early Conference: Hope, Celebrity, Punctuation--story by Jill Myers

An Early Conference: Hope, Celebrity, Punctuation

I had pictured him as a man with a certain East Coast lankiness, wearing a well tailored suit with a kind of casual elegance, maybe a silk tie worn loosely around his patrician neck, although from what fictional ingredients I assembled this image of a renowned editor of a renowned magazine I have no idea.  C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was the keynote speaker at an early Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference.  His agreeing to address our closing dinner was a coup by Marlis Broadhead, the founder and director of the conference.

The actual C. Michael Curtis speaking democratically from the very floor on which our folding chairs rested (there was no raised stage in the community room of the Fort Bragg Presbyterian Church) was of average height whose slightly rotund middle was accentuated by a sweater vest of the kind my grandfather wore.  With a certain Bostonian elongation of the vowels, C. Michael Curtis told us that the Atlantic Monthly wanted good writing, and we should avoid sloppy manuscripts: typos, improper margins, two-sided pages.  We fidgeted; our metal chairs creaked. We knew all that.  We wrote as well as we could.  We paginated, we proofed, we double-spaced.  We would forgive him his avuncular appearance if he revealed the inside story, the scoop that would move our manuscripts from the tippling rejection pile to publication as the single fiction story appearing in the Atlantic each month.  Then he said, “Whenever I get a manuscript that has a semi-colon in the first couple of paragraphs, I take the author seriously.”  A semi-colon!  Who would have guessed it?  Would a colon be even better? 

C. Michael Curtis had come to the conference with his wife.  Some of us were momentarily disappointed that there was a wife at all:  we’d had midnight dreams of a powerful editor overcome by the attractiveness of a West Coast writer of a certain age who could not only put together a mean paella, but whose stories show, shall we say, great promise?  Whose stories were, shall we say, masterful?  But there she was, a slender woman with graying curls escaping from a few poorly placed bobby pins, an attentive smile as she listened to her husband conclude his talk.

Before C. Michael Curtis could return to his table to finish his coffee a line formed before him, and I, usually shy, joined it.  I’d confided to a writer friend that C. Michael Curtis had written me encouraging letters when he rejected my stories, and once, in a particularly graceful rejection, asked me to send him everything I wrote, because “You’re so good.”  My friend said he would be pleased to have a face to put to the stories he so reluctantly didn’t publish.  So there I am, nervously in line, regretting that the Presbyterian Church didn’t allow us to serve alcohol.  The line moves quickly: handshakes, a fixed smile from C. Michael Curtis, an occasional empathetic look at a stammering writer from the nice wife.  I introduce myself.  C. Michael Curtis smiles politely.  I say my name again, in case he hadn’t heard.  Another smile. 

“I’ve abandoned the profoundly irritating present tense,” I say, quoting a recent rejection note.

“Oh?” he says, obviously not having committed to memory every word of every letter he’s sent to me.  I feel a little push from the woman behind me.

“I appreciate your interest,” I mumble.  C. Michael Curtis looks at his watch and wishes me good luck.  Mrs. Curtis gives me a sympathetic smile.  I stumble out of line.

Now that I know the importance of semi-colons, I notice them everywhere.  For instance, on the first page of “Mrs. Dalloway” Virginia Woolf constructs a dazzling ninety-nine word periodic sentence in which twenty-one clauses ripple outward like the leaden circles Mrs. Dalloway imagines as Big Ben strikes the hour.  This sentence is studded with no less than five semi-colons.  In Virginia Woolf’s next published work, “To the Lighthouse” she favors a more pedestrian construction, and a comma followed by a conjunction often replaces the semicolon.  She does not, however, abandon the periodic sentence. But that’s the subject of another post.

From Strunk and White

If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.

Epilogue:

Sometime in the 90’s The Atlantic Monthly stopped publishing fiction in each issue.  C. Michael Curtis never accepted any of my stories. 

Comments

[Elizabeth]

I actually worked at the atlantic monthly in the 80s and so I was able to meet Michael Curtis on a daily basis. You describe him well, altho when I knew him he was considerably larger. He lost weight after I left I believe because he became diabetic. Actually, Michael Curtis is not originally from the east; he is a transplant from Arkansas. And he is rather obtuse and focused on the wrong things, as you describe him, but also surprisingly insightful on occasion. He is reacting to what most editors experience, that many writers lack fundamental skills. Also consider how many writers send him their work, send him messages, etc. Thousands. He can't recall them all. Reading it all is immensely exhausting work. And Curtis is human enough not to keep up w it at times. This teaches us the lesson to maintain our integrity, not to give ownership to our work to anyone else but ourselves. Good blog.