THE JOURNEY BEGINS...

Early in 1990 a fly-specked yellowed telex arrived in India (where I had been living happily, absenting myself from most dreary responsibilities) from, of all places, Normal, Illinois, a town I would have guessed, had I heard it mentioned in conversation, to be an ironist's fiction. From Normal the message had traveled to Providence, R.I.,'s driver and bodyguard and who presented it to me on a silver dinner tray along with three freshly shot and lightly curried gaunt pigeons. The telex from Normal changed the course of my life. The maharaj was glittery-eyed, swarthy and shy, and his name was Bonnie. The engulfing desert was blinding and brilliant and surprisingly rich. The palace was hand-painted with aging floor to ceiling frescoes of goddesses, satis, beasts and feasts. The marble courtyards were covered in sand which barely mobile servants were paid to sweep. Our days were filled with laziness and innuendo, chats and folk-custom lessons, location scouting and plans for a documentary on local 'possessed' women I was hoping to shoot, and little could have shaken that delicate balance of escapism, surrealism, and timeless dailiness. The telex informed me that my manuscript, f/32, had been selected as the winner of the Fiction Collective Two annual fiction contest and the prize was publication within the year. I'd never submitted any manuscript to any publisher in my life. f/32 had been my thesis for an M.A. in creative writing in Boulder, Colorado in 1987. The writers Ron Sukenick and Robert Steiner had been my thesis advisors. Providence had worked it out so that the writer reading for the 1990 award, Fred Tuten, deemed no submission suitable for publication and, rummaging through their archives for more options, my committed ex-professors ran into my thesis, fixed it up, and presented it to Fred who liked it (it did after all chronicle the toils of a vagina) and I thus became, to my shock and terror, a published author. That book spawned translations, journalistic gigs, mainstream contracts, and I just floated with the flow and have been since; I never looked back and never lived in a palace again; and that's the story of my publishing books, and also that's a snapshot of life functioning at its irresponsible best, I suspect.