Found

Two boxes arrived from Houston today, boxes of mine that had ended up in my friend Nick's storage unit. How they got there, and how they got from there to here is too long a story for now--and not exactly the point. I'd hoped the boxes would contain papers of mine, papers I thought missing, my first stories, the correspondence around those first stories, "encouraging" rejections, acceptance letters, all that. In short, a record of my first attempts as a writer, back in the days before the Internet--I'm talking late 80's, 1990. My grad school days, Iowa. Maybe I wouldn't have cared so much about having that work if I hadn't thought it was gone. When it hadn't turned up for years (ten years? twelve?), I'd pretty much assumed it had been junked along the way, a minor but unfortunate accident in a series of harried moves. To my surprise, it's all exists, including this: Gordon Lish's edits on my story "Tip-it," which he'd accepted for publication in The Quarterly not long before it shut down.