33 Klassics: Intent

So for starts, or as parts, anyways, I'm just reprinting everything from 33. Of course there's no good way to transfer entries from one blog to another, because the blogdom all is suck, so it's manual transfer. Man I could go on and on but pasting is faster so...

“I hope to do something with writing, or at least prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this particular aspiration is in fact a pipe dream.”

I wrote that in an email to a friend not long ago, and it makes a fair summary of what my core intentions are for this magazine. But since I’m actually engaged in the act itself as opposed to merely writing about it, I feel like I have permission to expand on that sentiment and discuss my intentions in actually setting aside a place to say, in public, here is what I’ve written. Read it.

I have always written, ever since I learned how: journals (including a decade of near-daily writing that started in the late 80’s and stuttered to a halt early in the 21st century); stories for friends and school and for my own amusement; all the reports, essays and learned discourses of academia (almost universally destroyed in various purges of my worldly possessions throughout the years), and lyrics, most notably a stretch of 1001 days in which I wrote one lyric for each day. I have composed many thousands of pages of text. I have often thought or talked or written about the idea of “doing something” with writing, by which I meant taking it more seriously, doing it more rigorously and regularly, and generating an income with it. This has never been more than an idea, and I’d be pressed to argue that it is very much more than that now.

This fact probably explains the meek and conditional character of how I expressed my intention to my friend, and the need I feel to inaugurate this particular literary event with this less than wham-bang apology for its existence. Truth be told this idea, of really trying to do something with this thing I’ve been doing as consistently and naturally as anything for more than 25 years, scares me pretty badly. And why shouldn’t it, being something that I care about and love and know is a miserly and overstocked profession suffused with hacks and wannabes in a market where the absolute demand for text is sluggish at best and the cash-generating product of which is largely mired in the static economics of producing anachronistic sheaves of bound paper.

Nevertheless. Here it is, and I’ve asked you to read it. If you’ve come here by chance then I invite you to read it. I hope you like it, which I think should be any decent writer’s primary motivation (or at least one of them). And I hope you will keep in touch and let me know what you think, directly or through the comments. For me this is a place to work out my chops and hopefully grow a talent. It’s tough to give up a pipe dream for an intent, because dreams are sweet and a pipe dream has a much longer shelf life than a failed ambition. But if the only difference between those two is hope, well, that is no small difference. And if practice and a chance for an audience is the intent of this, then I will call that its theme: the significance of hope. And I welcome you, and thank you for giving it a chance.

this is what is up with this.