The Little Magazine Editor: in six parts

Part 1

Having a little poetry magazine was a windfall, in the sense that the original editor, who lived way down at the bottom of the South Island, just asked out of the blue, in a letter, of course, handwritten, as they were in those days, “Why don’t you take it over?”  I was startled.  Take over an existing literary journal, one whose name was known, which received a grant from the literary board, and that had subscribers and readers, so I presumed, was a tempting offer. 

               My wife picked up the letter I put down on the breakfast table, perused it at a glance, humming and slurping her coffee. 

               “Well,” I said, “what do you think?” 

               She mumbled something. 

               I asked what. 

               “If that’s what you want,” she said.

                “I don’t know what I want.” 

               She finished her coffee and started cleaning up after the kids, putting me and my dilemma out of her mind, it seemed.  Then she came back, half-hidden under blankets wrapped around her shoulders and big wooly hat pulled down to cover most of her face.

                “If it’s what you want, do it.”

               Outside the rain poured, and as it was winter, it could go on for weeks without a break.  Everything in the house was cold and clammy, one little one-bar electric heater made little difference.  It was a crazy new country for us.  We would never get used to it.  All of us were stuck, at least until the world economy that had closed down all our options for a return to civilization recovered.  I put on another sweater and boiled the kettle for another cup of hot tea.

               Since I did not have to reply at once, those being the days, as I said, of handwritten and occasionally typed letters, not of email or fax messages, when a quick turn-around between people who contacted one another beyond the reach of telephone calls, was a couple of weeks—a letter arrived, you read it, thought about it for a day or two, wrote a reply, posted it, and in three or four days the other party received your answer, read it, thought about it, and so on, so that almost two weeks would be the normal rhythm of writing, although overseas letters and communication with persons where there was no urgency might take on a pattern of six to eight weeks. 

               Anyway, though these matters of time between question and answer would become more important once a decision was taken, there was no rush to write a reply until I spoken further to my wife and to my friends.  After all, said I to myself, I had never done such a thing before, and there needed to be time to think through the implications of the offer, and to find out what the responsibilities of becoming an editor would be.  My wife agreed, I assumed, because she never brought the topic up again until the meeting was called.

               Again, let me remind you, dear reader, as all this happened more than forty years ago when there was no internet and local libraries were not equipped to answer the kind of technical questions that started to spring to mind as soon as I began to think through what was involved with editing a little magazine—not just the nice intellectual task of choosing manuscripts and setting out a number of pages, but the whole matter of setting up a business, negotiating with page layout experts, printers and binders, and a host of other details that at that point I could only vaguely  conceive of, such as contacting booksellers and subscription agencies—there was nothing I could do but seek out individuals who might have experience or, barring that, ideas.  I was still new to the country, unacquainted with people outside the university, and it seemed every day more and more alienated from the culture I was experiencing.  The only persons I could imagine contacting were my own students.

               Let the sun shine, let the rains come, in time of indecision and doubt being on your own is no fun.  So I pondered a few hours in the midst of the usual chores, washing dishes, vacuuming, preparing lectures, writing cheques on bills that always appeared in the midst of academic papers.  It was clear only that I had no friends among my colleagues to be trusted.  Aside from my wife and my children, the voices I interacted with were students, thus the university lecturer’s universal plight.  For me, the world of letters was precisely that, the world of letters—not real conversations, only scribbled notes that slowly made their way around the globe.

               However, two students, who were also friends, because as mature men with families they counted as more than callow youths and untrustworthy likely spies of the administration, seemed appropriate persons to consult and offer a chance at cooperation both by becoming joint editors of the little magazine we were going to run and directors of the limited liability company that would have to be set up in order to protect ourselves legally and financially. 

               John Pottlethorp was my doctoral student, an Englishman who had grown up in Africa, a staunch Catholic convert, and though very intelligent never in favour with my colleagues as they never attempted to hide at faculty meetings and always having difficulty finding teaching jobs in local high schools, making his life fairly difficult and awkward for his family, a wife and three children.  But he was very bright, as I said, interested in African literatures, and eager to find new projects to keep himself occupied, as though a family, a dissertation and a part-time teaching job weren’t enough.  Timoti Afioga Loani, a Pacific Islander, also a high school teacher of Biology, was an undergraduate, despite already having his BEd.  He too had a family, and was eager to do something for his people, so the idea of a little magazine that would print poems and stories about his people seemed exciting to him, and a way of building his ties for future political ambitions. 

               John and Timoti did not know each other until I brought them together over next the weekend for a strategy meeting at my house, their wives and multiple children to work together with my wife to make a picnic in the yard while the three men consulted on this interesting proposition of taking over a little magazine of poetry, short stories and reviews.  I had sounded them out enough to know beforehand that the idea interested them and both had already made suggestions that excited us all the more to go ahead. 

               John jumped with joy when I read out the letter that had arrived and I said I was thinking of accepting if he would join with me.  He jumped again and hooted: “Super and perfect idea!  I’d love to be in on this.”

               Timoti, a little more restrained and cautious, stood up, sat down, and asked for a small glass of water.  Then he announced: “Flattered, indeed, my dear good teacher, and I shall be honoured to participate in this venture with you.  Hoopla!”

               Now we needed to coordinate enthusiasm with practicality.  For a half hour we all hooted, jumped and got up and down a lot, until we had nearly talked ourselves into one of the greatest literary projects ever undertaken.  It was then time, thanks to many little messengers who ran in and pinched us, to go outside for the massive picnic the three women had put together on the spur of the moment.  For they, having take account of the late afternoon break in the weather and the appearance of something resembling the sun between the low dark clouds, had decided it wisest to organize an outdoors feast rather than everyone crowding into the tiny kitchen where our meeting would have to be terminated, the hunger and consequent whining of the children driving the domestic politics that day as always.

               That evening, several hours after the repast had been completed, our stomachs still full, and the wives and children engaged in the rituals of bed time in a strange house, John, Timoti and I gathered again around my kitchen table, to plot out the nitty gritty.  One of the key matters we all shared were our confessed sense of feeling completely cut off from, if not actually opposed to what we understood as the literary establishment of this country.  It wasn’t just that we were all now located in a small provincial town away from the cities where the literati congregated; but we sensed from the other magazines we looked at from time to time and failed to find any connection with what they were printing—the kind of hard-drinking, drug-consuming, masculine orientated mateship they seemed to affect to cancel out any implication that what they were doing was actually intellectual or sensitive to the imagination. 

               “Here. Here,” John intoned in his deep voice.  “This is a matter of deepest principle.”

               Timoti said softly, “I have been waiting for just such an opportunity.  We must unite together and battle for these wonderful ideas.  Hoopla!”

               We also all agreed without much discussion that evening that, because of backgrounds, none of us being born or educated in the country, it was they—the literary establishment of snobs, colonialists and nasty bigots—who were provincial and we, for all our naiveté, who were cosmopolitan.  So we drank to that, my wife having silently slipped in and out, bringing us glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice spiked with lemon zest.  Outside meanwhile as darkness closed in the rains came plopping down, not as drops but as huge buckets and tank-fulls, while growling thunder rode down the river and across the whole of the town. 

               Another thing we agreed on in principle as the basis of convincing ourselves to take up the challenge was that our cherished little magazine would be multi-cultural, multi-lingual and international.  I remember how we wrote out these principles, signed them, and placed the copies, one for each of us, in coloured folders we made for ourselves. 

               Though John was technically an Englishman, his growing up in on a big farm in East Africa and many years of itinerant labour  in Australia, made him wary of the kind of snobbish British colonial attitudes that lurked behind the pose of muteness and anti-intellectualism that marked the poetry, fiction and critical positions permeating the big literary magazines. 

               As for Timoti Afioga Loani, as a Pacific Islander and a traditional village elder and chief, he felt the prejudice against Polynesians, even when it came from the indigenous people who had assimilated into the in-group who drank together and seemed to share the same disdain for families and condescending attitude towards women.  He wished there were some kava available so we could pledge ourselves properly to fight the good fight together.  Barring that, he called out for his wife, who materialized instantly and gave him, out of small paper bag, a wedge of coconut, which he duly smashed with his fist on the table, and shared out the mess between us.  “Hoopla!”

               My own Jewish American background had proved almost from the first day I landed here to put me at odds with everyone around me, especially anyone in an administrative or managerial role, whereas ordinary people, though friendly on the surface, seemed to have no interests at all I could share.  “We’ll show those bastards, won’t we?  Bunch of shmucks.”

               So we decided two things that evening amidst the rumbling of thunder and the pounding of rain, our excitement protecting us from the cold winds that made our wives more and more snappish with looks that kept telling us it was time to go home and put the children into proper beds: one, that we would accept the offer, or at least I would, and the other two would stand behind me until the actual handing over was completed’ and second, related to that necessary caution, we would not announce our programme or change the name of the magazine but let the first few numbers gradually make clear to existing readers who we were and what our intentions were.  We also learned a letter that had arrived that morning from the editor who made the original offer, as a way of urging me to accept, that if we kept the same name for the little magazine and its basic format, at least to start with, we would inherit the small grant he had been receiving for the past five years.  That clinched the deal for us, as we assumed the grant plus the subscription base—though we were not yet aware of how small it actually was—would allow us at worst to break even in this endeavour, or so we argued to our wives when they showed some scepticism.  In fact, the three women, standing together in the doorway as we pledged ourselves to reforming the literary world, seeing how happy the idea made us, joined in by encouraging us and promising to help out with stuffing envelopes and addressing them, something they reminded us was a tedious part of the job.

Part 2

               Monday morning came, I posted the neatly typed letter of acceptance to Dunedin, and then made an appointment with a lawyer to draw up the articles of incorporation.  Each of us pledged $50 to start off a bank account in the name of the new company, Ocean Waves Publishers, Ltd.  The name of the little magazine would remain the same Ocean Waves.  Two weeks later a large envelope arrived from Dunedin with a letter signing over ownership of the journal, a pile of thirty seven manuscripts that the former editor told us he had accepted for the next issue already, and a little lined notebook with a list of thirty-six paid subscribers, fourteen which lapsed but who might be convinced to renew, the names and addresses of eleven booksellers around the country who stocked Ocean Waves, each variously taking three to six copies each time the magazine appeared, and finally a few letters from the national literary council stating that they were granting for such and such a year a grant of $250 as a subvention subject to production of at least three numbers of the magazine.  We were elated, as all this seemed small enough for us to handle as we learned the business and big enough to make it all worthwhile.  We walked to the local post office and rented a box, so we could announce our official address, along with a street address, my home, and get down to work. 

               By this time, the seasons were shifting, and the dull gloomy days more and more gave way to sharp mornings and hot afternoons, the sun blazing down at angles fixed to blind you as you walked or drove anywhere.  The season of end-of-term marking and then the sudden repose of a lush green summer, with Christmas looming.  School ended for the children.  John’s wife took their offspring, all four of them, away to see her relatives onb the Firth of Thames.  Timoti’s wife flew home to the islands with her brood, a trip long-saved for and dreamed of, but with only enough money to pay for one adult plus three children.  So there we were, the three editors on the brink of a great new adventure, at the very time when all around us people relaxed, sloughed off responsibilities and closed their shops for the duration.  There was only a mysterious sense of disorientation for John and myself, of family holidays out of alignment with the weather, and for all of us, Timoti included, of being amongst strangers at a time when they flocked together to bond on the beaches or along the shores of the huge inland lakes.

               The real sense of shock, however, came when we met again two weeks after term ended for our first official meeting to look through the material that had been accepted and therefore that we were honour bound to print in out magazine.  It was exactly the kind of material we hoped to avoid.  There were near incomprehensible poems that seemed to glorify drugs, sex and cynicism, stories about rough and violent men and the women who passively accepted their subordinate roles, and reviews of books that mocked anyone who seemed to hold any principles dear and that praised to the skies the friends of the reviewers.  Everyone I met connected to the literary world of this small country had their tales of how  the tall lanky bearded one would slip into a house at night, raid the refrigerator, seduce the daughter or wife, and leave a scribbled poem behind, as though that would make everything fine.  Or there was a new young poet, wild and boisterous, who drove a rusty old bomb around from town to town, or rather from pub to pub, bellowing out his little rhymed rants in return for jugs of beer.  It was this kind of rave and bravado that all the other less well known writers tried to imitate, and that we were made sick by reading or hearing told the provenance thereof.  But since we were stuck with this material, we had to work out some way to make it palatable to ourselves, and to insinuate in the first issue that we were going to take a different tack.  We decided that we would make an editorial statement that apologized to the authors accepted that we would space their material through the three numbers to be produced in this first year of our new policy, as this would allow us to keep that undesirable style of literature from overwhelming and categorizing us as just more of the same old same old.  Then we decided in regard to the book reviews that we would put side by side with the most obnoxious essays our own comments on the same titles.  But now we had to find the poets and short story writers who wrote in the way we favoured.  Did they exist?  After all, we couldn’t simply fill up the magazine with our own material. 

               Part of the problem was solved almost immediately because during the next few weeks we received letters and packets re-addressed from the Dunedin editor to our post office box number.  These were submissions from a variety of would be contributors.  A short while later we also learned that that previous editor had alerted his friends and sent out notices to various writers’ groups about the change in control and our new address.  We saw from these contacts that we could also send out our own notices to schools and clubs that had creative writing groups.  In a very few weeks, as it turned out, the word had spread fairly wide.  We also noticed, as we opened the submissions that quite a few came from overseas, and though in the past it was clear none of the editors around the country ever took the time to read or react to these authors, unless they were from England, only sending back their work if they enclosed postal-return slips (which it turned out paid for surface mail and not airmail), we decided that as a matter of courtesy and principle we would respond to all of these people and beg them to help spread the word on our behalf because we were interested in poetry and stories from India, Indonesia, Fiji, Australia, Samoa, Singapore, and other countries, and moreover that we would be pleased to consider writing in languages other than English, provided they sent us translations.  We did this because each of us knew the pains of rejection on racial, national or religious grounds, and we determined never to do to other people what had been done—and was still being done—to us.  It might cost us more money to have so many stamps to buy.  But it was the right thing to do.  We could hear in our collective consciousness the sniggering of all those establishment editors in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. 

               The result of our completely unbusinesslike decision?  We were soon swamped by letters from most countries in the world and spent a lot of time acknowledging receipt of their work, enclosing more notices for them to distribute, and also subscription forms explaining that we needed their support.  Very few orders actually came, but more and more submissions did.  Much of it was terrible.  Yet we tried to find verses that were acceptable and narratives that made sense.  Our policy was soon clear to us: we wanted to include as many authors as possible, not to exclude people on extraneous grounds.  With three editors, we decided we would share the initial reading, then come back with the poems or stories we liked, and if two out of the three agreed we would accept the material.  If someone sent us a dozen poems, we would try to find one we could print.  If they sent four, we looked for a few lines we could abstract—few people ever objected.  In the same way, with short stories, since we noticed beginners and amateurs tended always add on extraneous paragraphs or pages that were really little essays and homilies explaining what they were trying to say, we deleted the empty palaver; again there were few complaints, and then we apologized for the typographical error in losing the passages—and that settled the matter.  In a few years, we also learned we could make minor adjustments, lose some words and phrases in the middle of a manuscript, and re-arrange the text, with most authors never noticing and the handful who did thanking us for the editorial help.  The more we did this over close to twenty-five years, the more we received friendly letters from overseas from writers and their family, spouses or parents who thanked us for helping the writer who now felt much better about him or herself.  Of course, the big shot editors and writers in our own country really didn’t snigger any more, not even in our heads, because they simply paid no attention to what we were doing, and in due course actually forgot we existed.  We simply didn’t care.  Except, let me tell you, since another twenty-five years have passed, once in a while I meet some visiting writer-in-residence in their middle-age who recognizes my name, stops for a moment, then asks if I am the same person who once edited the magazine, and murmurs something almost positive, and then rushes off embarrassed.

Part 3

For the first few numbers of Ocean Waves that we published, we weren’t quite sure of what we were doing.  That is an understatement, of course.  For a bunch of bourgeois intellectuals, scholars, and academics it was entering a new world of practicality and commerce.  But we made our editorial choices, arranged them on pages, gluing the texts down as best we could, and taking them to a shop that had one of the new electronic copying machines, made a hundred copies of each page, returned home, folded and stapled the book together and sent it off.  By the second number we grew dissatisfied with the appearance, and after the third decided we would have to find a printer.  In those days, there were still small shops where some old man worked a small press to produce business cards, wedding invitations, death notices, birth announcements and similar small orders.  Most said they didn’t have the equipment to do a small booklet of 48-pages.  But one printer agreed to try.  We gave him our mock-up and he reproduced what we gave him perfectly, with all the uneven lines, awkwardly balanced layout, and spelling mistakes we had missed seeing.  Since it cost quite a bit, we did not ask him to do it again in a better way; after all, he had done what we had asked.  But we decided we better find a printer with some experience with booklets and books.  We walked around from shop to shop.  By chance, someone mentioned that there was a good printer about to retire from the local newspaper and maybe he could help us.  This turned out to be our miracle-worker, Fred Worthy. 

               As soon as we met him and he listened to our story, we all knew we could work together.  Fred had long ago worked for a medium-sized publisher of books in Australia before he migrated with his new wife and family and found a job at The Chronicle where he stayed for the next thirty-seven years.  But he always longed to do real artistic printing and he collected rare books and pamphlets with interesting type fonts, layouts and illustrations.  He said he was going to open a little business to teach his youngest son the trade and would love to have some artistic projects he could produce for his own pleasure and to train young Sam.  He asked if we could leave the manuscripts with him for a few days and he would make a mock-up. 

               “Don’t worry about the costs, boys,” he said.  “If we can get along well, I will become a partner with you.” 

               Three days later Fred phoned us to come to his house.  He lived just beyond the suburbs, where the new housing estates impinged on the countryside, and his home was a farmer’s cottage from the late 1940s.  It was the kind of dwelling we would become more familiar with as we created our new literary zone outside the usual concept set by the pub-crawlers and the denizens of other immoral places.  There he laid out on the heavy kitchen table the pages he had set up.  They were beautiful.  There were elaborate borders around the margins and each page was shaded in some light pastel colours, like blue and rose and green.  The poems were set in fine old-fashioned serif-face and the stories in fine more modernist styles.  Our faces beamed.

                “Well, boys” he said, “it won’t all be this eclectic.  I just wanted you to see the different techniques.  So leave it with me and I will give you a work of art for each issue.” 

               John hesitatingly asked about the cost because, he said, “Quite frankly we have a very limited budget.  I mean quite limited.” 

               Mrs. Worthy walked in, put down a large jug of fresh milk, a dish of home-made scones, and thick glasses.  Then she withdrew without a word.

              “No worry, boys,” he said.  “My work is free.  All we have to do is pay for the ink and the paper, and I will back you up until we show a profit.” 

               “Hoopla!” said Timoti. 

               I grinned from ear to ear and beyond.   “OK, partner, it’s a deal.”

               We all shook hands and, after sharing our milk and scones, went home to tell our long-suffering wives.

               That deal with Fred Worthy was another reason we decided to rename the magazine, having gone through the three numbers of the first year and used up all the material we had inherited.  From now on, everything in the magazine would be ours, including the wonderful contribution of our own printer.  

               Well, when I look back on all those issues of the little magazine, they still look great to me, even if a little old fashioned, and I bet that in a hundred years or more when somebody rediscovers who we were and what we did they will also marvel at the quality of the production of Connecting Seas, even if they still want to snigger at our editorial choices. 

Part 4

Another thing happened that we hadn’t expected.  At first, the submissions from around the country were from the big cities, many from familiar names of the authors we had decided we were opposed to, but there were also a few other writers in small towns, villages, districts with names but no streets or clusters of houses, places we had to look up on the map and were not always there.  We noticed a lot of the names signing the letters were of women.  When we wrote our acknowledgments, even before we read the poems or stories, we enclosed our notices, and where the addresses were not too far away we suggested that the editors would be happy to drive out to meet them and their friends and talk with them.  A few invitations dribbled in, and we drove to little hamlets and country districts that only had community halls in the middle of nowhere.  We occasionally found ourselves in tiny fishing ports with no more than a half dozen buildings clustered around a single wharf. 

               By that time we had read a fair number of these literary submissions—they were more often handwritten rather than typed—and were ready to announce that we would be printing a few of their verses and tales.  The meetings we arranged were in beautiful farm houses, patched-up garden sheds, out-of-place town dwellings, modernistic lifestyle blocks, unpainted district halls, tiny granny flats, relocated fishing huts, converted and rubbish-filled garages, tacked on and separate sleep-outs, microscopically tiny sun-rooms, cleaned-up and not-so-cleaned dog houses, glassed-in verandas in tiffany-styled and impromptu manners, former pubs, kilns, bakeries, and four-square shops, not to mention all sorts of shearing sheds, docking shelters, milk storage huts.  We also met in rusting bobby calf cages, redecorated cat litter boxes, kayak and rowboats turned tip over top and linked by canvas sheets, guard houses, shepherd’s lean-tos, comfortable telegraph posts, uncomfortable post-office containers, unpainted wooden crates from ice-boxes, wooden stoves and baby grand pianos.  Mostly women showed up, ladies in their late middle age or older, all having variations on the same theme: that they were isolated intellectually and needed to write down their feelings and experiences.  We all listened sympathetically and offered advice.  Stories abounded: war brides from Britain and Holland, abandoned children forcibly transported, girls who had embarrassed and shocked their staid bourgeois parents, failed actresses, adventurous and bright young females persecuted by an unyielding sexist society, would-be stage artists and acrobats, women who continued to mature long after their husbands settled into adolescent mentalities, widows of professional men who were stuck in rural ignorance, painters and sculptors who longed to live in Paris or London but could not afford to leave Wakakino or feared to abandon their own children in Frankton Junction, brave veterans of the War that ravaged their lives and had sought a few years of quiet isolation now caught in a web of poverty and family tragedies, middle-aged women stuck with senile husbands who could no longer do the chores and who feared their own children’s greed, in a word: a world of human interest waiting to be tapped.

               It was in these isolated rural areas that our subscriptions started to grow, very soon outnumbering the list we had inherited.  So that when our first number came out and was followed by many letters of complaint from the old subscribers and authors, it didn’t matter. A few people demanded their money back, either the full $5 per year they had paid or two thirds of that for the remaining two numbers.  That pleased us, in the sense that it wiped us of the obligation to please such folk.  By the second number a few months later we felt bold enough to write a new editorial statement explaining the policy we planned to follow.  Multi-cuturalism, multi-lingualism and international.  The country women easily understood that we would be providing them with a world-wide audience when we put their work next to writers from Mexico or Yugoslavia or Tonga.  The people submitting from Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe were happy to get published in a western magazine.

               We also made it clear in our notices and in the statement of policy we started to print on the page with the masthead, alongside the editors’ names, the production manager and printer, and the price schedule, that writers would not be paid—that we were, at least unintentionally, a non-profit company, and none of the editors were paid.  The only people making money out of all our work were the printer and the post office.  The more subscriptions we gained, the more pages we could contain, and the more often we could come out.  In all the years Ocean Waves existed, including after we changed its name finally to Connecting Seas, only three people ever made a fuss about not being paid and withdrew their submissions. 

Part 5

What also happened was that John Pottlethorp, who seemed to enjoy more than anything the visits to the little country towns and villages and conversing with farmers’ wives, shopkeepers and retired nurses and school teachers, decided to expand into a supplementary publication.  He started to produce a little supplementary magazine he called Rolling Hills, something he typed up himself and then mimeographed, bound with staples, and often delivered by hand to places near enough for a few hours’ drive when he went to visit with his new circle of friends.  Sometimes Rolling Hills would have a hundred pages or more, and thus thirty or four different writers, authors no one ever heard of until we came along and who are still unknown; although the truth is, and today some of those women don’t like to recognize what happened, John’s encouragement spurred them to send their manuscripts out to the bigger magazines and to publishers overseas, and then they made it.  They often left their husbands and children, adapted to the bohemian culture that was fashionable, and said in interviews on radio or in slick periodicals that they had never received any encouragement but had fought their way out of rural poverty and depravity on their own. 

               Something similar happened when Timoti Afioga Loani visited Islander communities in the towns and cities around the country and he had a good rapport with church groups, and especially young students just starting to venture into the universities.  He talked to them for hours until they hesitantly brought out little notebooks with their stories and poems.  He read these texts with them, helped them make changes and deletions, and then promised he would see the new work into print.  Of course, we backed him all the way, though we let him take all the credit.  Soon enough he was making a name for himself, and then, on the excuse that he was appointed a head teacher in high school very Polynesian in its intake and progressive in its views, he moved north with his family, and gradually he stopped driving down to our editorial meetings, no longer needed us, or the writers he had inspired, though a few who went on to literary success always thanked him in their interviews and their dedication pages.  A few years later on, we learned that he had moved back to his own island, took up his chiefly titles, and entered politics.  Though he was gone, we kept his name on the masthead, and tried as best we could to bring in new writers from Samoa, Tonga, Vanua’tu and other islands. 

               The rural people we met loved the opportunities we gave them, and though we only sent a dozen or so copies of Rolling Hills overseas to authors whose work we all decided could go there because of the content, it was something we all approved of and enjoyed.  We found that we could express ourselves in very experimental ways in it, assuming a long list of pseudonyms to match the different voices we tried to assume.  Someday a graduate researcher will have a great time trying to figure out who were the real people John was publishing and who were the fictitious authors we created.  WhoThey might also discover that occasionally we created literary debates wherein we wrote letters to the editor complaining about one or another of our mock contributions and then answered back and forth over several months, thus playing out the different schools of theory that were plaguing the main literary journals in our own cities and overseas.  In a way, then, Rolling Hills was also a very cosmopolitan magazine and it allowed the retired old men and women who lived in Tokoroa, Palmerston, Ohope , Eureka, and other wee places to be part of these great ideological currents sweeping the world thirty and forty years ago. 

Part 6

John’s departure came a few years after.  He moved across the Tasman, having found a small parish where the old Latin mass was kept up and where other eccentrics like himself congregated.  Though he had not really contributed to the magazine in a long time, the whole project gradually falling on my shoulders alone, and I negotiating more and more with overseas writers and critics to produce special numbers on all sorts of what I found very interesting combinations of topics—The Other Chinas: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and San Francisco; Islands without Neighbours; Native Traditions  in South, Central and North America; Arctic Poetry; Little Lands of Europe: Lichtenstein, Monaco and Andorra; Muslim Literature in Sub-Saharan Africa—his migration made me realize that our original great adventure was over. 

               What finally made me terminate the magazine was my own illness, serious enough to keep me in hospital and then in bed at home for many months.  When I could I sent some letters around to ask our oldest contributors and subscribers if there was anyone willing to take over the magazine.  A few women from a farming community not too far away arrived to say they were very interested.  They asked me to provide them with the details of our sales, our production costs, and the salaries we paid.  I looked shocked, since these were people we had dealt with for close to twenty years.  I told them that our sales other than subscriptions were often less than ten copies an issue, that our costs were such and such but that it would be higher if they used a different printer since Fred Worthy absorbed so much of his labour without charging us, that postage was high—and getting higher as the government kept increasing overseas airmail costs—and that no one ever was paid.  The women did not receive this information in a friendly way.  They said they wanted documents.

                “Soon,” their spokeswoman said. 

               I replied that I would do my best but, as they could see, my health was not all that great and it might take several weeks. 

               They walked out with surly looks and seemed to mumble something about hearing from their lawyer.  After they departed, I had a very bad feeling in my stomach, and tried to sleep, but kept thinking about what had just happened.  A few days later, a handwritten letter arrived from the same woman who demanded the information.  It hadn’t been posted but slipped into our mailbox at home.  She said the group would perhaps have to sue me for leading them on and trying to take advantage of their long service to the magazine.   I stared in disbelief at what was written.

               “Have they gone out of their minds?” I asked aloud.

               After grabbing the letter from my hands and perusing it, my wife told me to forget what she said, to not respond, and to just get on with my own writing.  It was sensible advice.  But it didn’t comfort me at all.  I would sit at my desk, pen in hand, waiting for an idea to come to me.  Some days I would draw circles, other days long squiggly lines, and some days nothing at all.  Then it came into my mind that the way to surmount this depression, to crawl out of the slough, was to do what I used to do in the old days: find a long complicated book, preferably in some language other than English, and take careful notes, virtually copying it all down by hand.  The intellectual atmosphere, along with the mechanical reproduction of intelligent discourse, helped.  Days went by, then weeks, and in a few months, I found the ideas starting to take shape again in my head, then the words on the page, and by the end of the year there were articles to be sent out, later collected and smoothed out to make books.  I hardly thought about the threatening message. 

               So though there was no follow up to that letter and I never saw any of these people again, it actually took more than a year to get rid of the anxiety, and the fear that any day a notice would come from some small town lawyer with a real threat to sue.  The whole business came to an end but with a bad taste left in my mouth.

               Like the loss of my closest friend, my former students who had become fellow editors and founders of the little magazine we shaped out of the strange publication we had inherited.  The whole dream of transforming the local literary scene into something that had never been tried here before faded away.  How could it have been otherwise?  How could three eccentric intellectuals, each with a different view of the world, with only the shared feeling that whatever there was out there among the drinkers and drug abusers, the arrogance and the selfishness, was not right, how could we have succeeded?  The very people we thought were our supporters, the salt of the earth, the people on the land, hard workers, honest citizens, they had finally betrayed us too.  I don’t think they knew why they did—or even that they were betraying us.  This is just the way it is down here at the bottom of the world.  It will never change.