The community anthology that changed my life
In 1997, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in my area of Upstate New York with any internet connection beyond dial-up. Personally, I didn’t even have that, and I had to go to my best friend Dan’s house to watch images download line-by-line. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know exactly what kind I wanted to be, and I wasn’t publishing anything on the internet, yet. In fact, once Dan did have high-speed internet, we skipped blogs altogether and went straight to putting up funny videos and sketch comedy albums before I would’ve even considered writing on the internet in any form.
Imagine the excitement, then, when my English teacher, Mike Newell, announced to my alternative school, Upward Bound in Hartwick, New York, that we were going to have our works published. I mean, really published. On paper. On top of that, we were going to get lessons from a beat author named Fielding Dawson, a rebel without a pause, who eschewed the necessity of punctuation – especially the comma – whenever it suited the narrative he was writing, many of which were anxious and thoughtful and poignant and which immediately made me comfortable with my own writing.
This didn’t come from any sense of disdain, but rather recognition of the power this man had, to not only write, but to have published several books of often hard-to-follow semi-prose that, sure, wasn’t a recipe for mainstream success, but nonetheless supported his bohemian lifestyle. I could handle the basics of punctuation, I thought to myself, so if I listen closely to this gentle maniac, maybe I’d have a chance of doing more with my writing. Fielding’s job was to catch lightning in a bottle – to turn our teenage alphabet soup brains into something that not only resembled actual words, but which retained the essence of the brain that brought it to life in the first place.
This could mean anything from lengthy edits, to only polishing a piece until it made enough sense to be on paper, to actually putting some note-and-scribble-addled pages in the anthology we were putting together. It was to represent the creative process while also being the final product, just as much due to the seemingly staid and strict Mike Newell as it was to the traditionally counterculture Fielding.
Fielding would come to Upstate New York up through the year 2000, right before I planned to leave Laurens, New York for Los Angeles, or some sort of in-between location I would eventually decide was Chicago. In between helping troubled kids pour their hearts out, he was doing much the same thing but for death row inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Instead of last meals and last rights, he was giving these prisoners the gift of expression. A staunch opponent to the death penalty, he was doing what he could, and I can only imagine felt a little relief knowing that, at least with us, he was using these same tools but sending us out into hopeful pastures.
We spent a short amount of time with Fielding, who was coming up from New York City to do this. Maybe one or two weeks, if memory serves. It was to be our best work, the most representative of who we were, and he would also, if I recall, do similar work with the community of Hartwick, because this was a community anthology, after all. It was a whirlwind of an experience (one of many reasons I don’t have a handle on the time it took to work on this), with our local paper, the Daily Star in Oneonta coming by and taking a photo as I read a draft of my short story, Bob is Nosy. It was my first taste of anything even approaching notoriety, but the real deal was when The Porcupine finally arrived.
I wasn’t at Upward Bound the year something crazy happened at the year-opening schoolwide camping trip that involved a porcupine, but they all agreed that their shared history made it the perfect mascot for the anthology and for the school. Our school paper was already called The Quill, so this was more than appropriate. With financial help from The Kenyon Review, we got a full-color cover, and everyone got a copy of the 64-page book that was now part of the community and our short-lived school’s history. We may have done a reading that year (we did in subsequent years), but I’m not sure. If we did, I am certain I shook in my shoes. I was only 16, with absolutely no self-confidence but a belief that I could be whatever I wanted. I had, for the moment, picked writer, and the power that book held in a time where no one had the power of self-publishing was immeasurable. Any time from then on that I found an avenue to self-publish, I took it – I wanted to be undeniable, at least in terms of existence.
I submitted something every year for what would eventually be renamed (for reasons known only to Mike Newell, I think) The Porkypine. I did a couple of the covers, as well, and my submissions got a little better each time, including this short story about WWII that came from my personal experience with war, where I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan a ton and was obsessed with the sound design. I combined that with a family story about a great uncle who played dead during the battle of the bulge, and I remember actual stunned silence as a read it, feeling a little guilty that I was just working out the emotional impact that film had on me.
I was digging through some notes recently and realized I’d forgotten that Fielding had taken my piece and sent it along to a publication called First Intensity, along with his own stuff to get it bumped up for consideration. I have no idea if it ever got published, but I recall this being flattering, and an honor, but on looking back I clearly could not appreciate what a big gesture that was. Fielding and Mike had both been infinitely supportive, even as I told Fielding I was planning to leave Upstate New York to get into the film industry.
“But it’s so competitive,” I remember him telling me. I was shocked – this guy, of all people, who managed to get published despite the hell of that business, couldn’t grasp that I’d want to throw myself in the lion’s den. Of course, he was absolutely right, but that twenty-year lesson did end up yielding some of the best moments of my life, most of which were responsible for me finally living part of the dream and getting published by someone other than myself.
I’ll still self-publish. That’s inevitable. Most of my ideas are not remotely marketable, and yet – thanks partially to Fielding and very much to Mike – I must make stuff. If I have an idea that I must see in print, I have that option now, and it’s an affront to that whole experience not to make that happen.
I’m hoping one day to bring The Porkypine back, in honor of both Mike and Fielding, who we’ve lost in the last few years. In the meantime, I’m putting the old ones up online, with the first issue here: https://is.gd/porkypine1997, including my short story Bob is Nosy, along with a semi-poetic recounting of a dream which I’m not embarrassed to say is a dud. To me, at 42. To me then, it was a pure expression of who I was and what I thought mattered, and putting it in print was just proof that someone else agreed.
