Issue #17

Voice Over by Rod Clark

On a recent trip into Madison, Wisconsin, my old stomping grounds, I ran into an editor I had known a few years back. She greeted me sympathetically, gave my pickup truck with its "Writing and Media" ad on the door an odd look, and asked what I was up to these days. When I told her we had just put out the sixteenth issue of Rosebud, and were working on the seventeenth issue, a strange expression rippled across her face. "Oh...that's great news," she said. "I thought you were dead!" Meaning the magazine of course. But her smile was one part genuine, one part something else. Sometimes, even to the best of us, the failure of others brings an eerie comfort-justifying all the little deaths we have become resigned to in ourselves.

It is safer, after all, to love what is dead. The dead don't bite back, complain or edit epitaphs. They don't mess up your favorite stories about them, by telling everyone what really happened. Death is passive and secure. That's why spring challenges are scarier than cozy winter retreats. Spring presages summer and fall-it threatens us with hopefully gainful and sometimes painful enterprise: planting, cultivation, harvest. All this means that instead of sitting about -we have to work. Go out again. Start putting stuff in the ground. Sow the future.

And then of course, we have to re-engage the magazine with a certain sense of astonishment that we really do want to do all this again-in spite of all the work, sweat, and sorrow. In spite of the fact that having a vacation had its strong points. (No deadlines for the dead.) Sometimes the line between planting and burial is a thin one. Is the womb tomb? What will come up again as it has in the past? What will rot in the ground? Does the dreaming seed always know which way it will go?

There are times when I think death gets a bad rap. It's the dark side of a shiny dime. Just as season follows season, death is part of the rhythm of our existence. Whitman wrote: "It is as good to die as it is to live-and I know it."

It occurs to me that America doesn't have a good Persephone myth. The closest I can think of is Poe's story Ligeia. At the end of the story, a long-mourned and beloved wife returns from the grave. But it is ostensibly a tale of horror. Most people identify with the terror of the husband when his wife returns. I always identified with Ligeia. When you come back from the dead you don't always know how you will feel, or what your reception will be.

It's the same with creative hibernation. It was depressing not to be doing Rosebud for a while-but it was restful, and I for one needed that. The time to think, and reflect. Now it's all up and running again. Expectations confront you. The world around you suddenly accelerates-blood pounds in your temples, and you think: My God, I had forgotten a magazine was this much work and this little pay. You have a zillion things to read and write and research. You need it when? The clock ticks ominously on the shelf, the house is a mess, and you don't have a shroud to wear. And you are feeling a little trepidation too, because life is the scary part. The good part too-lilacs pushing out of the cold ground, prose out of the printer, and all that. So you rise and stretch, smell the coffee, brush the coffin dust from your sleeves-and realize that, Wow! In spite of everything-it feels good to be moving again.

In a way the downtime in part of '99 was good for us. We had to think about everything in new ways-writing, editing, designing, publishing, marketing. All the parts of magazinery had to be reviewed afresh. People who didn't get their subscriptions called in and we had to reassure them that we were struggling to get back, and that they would get the number of issues they had been promised. (We were touched that far more people were concerned than angry!) We had to look at money in, money out, distribution. We had to find time, people, resources. The process forced us to realize that we had a lot more stake in this enterprise than we had realized. That dollars and time were the least of it. Once again we were motivated to do what we had done in the beginning. Dream of a thing that many in publishing still consider impossible, the creation of a national literary journal that doesn't owe its survival to a literary scene, or a university, or a grant, or a foundation. A magazine that is read, written, purchased and produced by people who care about it. A publication that can survive and pay for itself.

What is green and growing has always filled us with a dash of ecstasy and a dash of dismay. Emerson spoke with delight of "an occult relation between man and vegetable," but Poe, gazing at the House of Usher, described his horror of "malignant vegetable matter." Life means growth, growth means challenge. The territory ahead was not engineered to be restful. A frontier is not a garden. Any enterprise in which you are genuinely at risk brings with it a little joy and a little fear.

And there is something kind of American in that. Like Whitman's grass waving its green flag over the bones of young soldiers. Like the little girl in Poltergeist II saying "They're back!" Like the mad scientist in the movie at Frankenstein's side who shrieks "IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!" when the lightning strikes and the corpse stirs. Sure it's a little scary but it's also great. There is promise here in the sequel that everyone hopes against hope will be even better than what came before. A rush in knowing that the impossible will come to be.

So Rosebud is up again-and healthy! Rising solidly and plausibly out of the faith of fellow believers. Out of financial odds that would make Melville's Confidence Man hedge his bets on a sunny day on the Mississippi. Like golden corn rising out of good Wisconsin dirt, or giant cabbages emerging out of Alaskan glacial till like the pods of an alien invasion. Out of dubious and uncertain soils never passed for approval by the literary gardening academy. Ready or not, here we come.

ronellis@hughes.net 04/17/08