Validation from Another Crone

My fellow Utne Salon sister on my story “A Good Deep Hole”

Remember The Utne Reader? Allow me:

In brief, The Utne Reader is a “quarterly American magazine that collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment ( The publication takes its name from founder Eric Utne; “Utne” rhymes with the English word “chutney” and is Norwegian for “far out”).”

Back in the late ’90s and early aughts The Utne Reader also hosted a plethora of online salons that covered nearly as many diverse and interesting topics as Medium does today. I belonged to several but my favorite was called Birthing the Crone and consisted of a tight-knit group of women “of a certain age” from all around the country. At 44 I was a bit young to be a Crone, but Inez and the rest of the Crones welcomed me and were a grounding bit of stability for me in the chaos of moving to New York City.

Those women were so amazing and I never met one of them in person

I was especially close to Inez Castor (shout out in case she ever reads this!) with whom I’ve lost contact over the years. But she was such a rock for me as I was ending an increasingly toxic relationship that I, predictably enough, thought I couldn’t live without plus she became a huge fan of my writing.

My short story, “A Good, Deep Hole” was one of the first that I completed and began submitting to literary magazines and reviews. Until I found Medium, about the only eyes that ever hit that story were those of close friends in Cleveland and Inez. Oh, and the eyes of countless editors and publishers who rejected the story for over a decade.

Recently, I came across her 2004 email to me in response to this story and it still blows me away:

Finding this and re-reading it has been powerful. Fiction gets such short shrift in Medium and the rest of the reading world and, admittedly, for good reason. There is an awful lot of really dreadful fiction and poetry floating around online thanks to the demise of our old friends, the gatekeepers.

Not that I miss those sour old killjoys, mind you

Although there was a certain satisfaction when a gatekeeper lifted the barrier and welcomed you into a print edition of some obscure literary review (which paid nothing for the privilege of appearing in their hallowed pages), but even they were not a guarantee that purple prose and awkward rhymes wouldn’t get published.

I’ve never kidded myself that my fiction is going to set the world on fire or get me fame, fortune, and a nice fat sense of superiority. But there’s nothing that comes close to the high that I get when some pitch-perfect phrase, or better yet an ending I hadn’t foreseen, floats to the surface as in “A Good, Deep Hole” or “The Black Pigeon”.

As I said, I lost contact with Inez years ago and I still miss her. All I know about her is that she used to live up in northern California, near Oregon and on the coast. Who knows? Maybe she reads Medium or even writes here under a pen name. If so, Inez, thank you!

And, more to the point here, thank you for reading my wild array of fiction, not fiction, ponderings, surmises, and outright ridiculousness.

I’d be lost without you.

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