If you’ve been researching something that you’re passionate about — for a day or a decade, it doesn’t matter — at some point you’re gonna run smack into a hard unmovable brick wall.
Hours – days? – later, you’re still at it despite all the signs. Your vision blurs, you’ve been sitting so long that your legs have gone numb, and you have to pee, badly, but dammit, YOU’RE GOING TO FIND IT IF IT’S THE LAST THING YOU DO.
Either your bladder finally wins out – or it’s your turn to cook dinner – so you creak your way towards the upright and locked position.
Later, when you’re chopping onions or walking the dog or replacing the toilet paper roll, blammo! Something missiles its way into your gray matter.
Your holy grail!
Because, as that old adage goes, the thing you want most comes when you stop looking.
Right?
Hmmmm. Not always usually.
My current holy grail is my first-ever published article, a short first-person account that appeared in Gifted Children’s Newsletter sometime in late 1981 or early 1982. I was on the verge of dropping out of my freshman year at NYU – I always sucked at having to be on someone else’s schedule, forget about being forced to learn about something I didn’t care about – when I was waiting for a friend in front of the late, great Waverly Theater on Sixth Avenue.
She was late, or I was early, so I started flipping through the open-air newsstand…are there still such things?
For some reason, the cover of Writers Digest jumped out at me. Back then I never thought of myself as a writer and hated English classes in high school because if you didn’t write what the teacher wanted to hear – or in a particular style – woe was you. I liked math because there was only one right answer, and I really loved algebra because it was a puzzle, and oh how I loved puzzles, especially trying to figure other people out.
I also loved reading, magazines more than books. I had subscribed to Esquire, Rolling Stone and New York Magazine since I was fourteen or fifteen. I picked up the copy of Writer’s Digest and plunked down a dollar and a half. My friend Rosella showed up a few minutes later and we headed off to wherever.
Back in my two-room ground-floor apartment on Ninth Avenue before Chelsea was hip, I leafed through the issue. I saw a paragraph about Gifted Children Newsletter in the Markets section. The editor was looking for first-person accounts and would pay $25 for each story.
I was diagnosed as “gifted” at the age of two, for all the pitfalls that the label engendered. But it was something I could write about. And back then, 25 bucks wasn’t anything to sneeze at.
I typed out a short piece – about what I don’t recall – and sent it off with a cover letter and a SASE, a/k/a self-addressed envelope, which was de rigueur if you wanted a reply from the editor.
A few days later, the editor left a message on my answering machine – I was the first of my friends to have one – and said she wanted to buy my article, with a caveat. “Would it be okay if I use your mother’s name instead of your own as the byline?” she asked when I called her back, at ten cents a minute for long-distance. “After all, it’s for the parents of gifted children, not the kids themselves. If you’re okay with that, I’d like to publish it in the next issue.”
I said sure, whatever she wanted. Some writers might have fought bitterly against this, sweating blood and tears for each word, but I was used to being subsumed by others, a pattern that would become deeply entrenched through the years, hiding behind writing about other people.
A story for another time.
It was my first submission and my first sale! Freelance writing was going to be easy!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Recently, I’ve been exploring this era of my life in my memoir, and GCN popped into my head. After all, it was where I got my start; I had to find the newsletter. No issues showed up on eBay, so it was off to WorldCat, a clearinghouse that lists the catalogs for most if not all libraries in the U.S., and many throughout the world.
I typed in Gifted Children Newsletter, and 24 results popped up. Some listings had only a few copies, but I wanted as complete a collection as possible because I didn’t know the exact date. I clicked through to some of the catalogs directly, and Boston College sounded most promising.
I emailed my local library about arranging an interlibrary loan and sent a link to the listing. A few days later, they told me Boston College wouldn’t let it circulate, which is not uncommon.
I then contacted the Boston College library directly because I’ve previously hired research assistants and students to scan documents for me.
Hint: The CHAT/ASK US! button on the page of most university libraries is the key to a goldmine. In many cases, you don’t even have to live in the same city or be a student or faculty member to ask a question. Librarians LOVE to dig for information, in fact, that’s why many entered the profession in the first place.
They were troopers — I wanted to send them a gift basket each time I sent them back to the stacks — but unfortunately they came up short in the end.
Was I off by a month? Or more?
I didn’t know. On to Plan B.
What about the copy of Writer’s Digest where I had seen the notice? I didn’t know the exact date of the issue, but figured because I only lasted six weeks at NYU, it had to be sometime in the fall of 1981.
I found the September, October and November issues on eBay, and when they arrived I tore through them. The October cover looked vaguely familiar through the gauzy memory of over 40 years.
But yet again, zip, nada, nothing. I pride myself on being able to find anything about anyone, short of visiting the dark web. But this time, I struck out.
Clearly, it was time for a break. I regularly buy old magazines in bulk off eBay to help plant me squarely in the 1970s, so I plucked the March 1975 issue of Seventeen Magazine from my stack. Getting lost in ads for all the weird shampoos back then is a bit of a security blanket for me. Farrah Fawcett Shampoo, anyone?
On page 40 I found a tiny bit of hope: what may have been novelist Meg Wolitzer’s first published article. A sign, perhaps, that I’ll eventually find mine.
But my strike-out still bugs me.
I will admit that I am so addicted to the hunt that part of the reason why I decided to write this post was because it would give me an excuse to look again. Indeed, I spent at least a couple of hours digging around trying to find it.
Of course I did.
Goose eggs once more. But I don’t give up that easily.
Do I need to find it? Yes.
What if I can’t find it? I’m not ready to go there yet, because the big scary question is:
If I’m wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?
And that’s something I’m not ready to dig into.
The Takeaway: If you can’t find something despite your best efforts and hours and hours of research, try to let it sit…of course, you may not have a choice. If you shift your gaze to something similar — like a magazine or TV show from that period — you might just find something that’s better than the square peg you were trying to shoehorn into the round hole. At the very least, it may broaden your understanding of your topic, and in some cases it might even spark an idea to look in an entirely new direction.
P.S. If you live near one of the libraries listed in my WorldCat search and can locate the GCN issue I’m looking for, I’ll send you an autographed copy of my next book, Propaganda Girls as my eternal thank you.
P.P.S. If you like what you’ve just read and have gotten at least one new idea from this post, please share it with a restack, repost, or passing it along to a friend. I’d really appreciate it.
I hope you do find the essay, Lisa.
I’m glad I’ve kept the archives of my life - or if I didn’t, my mum did, and I found them in her loft after she died. One benefit of having a mum who was a hoarder.
Good to connect here.
This begs so many questions. How did the label of "gifted child" shape your identity? You didn't seem to flinch when the editor attributed your first publication to your mother? What mother-daughter dynamics came into play there? And what did your essay say that might give readers the sense it was written in the voice of a parent? Fact-checking your own memories is complicated. My sister and I grew up with the oft-repeated story that on a roadtrip to DC in August heat I had a meltdown because I didn't want an orange dreamsicle but a red/white/blue rocket frozen treat. The mythology around my persona in the family as the one who threw the hissy fits was revealed to have come out of thin air when my sister transferred 8 mm film of our childhood vacation to VHS. The film showed my little sister had the meltdown, not me. The messiness of memory necessitates your search for that first publication. And it's why I find therapy so helpful in sorting through my mess of a memory.