hanging chad

Long Story Short

In Corte Madera, California in the late 70s/early 80s I invented Smiley Magazine. Call it a sense of destiny. Call it refrigerator art. I ran the construction paper assimilation for more than a year. Even got my best friend, Beau Kelly, to join in. It came out monthly and featured a story, crossword puzzles, cartoons, and other various and sundry inventions of the life of Smiley. I enjoyed the writing part, but it was always more than that. Now I know it had to do with the creative element, the cornucopia of delights from the art, graphic, and design, to the creation of different mediums of reader participation and production.

But for all these early origins, my name became “known” during the campaign election of 2000 when the very word “chad” infiltrated the collective consciousness, and held it hostage for a few short-lived moments. As one author asserted, in a single year the word chad had become a literary star. Some say chad is related to chit and chat, meaning small residue. To be clear, I am not related to them. I prefer to think of myself as dimpled, hanging, swinging and pregnant, than as related to small residue. When attorneys in Palm Beach, Florida argued that pregnant chads didn’t count, only penetrated ones, my reputation was never the same.

With time and patience, my first novel, The Director of Happiness, seems to have found a home with Atticus Books well over a decade later. We’re currently running a publishing experiment that may not succeed, and I’m anxious about what happens if it doesn’t get the attention and donations we’ll be drumming up interest in.

It is my belief that literature is necessary and transformative, and I have a mission to translate my life experience through this prism. It’s something I spend a lot of time at. If this mission can intersect with other needs and causes in the community or at large, that’s great, but I believe the creation of good literature is end in itself.

Shelley and I do our best with three wild and talented children (we’re biased of course). Eliah is nine, and has an astounding recall of facts. He’s also becoming a pretty good little piano player. He helps load and unload the family dishwasher on a daily basis. Lucas is six and finishing a strong Kindergarten year. When he gets home, he likes asking for a popsicle and then running off to for some alone time. Once he’s had it, he’s refreshed and ready to run outside and fool around or hassle his little sister who’s becoming more competitive with him. Lennyn is three on March 20. Avocados are the only green thing she willingly eats. She only wants to listen to “Superman” and “The End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. when we get in the car, and she likes yelling “Water!” every time we cross Veterans or Market Street Bridge over the Tennessee River.

Meeting Shelley when I did saved my life. A good man may be hard to find, but a good woman may be harder. I guess it’s why I chased her up to Wheaton, Illinois after only knowing her for two months. We’d worked together that summer as camp counselors for Passport. She was going to get her M.A. in Psychology. I had just graduated from Seminary and had nothing else to do.

I had to live with a 250-pound sports and computer freak, Jeff Otterby, for two years to pull it off, but the rent was cheap and I was able to substitute teach in the affluent Naperville, IL public education system, work at an Aftercare Child Center some afternoons, read and write, and fit myself into Shelley’s schedule. Just kidding, Jeff! Otter was an usher at our wedding, and runs a mean fantasy football league. It was during the second year that we got engaged (this is the short version, remember), and I decided to give some M.F.A. programs a shot.

Next thing you know, Shelley and I are millionaires. Kidding again! We’re not millionaires, we’re married and moving to downtown Atlanta on Moreland Avenue. We did possess a little car each, but I didn’t want to hassle with getting a Student Parking pass (I said it would give me incentive to keep riding the bike if I had no choice, which turned out to be true). Thus, for the first semester in the fall of 1999, I got in pretty good shape on the fumes of Piedmont Avenue traffic (uphill all the way there and down coming back) trekking the 4.5 miles to Georgia State University.

Shelley, with a freshly-minted M.A. in Clinical Psychology, and a student achievement award, needed to accrue some enormous amount of “supervision hours” before she could practice on her own, or charge a full fee for seeing clients. A minor inconvenience I hadn’t understood until then. So, we found ourselves celebrating when she got a Counselor job at Hidden Lake Academy in Dahlonega, an hour and a half away. We split the difference in miles that January, living in an Alpharetta apartment. We lived on my scant savings, her teacher-level salary, and a few student loans for the next two years. Eventually, she found better things and I finally graduated. It didn’t really seem so crazy at the time.

We moved to Chattanooga because it seemed like the best place to live when I started my first “real” job, as Assistant Professor in English on tenure-track at Lee University. Lee’s a fine place, and I figured out a way to remain there for five years but it was not the right place for me long term. With no openings at the best creative writing program in town at UT-C, Shelley and I were faced with the very real choice of moving again about a year ago. But our love for Chattanooga, and our desire to remain grounded, led us on our journey to figure out how to make it work. Now, through a series of amazing synchronicities, both of our callings are unfolding like never before.

Given a little time to transition into how this new phase of our lives’ feels, it’s confirmed that I do very much want to keep writing. It’s a labor, but truly a labor of love. A practice. An art. A craft. I love it.

But I also love the cornucopia of pleasures, and the immediacy of a blog like the one you’ve taken the time to check out here.

For now, it’s my little magazine in process.

Will Smiley Magazine find another version of itself one day? Do all things cycle back? Maybe they already have.