Hi there.

So…it’s been a while. There has been an awful lot going on in my life this year, and as a result, I’ve given 400 Words much shorter shrift than I had wanted to.

It’s gotten to the point, in fact, where instead of just letting it fade away, I’m thinking of gently packing 400 Words onto its ice floe and pushing it, sadly but with reverence, into the glistening sea. It’s been a grand project. It seems to have resonated with people. But the web isn’t what it was in 2005, and then again, neither am I. The time pressures of running my own career haven’t allowed for enough leftover energy to design, print, bankroll and distribute a zine.

It’s possible that I’ll continue to post some stories here on the website, and I’ll keep the archives up and running as long as I have sixty bucks a year to cover the hosting costs. But I don’t think there will be any more print editions of Four Hundo. It’s sad, because Work was just about ready to go (okay, I hadn’t braved InDesign yet, but I had cover art, and the contents were picked out, Eloise had designed some awesome logos for the flyleaf).

What can I say? When I started 400 Words, I had no idea what would happen. I was a small-town graduate student looking for a way to feel more creative, and to indulge a lifetime’s interest in zines, publishing, storytelling, and other peoples’ secret inner lives. Realizing that I could get people to entrust me with their stories was unbelievably cool. That the stories themselves were so interesting was wonderful. A little bit of media attention for the project felt great.

Being picked up for distribution by Microcosm was a great coup. The handful of times that I ran into someone who already knew about 400 Words from elsewhere was such a kick. On the other side…the article in Newsweek led to being approached by Ingram, the biggest periodical distributor. Could this be 400 Words’ leap into the big time?! Unfortunately, the small trim size of the books (they are six inches tall or whatever) meant that they would literally disappear into standard magazine racks, which led to Four Hundo’s rejection by Borders and Barnes & Noble. I thought briefly about changing the format of the magazine in hopes of being picked up by the big chains, but decided against it for a handful of reasons. More limited distribution by Ingram didn’t go so well. I spent several hundred dollars on a proprietary code that all periodicals need to have in order to be distro’d by Ingram, and another several hundred to initiate my account with Ingram. They ordered a few hundred copies of Issue 2, and I sent them off. Because the bar codes on the front cover were non-functional, the books needed to be specially stickered, at a cost of 25 cents per; I haven’t seen a stickered book but I suspect it made them look unappealing. The only thing I’ve received back from Ingram is a ream of printouts detailing a copy returned here, two copies returned there. I haven’t gotten a dime, and at this point I don’t expect to. We were a bad fit, and I probably should have gone with SPD, or something, if I wanted to get more heavily into third-party distribution. Or just stuck with Microcosm and concentrated on putting out a good zine once a year.

But that’s not what happened. When I started 400 Words, it was really important to me to have a physical product: not just a web thing but little books that people could flip through, smell the ink of, put their hands on. Doing it twice was unbelievably fun. I recommend it to everyone. But there are also logistical issues with physical products that you just don’t face with internet-only affairs: per-unit production costs, shipping, the inability to make changes once you’ve committed to a print run, getting your orders out to the post office, and last but not at all least, where to store all your cardboard boxes full of stock. I loved it, but it was a real operation, and as a one-woman show which at a certain point seemed likely to remain a hobby, albeit an awesome one, it got to be a bit too much.

I sense that I’m starting to get repetitive here, so, moving on: I’m going to post, very soon, one submission that I was so excited about that, when it came to me over a year ago, I kept waiting and waiting for the right time to post it. The time when it would make the most impact, and when I’d be able to do it the greatest amount of justice. That time never seemed to come, and the submission that I’d been so delighted about began to cause no less delight but also a significant and ever-increasing amount of guilt. So that, and the story behind it, are coming out soon.

I’m also announcing, just in time for the holidays and the next Great Depression, deep discounts on the remaining stocks of 400 Words, Issue 2. A clearance sale, if you will. I will be posting the revised prices at the store tout suite.

I don’t know what else there is to say right now. Good night, and good luck?

—Katherine

(Image: Nick Russill)

2. Less-expensive asparagus spotted at the fruit stand

3. Stirrings of life at 400 Words

It’s been a long and restful sleep, but 400 Words is getting ready to come back to life. The first step: a fresh coat of paint. I wish I were a real web designer, but I’m not, so I’ve been searching for a new WordPress template that will liven up the place. Something simple, but a little brighter and more cheerful. I will be trying things out over the next couple of weeks, so please excuse intermittent upheavals in the site’s appearance.

If you want to buy a copy of the Compulsions issue, the store will remain open. The Work issue is coming soon!

Update, 3/30: I’m tinkering around with Derek Powazek’s DePo Skinny theme, which I love love love. Tinkering is fun and slow going, I’m definitely still playing around with colors etc. Next stop: sidebars, and a custom header image.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon.

400 Words contributors Leah Ryan and Jason Wachtelhausen turned out to read at the Rail’s latest Rant Rhapsody reading, at the Bowery Poetry Club this last Sunday. They both ruled.

Finally, another 400 Words contrib, Stephanie Gayle, is publishing her novel, My Summer of Southern Discomfort, this month. Her author page at the HarperCollins website reads: “Stephanie Gayle’s work has appeared in the literary magazines 400 Words, The Charles River Review, Edgar Literary Journal, Ellipsis, and The Fourth River.” How cool is that?

But before that can happen, I have to catch up with all the incredible stories you’ve sent. So: the last day for submitting pieces for the Work issue will be Sunday, July 1.

If you’ve been thinking about sending something in, I hope you do.

As always, there’s no expiration date on 400-word-autobiography submissions. I accept those 24-7-365.

Visit the submissions page.

And because that’s a little esoteric, please feel free to send in any other images that you think would make good 400 words header images. Or maybe pix to go along with the stories. Or if any of you do black-and-white line drawings. Get in touch. We could use more art around here.

Email pictures to editor {at} 400words {dot} com. I will look into the Flickr thing and be back with details presently.

And in the meantime? Site traffic is up, but sales are way down. Are you aware that 400 Words is a print magazine (almost a book, really), that it’s cute as a bug and that you should have a copy for yourself and your best friend? Do you know you can order a copy right here? If you enjoy reading the stories on the site, please think about buying an issue or making a small donation (there’s a button at the bottom of the right sidebar). Thanks!

The journal has a blog, too, where they kindly wrote a short piece about this website, and posted a much more impressive photo of Kurt Vonnegut than the one I was able to dig up.

But enough from me. Go check out Brevity.

I’m experimenting with more editorial-type posts, and I’ll be back from time to time, introducing sites whose projects resonate with 400 Words’ whole thing.

*Yes, the title of this post is kind of a weak allusion Sassy magazine’s “˜Cute Band Alert’ column. Incidentally, though I haven’t read it yet, someone recently wrote a whole book about the best defunct magazine of all time.

I haven’t picked up a Vonnegut book in years, but he and his work were a full-blown obsession to me once. There’s only one way to describe what happened when I discovered Slaughterhouse-Five in high school. I freaked out. There was something so exciting about the blend of fact and fiction. The directness of the address. ‘You are a reader and I am a writer,’ Vonnegut’s prose said, ‘and I am telling you a story. Let’s not pretend otherwise.’ And he threw in drawings and weird chapter breaks and put the obviously-memoir chunks up against the obviously-science-fiction ones because that strange brew is what he needed to get the point across. Looking back, I see now that Vonnegut was my first brush with metafiction. His writing answered to some need in my high-school brain. If I studied it hard enough, I thought, I would find an inkling of how to develop my own true and necessary voice.

The Times obituary quotes Valerie Sayres pointing out what she calls Vonnegut’s “continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction.” I have that interest (fixtation?) too, and for what it’s worth, Vonnegut’s writing took it from latency into full flower.

I still have a novelette that I wrote, patterned after Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus, during senior year of high school. It sits in a yellow Pee-Chee folder in my closet. And it occurs to me this morning that at the end of that year when I was seventeen, I chose a Vonnegut quote to paint on my high school class’s ‘senior wall’ in the hall outside the school library. It was “All this happened, more or less,” which spoke both to my urge to document life, which I’d started to find endlessly fascinating, and my sense that high school had been in some way hallucinatory, the myths and the reality of it impossible to pick apart. Or perhaps I just felt superior for having picked something more literate than “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” or “It’s Been Heaven ’97.” Doubtless that was part of it.
Point is that Kurt Vonnegut is gone and he was important to me, as he was to a lot of young people. Second point is that 400 Words is now gathering stories about work, and I was very taken by the Times’ run-down of Vonnegut’s early working life. I had no idea that after his time in the Army, Vonnegut had been so peripatetic. (Then again, I guess I’m not surprised.)

When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.

That’s so perfect. And I think a good remidner of how just the facts of a life’s choices over time, with basically no emotional editorializing at all, can be effective and fascinating.

Keep the work stories coming, people. Try an ‘I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this’ form, if you want. I think that how people get from one thing to another is one of the most fascinting dimensions of work.

Other than that, back to the stories. I was a little sick last weekend and decided to hole up at my parents place; while there, I waded through part of the backlog of ‘work’ submissions. They’re awesome! So I can confidently say that there’s a lot of scintillating stuff on the way, from an engineering professor who dreams he’s a clown, to a guy who wears a spacesuit and builds computer circuits at night, to a cop’s first brush with nudity on the job. Enjoy.

–Katherine