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We sat in a corner of the room for the next hour or so, drinking white wine out of plastic cups, and talking about stories. Albert Maysles and his brother David are fathers of American documentary filmmaking. In person, Albert is extremely gracious. He’s still at work on a variety of projects (he described to me with infectious enthusiasm a series he’s developing, in which he makes conversation with random travelers on trains). He told me about the early part of his career, transitioning out of psychology and into filmmaking, and he talked with candor about his family. We had a memorable conversation about positivity: Albert thinks that the stories that are told in America lean overly towards the negative. We talked about how to tell positive stories in an interesting way; he gave me a few ideas that I’d still like to do something with. And he’s interested in other peoples’ projects. He listened to me talk for a while about 400 Words and not only said he wanted to contribute a piece, but actually followed through. I haven’t been as great about my end of the bargain. I wanted to wait until the 400 Words website was better-looking, until the next issue was about to come out, etc., etc.

Well, no more waiting. Here’s a 400-word autobiography by an American treasure. —KS

Albert (right) with David Maysles on the set of ‘Grey Gardens’

by Albert Maysles—Age 82—New York, NY

“It’s been a code in my family of origin to give notice and care to the outsider—the underprivileged, the scapegoat, the handicapped, the social outcast, or the downright eccentric. Examples are so many.  My father couldn’t bring himself to collect the three dollars a month rent due from his tenant, too poor to afford it. At first my mother complained to him, but then came to me to praise him for being so thoughtful. My brother and I shared a love for all three of our uncle Sams—one an artist in his nineties, another a talented violinist, but a special love for our uncle Sam the egg salesman, a man whom no one (especially his wife) but us brothers cared for. He was coarse and uneducated—all the more he needed to be appreciated by us.  In an exclusively white neighborhood my sister had no problem bringing black friends home for dinner. Once grown up my brother and I made two of our best films where it was the main character (in ‘Salesman’ it was Paul Brennan) who was constantly rejected and (in ‘Grey Gardens’) a mother and daughter who were reclusive non-conformists.  In both films our subjects count on us telling the truth and with a loving care for them.  Some 30 years ago as my mother lay dying she asked the following be put on her gravestone:  “Count on me as one who loved her fellow man.”

And the tradition goes on in my immediate family. I like telling the story of how when I moved in with my wife-to-be’s apartment, I soon noticed a woman moving aimlessly about the apartment. When I questioned my wife she explained she was her housekeeper and totally blind. “You have a totally blind housekeeper?,” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “If I let her go, who’s going to hire her?” My son is a very talented artist obsessed with the plight of the disadvantaged. In our living room hang, side-by-side, two of his portraits in oil: one of Frederick Douglass, the other of John Brown. My youngest daughter spent two years between high school and college in Nepal working with refugee children. And my oldest daughter, she is always coming to people’s rescue.

Filming real people with love, understanding, and a special care for outsiders—it’s my way of making a better world.”

(Image: Maysles brothers portrait from DV.com; ‘Grey Gardens’ image from lestercat)

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)

by Katherine—Age 29—New York City

The embarrassing, complete list:

Kindergarten:

Great artist. Great philosopher. Write treatises about things. Composer (later realized do not comprehend music)

Second grade:

Scientist, like Louis Pasteur or Marie Curie (classroom had book nook with career series); Margaret Mead (did not totally understand what she’d done, but liked her style as represented in book-nook career books); chicken farmer (eggs not meat, of course); paleontologist; designer of fountains

Fourth grade:

Conceptual artist; director of music videos; choreographer (am inspired by Paula Abdul videos watched at friend’s house); makeup artist; interior decorator; inventor (save world with clean energy from perpetual motion. Invent flying machine); architect

Seventh grade:

Movie director; writer (with a bullet! Possibilities included: Virginia Woolf, eminent playwright, publish memoirs and become instantly famous, Sylvia Plath. Victor Hugo, for some reason); shaman-esque figure; successful child actress; manufacturer, with friend Ellie, of line of natural cosmetics

Ninth grade:

Creative writing teacher; visionary administrator of new, perfect school; rock star, or famous punk-rock muse; itinerant music journalist like Cameron Crowe; playwright; coffee shop or art-house movie theater owner; work at Sassy magazine; Stewart Brand; vintage clothing finder/buyer

Rest of high school:

Set designer; travel writer; science writer; film critic; founder and editor in chief of magazine; photographer, preferably for National Geographic; writer of experimental fiction; combiner of photography and experimental fiction; EIC of The New Yorker (ha!)

College:

Field anthropologist; professional academic feminist; landlord; buyer and renovator of old houses; self-sufficient hippie (geodesic dome, garden, animals, boyfriend); endless bohemian; famous literary critic; New Yorker staff writer; glam, long-format journalist; producer, ‘This American Life’; PA on films; maker of documentaries; long-haul trucker; endocrinologist; college professor (w/ reservations); building caretaker; writer of polemical books about what’s wrong with society and why; fire lookout on remote mountain, á la Jack Kerouac in Dharma Bums; seller of things on eBay, fuck everything

Postcollege:

Most of the above, plus: hospital bioethics board (for a month, right after graduation); doctor (for a week, same time period); editor of book review section at a magazine; therapist; science writer; mother, all of a sudden

Things I never wanted to be: President, kindergarten teacher, elected office of any kind, crime scene investigator, lawyer (okay, maybe for a few minutes), middle manager, anything at a Fortune 500 Company, ever; statistician, news reporter, topologist, school psychologist, professional chef

(Image: Justin Cormack)

by Katherine—Age 28—New York City

Like most Americans, I wanted to get rich quick. This was around age eight or nine; I bursted with schemes, like starting a henhouse in our suburban backyard and selling eggs. My mother smiled noncommittally and I went back to the drawing board, dreaming of self-sufficiency and doing things my way. Several years later, hepped up on Babysitter’s Club books, I found a couple local mothers looking for cheap childcare. The responsibility caused panic attacks, worse than the time mom gave me twenty dollars to keep and I lost it under the gumball machine at Food Star. Ashamed of myself, I stayed out of the workforce till age 15, when I got a gig doing data entry after school at a family-owned health food store. Mind-numbing. Working at the coffee shop was better: customers, co-workers, interaction, the rich smell of beans in my clothes, good clean post-work exhaustion. College, my parents told me, was job number one, and I listened; the summer jobs (a museum, a restaurant, some desperate stabs at temping almost as panic-inducing as babysitting) hardly counted. One winter I worked for my father putting up oak siding outdoors. And I fretted about the future. I’d never wanted a job, not the kind where you apply and there’s a boss and you go and, my god, the panic again. Paid work felt like an ocean wave, something that was going to swallow me whole. I interned for a newspaper, a magazine. They were all right but I was still waiting to feel at home, the way I had in art studios and theaters, which always felt both fertile and safe. I was hoping to flail into something I cared about, a calling, a tribe. After according every job under the sun its fifteen minutes inside my head, I went to the best graduate program in English I could get into. The monastic commitment seemingly required of academics frightened me; furthermore, grad school didn’t feel like college. I’m out now, masters degreed, with a knowledge-worker job that pays the bills and oscillates between oppressive and interesting. I left with a feeling I was looking for something, looking to make good on something, a long-time dream. Be a creative person who lives in the city. Balance panic and desire, independence and worthwhileness. Know interesting people, do interesting things, and make ends meet. Is it too much to ask?

Image: wheany

by Mark—Age 30—Astoria, OR

The bridge I see from my window rises quickly from Oregon and crosses a river so wide it could be confused for the ocean it feeds.

Bridges occupy a piece of real estate in Sarah’s brain. She’ll spot them on trips and make me pull over. Covered bridges, short steel trussed spans bridging creeks and the Art Deco jobs with turquoise lights.

“Take my picture,” she’d say. “But make sure to get the bridge.”

I remember, years ago, leaving my first girlfriend for a family trip during the summer. I thought about the nights we had spent under the shadow of the rusting water tower near my house.

Her name was Natalie, and she didn’t care about bridges.

She had that sixteen-year-old skin. Her vanilla perfume would hover near her collarbones like a necklace.

When we were apart, I carved a piece of her out of the air and looked at it too long. When I returned, she was just a stranger walking through the high school halls.

Years later, relationships later, I met Sarah. She has tide pool hazel eyes with purple and blue anemone speckles clinging to the edges of her pupils.

We’d make love in the morning and nap. After a while, I’d look up, and she’d be gazing at me with those eyes.

We’d drive over the mountains and past the jagged lava fields or west to the coast, the dunes and the juniper trees. She was always scanning the road ahead or searching the side roads for a river or creek. Water meant a bridge was close by.

And now, Sarah and I are separated by work and geography. There’s a thousand rivers and a hundred bridges between us.

The hulking bridge framed by my window runs four miles across the river bar and ends in a different state. The land on the other side is similar, but if you look close, you can see differences. The ponderosas seem flatter, just as the bridge is flat after its aerial leap from the south bank of the river.

I wonder if Sarah will still be looking for bridges if we ever reunite. Maybe she has tired of them. Or maybe, tonight, when the lights of town boil out toward the middle of the river, I’ll reach out the window, grab the dust-green steel tresses of the bridge before me and crush them with my bare hands.

(Photo: Estherase)