There’s my “career,” Daniel, and then there’s my career.  The first is what enables me to do the second.  It allows me to pay the rent, keep the fridge half-full, raise my kids in something other than poverty and, when I’m not overwhelmed by these day-to-day challenges, to write.

Writing is a privilege.  I don’t for an instant believe that anything I write will make one gnat’s breath worth of difference in the world, and I occasionally regret the expenditure of paper and ink (or at least digits) in exercising this privilege.

But I’m thoroughly convinced that all of us have a need to do something more than survive.  When I was still a young student (in Vienna, Austria at the time), a professor asked me whether I was going in search of fame and fortune.  I told him no, I had no desire for fame and fortune; what I wanted—I modestly appended—was immortality.

Many of us achieve a brush with immortality in our children.  If I accomplish nothing else in my own life, I can honestly say that I’ve had a small part in raising two of the most extraordinary people I know: a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Alexandra.  The first is an aspiring writer; the second is an aspiring dancer.  Their talents and aspirations aside, they’re both genuinely considerate, loving, sensitive and likable individuals.  That I, as a parent, love them is a given; that I also like them is not.

I like them.

FARAWAY: How did you first know that you wanted to write?

I’ve known since I first entered college as a pre-med major (Davidson College, in Davidson, NC) in 1969 that I wanted to write.  I puttered around with some poetry at the time, the object of which was some poor girl up the way and over the mountain in Bristol, TN.  Mostly, however, I read.

1968 – 1969, however, was a troubled and troubling time.  I left Davidson after a year, moved around a bit for almost two years trying to make some sense of my life, then went to Europe with the idea of getting an education on my own terms.  The eight-year plan was both straightforward and naïve:  I’d live in four countries for two years each, learn the language, the culture and the literature of each.  I ended up living in five, including a summer in the then-Soviet Union, and learned five languages.

By the time I returned to the U.S., I’d learned at least enough to know I’d have to get a college degree—and so, I enrolled in Columbia University here in NYC.  One of the things I obviously hadn’t acquired in Europe was wisdom; I enrolled as a philosophy major.  However, I also knew I’d have to work one day to support my habit.  I minored in Russian and studied a sixth language, Swedish.

I graduated from Columbia in three years as clueless as I’d gone in—which is a pretty dangerous state to be in at the age of 33.  I stumbled into a secretarial job with a high tech company because, thank God, I’d learned how to type 65 wpm in high school.  Some of my jobbing in Europe had included teaching English as a second language—and so, I also had a pretty good idea of grammar, syntax and spelling.

It wasn’t long before I realized that most of the glory and money in the business world nested in sales.  I had debts that would’ve tried Job.  I consequently moved into sales, where I’ve been ever since.

As my eldest sister has never tired of telling me, she knows no one less disposed to the sales profession than I am.  She’s right.  But I had some luck, and it was pretty damned easy to be successful at sales in the nineties.

Then, of course, came the dot.com bust.  At 50, and with a base salary that would’ve made a commander blush, I was suddenly out of a job—and without prospects for getting another one.  I turned, in 2002, to the only other thing I knew how to do—and yes, to the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do.

I got my first poem published in The American Dissident, and I thought I was on my way.  If not exactly to fame and fortune, at least to a way to make a living.  I continued to write poetry, most of which has been published either on the ‘Net or in print, including one Pushcart Prize nomination.

I wrote a four-act play that went nowhere.  To purge myself of the failure (in all respects of that little oeuvre) I started to write short stories.  I wrote the first one in seventy-two hours without a dictionary or reference book of any kind.  It eventually ended up in an anthology titled Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen.  (They may’ve been bound, but only in the editor’s head.)  That story, “Waltzing Matilda,” appears in the anthology you have kindly agreed to publish.

I wrote a second, “In the Animal Kingdom,” which also eventually earned a Pushcart Prize nomination.  It, too, appears in this anthology, Stories.

I eventually went on to write a novel, Trompe-l’œil, which, with an unhappy ending at 162K words and using eleven languages (in dialogue), understandably remains in neglected manuscript form—although the first chapter of it has been published once in print and once on the ‘Net.  Some other excerpts have also been published on the ‘Net.

Speaking of which, Internet publishing has been quite kind to me.  It hasn’t paid my rent—not by a long shot—but Googling to my name would suggest that I’ve done reasonably well in cyberspace.

If success is measured in more than coffee spoons, however, I frankly haven’t done well.  If I’m still alive today, it’s thanks to a woman who has, for all intents and purposes, kept me financially afloat for a couple of years now—and also to a supreme bit of serendipity in finding a job in the industry in which I’d worked for eighteen years, and which I began last December.  The man who hired me chose to overlook what most would not: my age (not to mention my seven years’ absence from the industry, during which it had evolved almost beyond recognition).  I intend not to let him down.  If this means that I spend less time writing, so be it.  Let others have their shot at grinding trees into pulp or the ether into digits.  I will—only because it’s the one writing thing I can do that doesn’t require long hours at a single sitting—continue to dabble in poetry.

To read samples of Russell’s poetry click here.  Be sure to return tomorrow for the first chapter of Something Special.

My sister Zoe, a travel writer, had just returned to New York City from Tel-Aviv or Riga or St. Petersburg when somebody told her I had three months left to live. The news struck Zoe as rather odd: nobody at the headquarters of the travel publishing firm where we both work could trace the source of this information or venture a guess as to the cause of my impending death, and Zoe is not the one to believe uncorroborated rumors. She brushed the idea aside, and proceeded doing business as usual: finished her report on the latest adventure, ordered new custom luggage from Signe Mou on Fifth Avenue, and went out for lunch with her boss, our chief editor Karen Everest. Karen is Zoe’s boss only nominally; in fact, Zoe herself hired and trained Karen during her own brief stint as the chief at Kongo-Roo.

The job kept her stationed in New York for several months at a time—it was the longest period of time Zoe had spent in one place since college, and she almost single-handedly caused the demise of this 100-year old organization driving everybody crazy with her constant flow of ideas for radical change. It was she who opened our surprisingly successful West Coast office (hiring me as a technical editor), and immediately attempted to do the same in China and Ireland, I think. When those ventures almost bankrupted the company, Zoe announced that she was a travel writer at heart and turned her position over to Karen. They say that after two and a half years of tenure my sister’s office had remained a bare white-walled room without a single picture or personal item.

 

Silent Signs features a painting by Gay Degani.  Read the rest here.  Read more about Olga Zilberbourg and Gay Degani.  You can also click here to read another story by Olga in The Writer’s Eye magazine.

In Faraway news, we’re closing in on the release date for the new issue.

Traditionally, self-publishing has been looked down upon by professional publishers and agents, not to mention readers.  For one thing, turning to self-publishing usually meant that the author could not find a professional publisher willing to publish their work–in other words, their book must not have been very good.  There was also a stigma attached to what the CNN article terms “vanity publishing” where authors would pay to have their books published in bulk and then try to market them by themselves.

Sites like Lulu and Author Solutions are now turning this old thinking on its head.  There are many benefits to self-publishing now: total control over the look and marketing of your book, less stress in trying to find a publisher or being rejected, no up-front cost (as opposed to vanity publishing), and now, according to the article, literary success.  Although most self-publishers don’t sell a whole lot of their books (most books in general don’t sell very well), some are achieving literary fame and success and are doing away with the old stigmas attached with self-publishing.

Something to look into?  Read the rest of the article here.

In the near future, we will also have a new issue of Faraway available, featuring a LOT of writers new to our site.