As you can see, I've just stepped upon the threshold of senior citizenry. As a teenager, I was pathologically shy (or so it seemed to me). After a good five year stretch sorting out this personal difficulty, I got into the printing trade and managed to make a working-class living in Bellingham, Washington, where I wrote my first short story and shared it with a writing class, this instructed by an English professor from the South who encouraged us to attend a talk by John Hawkes (which I never attended, though should have). Trying to publish a story in a literary magazine is like trying to perform a standing broad jump exceeding twelve feet. It's nearly impossible unless you already have a name (or at least a reputation) or you happen to have an acquaintance sitting on the editorial board who loves to do favors for all of his or her writer-type friends. Now, up until Lulu and my learning of this web-site, I had published a grand total of three poems, in a newspaper and a regional book