SSP went from a 3-person company to a 1-person company in 2010 and made it through 2011 by dint of hard work and the will to keep the doors open and the lights on so Scags at 18 could be launched. We were thrilled to get all of that done. But we made some bad decisions along the way in order to keep our business going. Of course we are making corrections and also changing course somewhat.

With sadness, we end the road show. But with gladness we have found some other ways to give back and to keep true to our mission.

For the record, I want to acknowledge many of the things we learned while on the road. First and most important of all was this–no business is doing a good job if it isn’t listening to its customers. The Itinerant Book Show was a unique opportunity to have customers of all kinds as we distributed books for others so could learn and report back to our collaborators about what the readers had to say. Readers are after all book lovers, the people we want to know and have as part of our daily contact. We want to know why they like certain kinds of books and what those books will mean to them as they continue to read.

Book lovers are also in the position to tell you why cover art moves them, what it means to have certain font sizes, what it does to a reader to see books that the bookstores aren’t carrying, that is if they have a bookstore in their community.

Book lovers also tend to be the same sorts of people anyone in the publishing world would want to know and to hear from on a regular basis. The numbers of comments about the ereading experience alone was enough to fill up several pages of transcribed notes. In my own distillation of it, I can see two very distinct types. Those who love the idea of it and those who hate it. Both were very loud and certain of their views. It was almost like having a political discussion at the family table. But the one thing that I found over and over was that even those who love to use ereaders are uninformed for the most part as to how to download books that aren’t readily available on the dedicated readers they owned. For the most part, ereaders aren’t created to make downloading from other sites other than say Amazon.com or B&N.com very easy.  (More about that at another time.)

Book lovers are also highly sensitive to pricing and yet when books are presented to them as a product whose sale will help others, then all ideas about price disappear and it is only a matter of do they have the money to make the purchase. In other words, book lovers are a wonderful group of people who may disagree hotly about which device or if a device should be used, but when it comes to the support of other writers or readers, they are extremely generous.

In its way, the Itinerant Book Show wanted to present a different face of publishing. The face we chose was determined by our commitment to customer service. We wanted to get out to the world west of the Hudson River where most people in this country live and where most readers reside. It was a very good time to be on the road and it is now a good time not to be.

In the days ahead as the books are returned to the authors and publishers, we are sad to say good bye. But we have plans in place to give back in a new way that isn’t as expensive as the road show was. Sadly, money is an issue, the largest issue today. I am so happy to have had this experience. The places I have seen, the people I have met . . . You know the rest.

Stay tuned for what SSP is up to next. In the meantime, please read the first diary entry of Scags at 18 and please order it. www.sullivanstpress.com/publications

My life in a book was more real to me than the life I lived at home. Or, more accurately said, my life while reading was more compelling than the one I lived with my family. I learned things from books that I never learned from my parents or in school. For example, I learned empathy and ethics. I learned that these values weren’t easily acquired or kept. That a good story could be built around a character struggling to understand what was the right thing or the best thing to do and then the rest of the story would be about how that played out.

Those values, justice, mercy, love, kindness, weren’t taught to me as well as they were in the books I read. The more difficult the task for the protagonist to find the best way to deal with a situation, the more inclined I was as a child to love the story. As I grew up, that changed. My friends used to tease me by saying that so long as a story or a movie were depressing, I was sure to love it. I think we all need those dark phases too. Those periods where we struggle with our own demons and want to participate in the fictional lives of others involved in the dark times too.

No matter how many books I read a year and that varies with how much I write in a year, I’m always on the lookout for books that books that will plunge me into the labyrinth of life with all its complexities. Thus, my books of choice are those that start out to do that. I am enamored of those writers who want to take the time to explore the deepest and most consequential ways in which we are human beings.

I often say to myself that reading a Chekov short story is like putting a band aid onto my skin for life. I think of reading Nadine Gordimer is to find out how doing the right thing leads to a life of misery. Or that reading Alice Munro is a journey into structures that are so involved that the story is, to me, more about architecture than meaning. I read Stephen Millhauser because he makes me laugh and cringe in fear just like Kafka does. I also read Kafka because that is an exercise in brilliant absurdity.

When I was in high school, I read all of Faulkner’s novels as well as many of John Steinbeck’s. Then I read much of Virginia Woolf. I then dove into Dostoevsky. Every one of these authors I chose because they had written lots of books and because they were so good at what they wrote.

When I became a writing teacher, I tried to shove onto my students the writers I thought they should know. Often as a gift they gave me a book they liked. I couldn’t always feel that the exchange was equal but it gave me insight into what was going on in this new world of writing that I was hoping they would like to dive into with me.

At first, students had this delusional belief that writers made lots of money because Stephen King did. Then as time went on and the world of self-publishing began to open up, they were convinced that if they quit their day job they too could write a best seller for the world wide web and make a ton of money and spend their days doing what they loved to do best, which wasn’t writing or reading. Too often this belief that writing was going to be the magic bullet that would solve all their personal problems in life turned out to be just as problematic as going out into the world to slay managers and customers.

I fantasize about teaching a course on genre fiction. That course would fulfill two sets of wishes. I wish that people didn’t need genre fiction. I wish people appreciated literary fiction.

Now though the entire literary landscape has changed radically from when I first began reading. Now we have too few bookstores and libraries. Instead we have Amazon. Amazon had been doing lots of things that are radical in nature and work and don’t work when it comes to book buying, selling and writing. (Here is a good article on some of that:http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/has-amazon-turned-ebooks-into-commodities/

But what is truly of importance to me, and I hope to you too, is this. Sitting down to write isn’t about sitting down with a ledger to see how much money you can make if you pursue this particular story idea. Not if you are originating this idea, want to spend as many years as it takes to follow the entire story to its conclusion, and then work to help others learn of its existence.

And yet, I have one last huge wish. It has to do with literacy itself, the role it should play in all our lives and the role we should play if we want to maintain a literate world. Wherever you live, there are literacy programs that you can help with. These local programs are always in need of your help. So, please go to them with offers of time, talent or money. That too will help us to confront the lack of a serious literate culture that is full of wonderful story tellers who just don’t know yet that they have that talent.

What happens is this: People get lazy and crazy with their lives. They begin to think that there are solutions to things that can be found in food, in alcohol, drugs, and sometimes in genre fiction. I don’t understand the craving for the constant story of love thwarted and then consumed. Or for vampires or dragons. In fact, a monodiet of anything is so uninteresting that it makes me suspicious of the motives. I remember going to white parties when I moved to NYC in the late 1970s. People had to dress all in white and the food we ate was all white and by the time we left the apartment where the party had been held I felt as unstimulated and constipated as a person confined to gruel must feel.

I understand binges of a particular writer’s work so that you get to know it intimately. I don’t understand a constant feeding at the trough of simple stories told for the pure pleasure of plot. Plot is a great tool for writers and since there are so few of them, it is always good to learn all the other techniques involved in writing fiction. I can’t imagine being tied to the demands of a certain plot line and to make the “what happens” in a story be the most important element in it. For that truly is what genre fiction is about. Writers are satisfying a certain need in their readers for a consistent sort of story that is likely to be long on the what happens and short on the other elements, such as dialog and description, the use of description being to me one of the mightiest ways of telling almost any aspect of a story.

Many years ago I was introduced to the short fiction of Bruno Schulz. What happened in his stories was almost so minor as to be forgotten but what stood out were his descriptions. Being inside one of his stories was like lying on my back on a very dark night and watching the stars. Knowing that I can’t see everything that I am looking at but having someone inside me telling me what is important to notice. To have this guide showing me what it is in that dark sky that I must pay attention to.

Interesting, is it not, that no one is speaking out about this blatant and constant attack against our LGBTQ community? Where were all those liberal voices that had voted for DADT or helped to pass same-sex marriage laws in New York State? Funny how when our votes aren’t presently needed, they have crawled back into the woodwork, not daring to raise their voices against this constant ridiculousness from Republicans.

All those fears of how gay bashing affects younger people seem hardly worth mentioning now. Though seldom do we hear how all this gay bashing affects those of us who have had nothing but that for decades. And at some point, for whatever the reasons, enough is enough and one becomes oversensitized to it and wants some relief. One wants to hear the end of the equating of same-sex love with pedophilia or polygamy or bestiality. I, for one, would like to hear some apologies as well from lawmakers who stood on the sidelines for way too long and never spoke out, never dared to say something courageous for their own constituents.

I sure would love to hear President Obama call for an end to this practice of baiting voters with these angry, ugly attacks on my community. I’d like to see these religious leaders stand up to these assaults and say that there has been enough of this kind of talk coming from people who supposedly love Christ and their country.

In this perfect world I would love to live in, that would all be possible because no one would be going to a pollster to see how people would react to them saying this. Likely, the polls can’t be done soon enough for me or truthfully enough either. Because in the light of how awful it is to hear this coming out of the mouths of men and women who want to be president of the United States, there does come a point when we all wake up and realize some very important things.

The current crop of politicians is a lot who know no decency, care not for it and won’t be tempted to return to any civil discussion of anything ever again. Having already sold their souls they are “enjoying” the fruits of their labor beyond measure. They live better than 99% of us do. That was the goal and they have achieved it. Why should they ever return to a state of being where justice, mercy, love and peace were their values? What can you buy with that?

On another front and of equal importance is the gay bashing that occurs in 76 countries. Canon Ogle writes well about it and I share with you his new column outlining, from his perspective, what this looks like from a priest’s point of view.

http://sdgln.com/social/2012/01/06/rgod2-kings-queens-smoke-and-mirrors-religion-faith

So, please read and join with him in working to obliterate this form of oppression.

I am thoroughly pleased that Scags at 18 is finished and available. What has made this even more pleasurable is the fact that we can now offer all our titles in not just e-book format but also in a POD format as well. Print on Demand is going to make our mission more comprehensive. Our experience is showing that not only are there lots of people who don’t own e-readers, they don’t want to own e-readers. Amazon and Apple may tout the numbers of people who own their devices and they are in the hundreds of millions world wide at this point, but there are those who don’t ever want to go that route. And at SSP we didn’t want to repeat the mistakes we made in printing a version of Scags at 7 and then going the e-book route, seeing the e-book selling and the printed version languishing. It is expensive to print and then ship and then warehouse and then ship again to the reader.

A solution to that dilemma was necessary. The Espresso Book Machine is the answer to the problem and the fact that one is now in Manhattan at the same time that Scags at 18 was launched, well, one could call it providential. After all, what could be more “green” as far as technology goes than a POD machine that can produce a book on demand, rather than having to waste paper, waste fuel shipping, waste land and resources to store, and then waste more resources trying to get bookstores and readers to purchase separate copies? Now we don’t add substantially to the environmental waste that traditional publishing does and at the same time we can respond to our readers’ needs.

We have taken further steps as well to make SSP a better known publisher. We have signed on with an online marketing and PR firm (Vocus) that is able to work with us and handle so many of our basic needs in very creative and helpful ways. As the year progresses and we can offer more insight into what SSP does and how those new projects we have begun to line up for 2012 take shape, you will see a nicely growing set of press releases coming out with each new step we take.

I am very pleased with what we have on our plates for 2012. But I don’t want to forget what we were able to accomplish in 2011 because it was a new start for the company as it reverted to a single owner and employee–me–and with that came the need for a new website, which we launched in April. We published Scags at 18 in two formats. And we signed on with an online marketing and PR firm to help us get the word out more effectively about what SSP is doing and will be doing.

For those who have not yet ordered the book, here are the helpful website links:

For e-books, www.sullivanstpress.com/publications  (both Scags at 18 and Scags at 7 are available here)

For POD, www.mcnallyjackson.com/bookmachine/scags-18

A wonderful 2012 to you all and thank you so much for your support.

Today the twitter channel is filled with some more outrageous Amazon-related news items. It looks as if the literary world is turning around to bite back at this behemoth. That is some of the good news.  But what shocked me today is the fact that Amazon is not just large (go to www.facebook.com/sullivanstpress for lots of these news items) but that they are getting larger and nastier.

I turn to twitter when I feel that the news as it is happening isn’t being reported. Too many news outlets have a vested interest in not reporting about this type of egregious behavior by Amazon. I don’t know if you’ve been following the censorship tweets that have been posted, again on the same Facebook wall, but there again, where is the real outrage against this monster that is eating up our world?Authors are being threatened with permanent banning from the Amazon site if they are found, by Amazon, guilty of some of the most broadly stated terms that all authors have to agree to in order to have their books posted on the site with no redress and no one to contact should they oppose the ban.

Today’s news, though, tipped the scales for me. Not only does it look from the new chart someone has now posted (and can be found on the SSP Facebook page) that Amazon owns most of the world, but they have a new phone app that will be available on Saturday. If you download the app, go into your favorite stores, price the items you want to buy, send those prices to Amazon and not buy the goods there but take advantage of Amazon’s “largesse,” i.e., a $5.00 discount on the item, you will be doing them an enormous favor–all their research. And making use of that phone app so they can get more demographics. Thank you shoppers.

Amazon is Pacman, eating up the known world. They buy us all and they appeal to only one part of our being–that mad shopper who needs to be enticed all day long to order from Amazon.  This season especially, Amazon is like The Brain, but with a plan that can work; they really do intend to take over the world, one shopper at a time.

We are increasingly a nation of specialists. Nowadays college kids are selecting majors in their freshman years, the better to get onto a secure career track. And who can blame anyone for being focused, even narrow-cast, given the current brutal economy?

But specialization wasn’t always the rule. I’m the author of Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted and while researching the story of this grand 19^th century figure I was struck by how different things once were. Olmsted came of age in a genuine frontier society. And it wasn’t only a frontier in terms of vast undiscovered spaces. Back then, America was also a frontier from the standpoint that there were fewer people, fewer codified professions, leading to a kind of all-things-possible, all-hands-on-deck mentality.

At age 14, Olmsted dropped out of school and dabbled in a series of jobs: surveyor, clerk, sailor, farmer. Then, in 1852, he landed an interview with a startup newspaper, The New York Times. The interview lasted just five minutes and Olmsted was handed a dream assignment: travel through the American South and document plantation life and slavery. In hiring Olmsted, the Times editor recognized that experiences such as surveying and farming would be valuable to a journalistic endeavor. And the editor’s instincts bore out as Olmsted produced a series of 48 spectacular dispatches that helped put the upstart paper on the map.

In 1861, Olmsted’s dispatches were collected in a classic book called The Cotton Kingdom. Here it is exactly 150 years later and title is still in print. Historian Arthur Schlesinger once described The Cotton Kingdom as “the nearest thing that posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization which time has tinted with hues of romantic legend.”

Just think of what would have been lost if that editor hadn’t been willing to take a chance on Olmsted the generalist. Would it be possible today to make the transition from surveyor to clerk to sailor to farmer to journalist? Would it be possible, as Olmsted did, to parlay journalism into becoming the designer of New York’s green space masterpiece, Central Park. Incredible! And Olmsted wasn’t nearly done recreating himself.

With the onset of the Civil War, Olmsted departed Central Park for Washington, where he headed up a wartime medical relief outfit that provided immeasurable care to injured soldiers. After the war – through a whole series of convolutions – this outfit morphed into the American Red Cross. Next Olmsted headed to California and became a goldmine supervisor. While in California, he visited Yosemite and it awakened an interest in environmentalism, an interest that informed his work for the rest of his life.

Finally, Olmsted returned East, designed Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and at the age of 40 settled into landscape architecture, the career for which he’s best remembered. But what makes his creations – ranging from Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system to the grounds of the US Capitol in Washington to Stanford’s campus – so spectacular is that he brought all his pervious experience to bear. Nothing was wasted.

At times, I found researching Olmsted’s life story heartbreaking. It’s clear that some of the best aspects of America are rooted in that all-but-vanished frontier mindset. But learning about Olmsted’s life was also inspiring. He made false starts, hit dead ends, failed outright sometimes, and kept going. That seems like a good formula for any era.

http://www.facebook.com/OlmstedBook

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/dacapo/howtoorder.jsp?isbn=0306818817

It happened so quietly, as fits her character. I was at work on Scags at 18, enjoying the work, enjoying being able to incorporate into the story some of the more important writers from that era (the 1960s) that I thought should be included and who don’t often get mentioned–Robert Lowell, Noam Chomsky, Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf. For those of us who grew up and gained our intellectual bearings in the 1960s and 1970s, Woolf played a huge role. Yes, we read Doris Lessing and many more but the real star of that time (as she should be in all times) was Woolf.

So as I wrote about Scags reading Woolf and that famous essay for the first time, I couldn’t pull myself out of the book. It was like being caught in some glue pot of words that found a way to liquefy and enter into my bloodstream and in that way wrap themselves around the muscles, tissues and organs inside me. She invaded me.

I couldn’t read a newspaper, hear some politician bloviate or watch a film without being reminded with such incredible precision of what Woolf had said about things like: men writing about women’s sexuality, the predominance of male voices in the discussion of what women should do about most things in their lives, the representation of women on the screen as projections of wish fulfillments rather than as real characters caught up in the things that women care about daily.

When I read the sentence “Chloe likes Olivia” in her essay and couldn’t at first feel the revolutionary thrill she felt, I knew the speed bump I had just encountered needed my attention. If I wasn’t going to run right over what had caused such a stir in her, then I was going to miss much of what she was admonishing women to do and why. That element of surprise that I couldn’t appreciate wasn’t due to Woolf’s writing but to our coming a bit further along in what women now write about. But with some careful thought, I began to unearth inside me all the various prejudices that hadn’t made me appreciate the weight of that statement of affection.

Not unlike the way we of the LGBT community have been trained to accept the homophobes dislike of us, women too, suffer from this sense of turning the misogyny inward. Woolf writes about this, and it is painful to read. But let her take you on this journey with her as she explores what it means to be a woman writer. As she turns her gaze backwards, as she peers into her own life and as she predicts with great accuracy what we women need to do to write well. She offers us a rich platter of comestibles. If you eat one, you won’t be able to resist the rest.

You, too, will then be invaded by her. My wife, Suzanne, rightly said that she is our Shakespeare. That then made me relive inside myself her stories about Shakespeare’s sister in which she fantasizes what her life would have been like if she too wanted to write.

If you read Woolf’s essay and it affects you as it has me, you too will live with Woolf’s words visibly enmeshed inside you. You will be able to read her deep within your own being.

In addition to needing “A Room of One’s Own,” we also needed a Virginia Woolf.

While the voices and the mood in Foley Square was definitely celebratory, as in, you really can’t evict an idea, the overwhelming force around us was lost in another world that must see their end is near. The task now is to disarm the police and make them see they are on the wrong side of the barricades.

One encouraging sign of how this might be cracking is the number of articles coming out about the Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, who some say is thinking of running for Mayor at the end of this horrible third term Bloomberg bought for himself (I wonder if he isn’t waking up every day with buyer’s remorse). As the news trickles out about how Kelly has been running his department, and as more news has been coming out about how the police department is filled with corruption, perhaps, some of the more honest cops will take a step back and say, hey, this is not the way things should be.

Unions are waking up. They are there, in force and visible. They weren’t there in these numbers or with this kind of activism during the last large set of demonstrations against the run-up to the war in Iraq. Police belong to a union too and the city is also trying to eat away at their benefits. Like the teachers, the fire department and other vital services that the city must negotiate with and against whom Bloomberg has taken a hard line, it may be time that the cops standing there in the cold, having been on duty for too long, might be wondering just what it is they are protecting. Or who? And why in the midst of such obvious peaceful protesters are they being asked to take such a militarized stand?

It was such a hopeful sign that the former police commissioner from Philadelphia was there yesterday and was arrested. It is great to read articles by police saying that the militarization of police doesn’t work. Let’s organize a rally so we can sit down with the cops and talk to them and help them to see why they aren’t on the right side of that line. Once we have broken through to them with the message of peace, hope and understanding, the battle will be on a completely different footing. It will then be time to be in charge and put into effect all this hard work leading up to that moment.

Talk to a cop today and make him/her see whose side they should be on.

Planting in the Wasteland

Television has a vast influence on our lives.  How could it not?  According to the Census Bureau, the average American over the age of 12 watches 4.7 hours of television per day.  This was as of 2008, and reports suggest television viewing is on the rise.  The Main Four, a publication by Howell High School Students, in January of 2011, reported that the average teenager watches 4 hours of television per day – not counting the 2 hours a day spent on the computer playing video games.

While I don’t think the above information is healthy or heartening, I am not here to rant about the negative effects of television viewing.  I don’t want to credit television with making teenagers more prone to violence, promiscuity, or drug use.  That would take more copious research and abstract reasoning than I (a recently retired high school teacher) am willing to do.  Rather, I would like to report on the influence on teens that I was able to observe by asking a few simple questions of graduating seniors.

The first question I would ask was, “So, what are you doing next year?” The overwhelming answer was, “I am going to college.” This prompted my second question, “What are you planning to study?” The answer, with baffling frequency, was, “Forensic Science.”  The first time I heard this response, I think I literally stepped back a few paces.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why this lovely and bright young lady was opting to spend her life amidst the ick and the dead.  When forensic science started to be a regular answer, I realized that only television could make this most unromantic profession seem like it was not only a plausible career, but one with an allure.

In my rather unscientific way, I trace the trend (at least in the U.S.) back to Quincy, M.E.  The show starred Jack Klugman as a medical examiner who gave some glamour to the job of forensic scientist by staring, with a deadpan expression, into the camera and stating, “Forensic science is an exact science; it doesn’t lie.”  And, of course, he always caught the criminal.  Then, of course, the Law and Order franchise came along and used forensic science as part of their formula.   Today there are a proliferation of shows in which forensic science is at the center, notably, all the variations of CSI.  In fact, it is difficult to turn on the television today without seeing a latex clad hand holding a pair of tweezers; and the pair of tweezers is pulling something off of a bloody or jaundiced body.

This gives me an idea.  If television can make forensic science look glamorous, what can’t it do?  My particular proposal is for a show that would glamorize environmental science and scientists.  There are many causes and viewpoints I espouse, but without a planet to work things out on, what is the point?  I think it is our most important issue.  And it is definitely underrepresented on television.

All we would need to do to make this possible is to use the same formula from existing popular shows and apply it to this new venue.  Drama, of course, is at the heart of every successful crime show.  What greater drama is there than a dying planet?  There is also the drama of what happens when we don’t pay attention to the planet: numerous oil spills, nuclear meltdowns, hurricanes, earthquakes and tornados. And this is just the tip of the disappearing iceberg. Crime shows also invite in the viewing audience by presenting them with a mystery or puzzle.  What if we invited the audience into the current conundrums in environmental science?  Biofuel or solar power? How will we provide clean water to an overpopulated planet?  Will we let the pipeline dissect the United States even though scientists think this will be the beginning of the end?

The main thing that makes any narrative show work is the community we are invited into.  Every show from Quincy to CSI is a little bit of a soap opera with a lot of science thrown on top.  This is only natural as we are social creatures.  I have no objection to casting our new show (let’s call it 350) with handsome and adept actors.  Why not?  Then we invent enough of a complicated personal life for each character so that our viewers are enticed. Of course, we include characters of different ethnic and racial backgrounds as well as differences in outlook and sexual orientation.  This is not only to draw in all types, but to express what the world of environmental science looks like, or at least what it must look like if we are to survive.

Now I know that most of the students who told me that they were going to study forensic science will change their course of study. This will most likely happen when they find out that their real future looks nothing like what they see on television.  After all, most law enforcements units have nowhere near the budget they would need to provide all the equipment we see on these shows.  Most of these students will wind up in law enforcement, or as science teachers, or in a totally unrelated field.  But, by at least trying out this course of study, all of them will have a broader and deeper understanding of science.  And that can’t be bad.  I want the same thing to happen for environmental studies.  We will be lucky if we get a little swell in the upcoming crop of environmental scientists.  But wouldn’t it be great if a large sector of the public had an increased awareness of environmental issues?

So, how about it?  Any screenwriters out there willing to make this a reality?  The hardest part, of course, will be finding sponsors that have nothing at all whatsoever to do will big oil!

Suzanne Pyrch can be reached at supyr@earthlink.net

Before Women’s Rights

Jacquelyn Judd

I was fifteen years old in 1962 when my eyes were brutally opened to the results of illegal abortion: I watched as my
high school classmate/friend bled to death slowly as the result of a botched back-alley abortion. I was to blame–
I and three or four other friends, including her long-time boyfriend. We had collectively decided that an abortion
was the best solution for her pregnancy. This was a big secret to keep. Any abortion was illegal.

In those days a woman (whether she was fifteen or thirty-years old) had few options when she was unwed and pregnant. No matter what “choice” she might make, furthermore, she was already a sinner (in any church).
We were not branded with a blazing A on our foreheads anymore, but we were branded for life emotionally.
Thus the veil of secrecy was the most important part of her pregnancy. It is important to realize that we had
no pregnancy preventatives then except rubbers, which no one liked to use, and diaphragms, I guess (I’ve never
seen one). Every woman that I knew who was having sexual relations douched to prevent pregnancy–not at all
effective. No one was working on that problem. Women were expected to “behave themselves.”

Here were the choices: (1) adoption, which meant, for the teenager, that her parents would find out, and others would
figure it out as well; (2) an expensive back-alley abortion in a secret–and most often very unsterile, filthy–environment;
or if she had no money, (3) she could try to abort the fetus herself. Various manners of accomplishing the latter were
spread as rumors are spread–no one had any proof that these actions were successful. Such actions included douching
with Draino, I remember, or other acidic solutions, but the most popular of the DIY methods was using a hanger (wire,
of course), straightening it out, inserting it through the cervix, and scraping the womb. We knew the dangers of using a hanger:
Puncture wounds, if not fatal, almost guaranteed permanent sterility.

My girlfriend and her boyfriend, although only 15- and 17-years old, planned to marry some day, and they wanted to have
children–then. Also, the fact that my girlfriend was only 15 (underaged) and her boyfriend was 17 meant that if her
pregnancy were discovered, he could be charged with statutory rape. We chose the most secretive and “safest”
method: We would seek out an abortionist.

Most often, abortionists were disreputable male MDs. Most women weren’t allowed into the medical field at that time.
The abortionist found for my friend was quite obviously either a dope-addict or a drunk, she told us. He wanted no
identification from her, and he withheld his identity from her. There was little furniture in the cheap hotel room
but a table and a bright floor lamp. She handed him the money and laid down on the table. The whole, very painful,
abortion took about ten minutes, and she was sent on her way.

And now we were watching her bleed. Like most naive teenagers, I suppose, we expected the bleeding to stop.
When it didn’t we tried to block the flow with towels. We didn’t consider aloud that we should call an ambulance. Her
secret would really be exposed if she went to the hospital. She didn’t offer that solution herself
as she grew weaker and weaker.

Finally we realized we had to call her parents. They got there just before her heart stopped beating.

There was no mention of her pregnancy ever again. There was no autopsy. There was no investigation.
She was quietly laid to rest. She, like her fetus, was gone. We, her friends and her parents and perhaps especially
her boyfriend, were stunned and silent. Forever. Like she.

This event occurred in St. Louis, MO. Jacquelyn Judd can be reached at jacquelynjudd@yahoo.com