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By Root 1238 0

is sheer, abject terror, especially since I hassled her for months about doing the reading and never got a direct reply. She was supposed to be teaching a summer class at Harvard, but when I called her department no one seemed to know if she was in Cambridge or not, and when I tried her in Vermont, where she lives, no one answered the phone, and when I asked for her e-mail address, her department secretary said she didn’t use e-mail, so finally I resorted to sending her requests via someone at the Review whose brother’s Pilates instructor was married to someone who had once taken a creative writing class with her (or something like that), and eventually I got a response via this person’s second cousin saying she would come, but as the hour approaches I am anything but confident.

As a result, driving through New England I’m too stressed to eat or listen to music—all I can do is stomp on the accelerator and lean as far forward as I can, as if by doing so I can will the car faster. The state of Connecticut is so tiny that normally I feel as if I can see across it, but today it feels as wide as Kansas. Every ten minutes or so I calculate what speed I need to maintain in order to make it to Cambridge on time (according to the latest computations, two hundred and ten miles per hour), which gives me a horrible feeling—not just the physical sensation of Kay’s Honda shuddering like the space shuttle on reentry but the uncertainty, the not knowing, the feeling of Will I make it? And if not, when will I know? What will I do then? Stop? Give up? Run away?

Yet as unpleasant as it can be, you can’t deny that this sort of seat-of-your-pants existence, which is what George cultivated at the Review, has its benefits. From day to day you never really knew how things were going to turn out, and that kept you focused on the task at hand, not next year, next month or even tomorrow. It also kept you alive to the smaller pleasures, like the discovery of a new voice, or holding a brand-new issue in your hands, or even something as prosaic (yet wonderfully satisfying) as proofreading a story. You couldn’t be distracted by money because there wasn’t any, and there wasn’t the zombielike drive of large institutions to exist solely for existence’s sake. To escape inertia, the only fuel was inspiration and a kind of back-against-the-wall, holy-crap-I’m-not-qualified-for-this excitement.

In the anthology that the reading series is celebrating, my favorite piece, an excerpt from a story called “Nighthawks” by the Chicago writer Stuart Dybek, captures something of this heady feeling: the apparently mild-mannered narrator, a man driving through the Great Plains, stops by a restaurant late at night for a cup of coffee, and there he happens to meet a “gay divorcée,” who invites him to follow her home. Things subsequently turn surreal as the man finds himself chasing the woman through the wheat fields, driving faster and faster and barely maintaining control of his car as he wonders how in the world he ended up in such a situation and what he’s doing. In a mere two and a half pages, the story manages to build up, store and then release a powerful charge.

That kind of spontaneous, in-the-moment energy is what being an amateur is about, and as I myself drive like a maniac through New England, it occurs to me that frustration with George had steered me into doubt of the amateur ethos, but the store had steered me back. The store, and of course George himself, who’d been so on my case last year, but whom as a result of all that sparring I now finally feel like I understand. I’m not sure if the Review can go on the way it did under him, but if I had the choice between being an amateur and being a professional, I know which one I’d pick.

Of course, if I don’t get up to Cambridge it won’t matter, because I’ll have shamed myself out of whatever chance I have of holding on to my job, and unfortunately that’s precisely how it looks like things are going to shake out. But then at five-thirty a twelve-lane toll plaza signifying the Massachusetts border comes into