From the Publisher

This is the third letter I have written you from this desk. It is the first one I have written knowing exactly what this magazine must practice.

Issue One’s letter was a deliberate proposal. There is a universal standard for fine fiction, I declared. Truth is its own standard, and it is experienced as catharsis.

We would publish only work that meets that standard, and while we were not for everyone, that foundation would be our strength. I meant every word. I also had no idea how true those words were, or what they would cost.

The second issue’s letter was written from inside a vortex. I built that issue around Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” and told you there is a force in every life that will not be reasoned with. What I did not tell you was how much of that issue was a distress signal. You will find the full account of that experience—personal and professional—in these pages.

Which brings us to this issue and its theme: deliberate practice.

Here is the question the whole issue turns on. When the whirlpool has your boat—when the plans are wreckage, the crew is gone, and the water is turning in a great circle—what, exactly, do you do? Not in general. Not in spirit. What do you practice, and how do you summon the strength to keep laboring?

Tim Grahl answers with the science. His essay lays out why a person can work diligently at writing—or any other learnable skill—for five, ten, twenty, forty years and never improve, and why that failure is never about talent. It is about the environment writers are told to learn in. The good news is that the environment can be transformed. The bad news is that the new environment, while optimized for skill acquisition, requires discomfort. There is no way around it. Seeking the truth hurts. That is why finding it is such a cathartic relief.

My essay, “Dead Letters,” answers with a deliberate clarification. It is the story of what happened to this magazine between the first masthead and this one—the aspirations, the revelations, the reckonings, and the restructuring of our entire enterprise down to the very bottom, with the recognition that it had to be resurrected from the sentence up. This issue is anchored, as every issue of The Standard is, by a masterwork. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was published anonymously in 1853 by a man the market wrecked and left for dead. Read the essay and you will learn why that story, of all the stories ever written, had to be the one at the deliberate center. I did not fully know myself until we assembled it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “The Solitude of Self” is the plainest statement I have ever read of the fact every writer must eventually face. No one can carry you across the threshold to the standard’s deliverance but you.

A word about the contents of this issue, and the absence of any original student fiction. When student work next appears in this magazine—and it will—it will be there because its author made the crossing to the standard themselves. I will not rework a student’s pages and present the result as their own. The writer must meet the standard. Nothing else counts. That was always the promise. Now it is also the practice—even when the practice means publishing an issue with no original fiction in it.

One more thing, and then I’ll let you in.

In these pages you will encounter the idea that a piece of true writing is a message in a bottle—written by someone in deep water, sealed, and cast into the current on the chance that it will find the one person whose life has prepared them to receive it.

This letter is no different. I’ve sealed it and cast it into the sound and fury as a faithful reminder that there is deep meaning to be had despite the incessant turbulence of circumstances beyond our control.

Shawn Coyne

Publisher, The Standard