The Girl With Plumed Eyes: The story behind the story

I wrote this story in college, for Esther Broner's class. I don't remember what the specific assignment was, but I remember doodling an eye surrounded by feathers.

It was a breakthrough piece for me, the first time I'd consciously used a traditional folk or fairy tale form as the structure for a story. I'd used imaginative, fantastic or pre-industrial material plenty of times before, but never grounded it with "once upon a time." This solved a LOT of problems in my writing -- the tendency to moodle around with details of what's on the mantlepiece instead of getting ON with it, difficulty deciding what incidents ought to go in or stay out, inability to figure out an END... And I think it was easier for readers to connect with, having a familiar form for such unfashionable subjects.

In any case, it gave me my fifteen minutes of fame on the Sarah Lawrence writing scene -- when it was appeared in the college literary annual, people shouted to me across campus, "Great story!" It also was what got me chosen as one of the three folks representing the school in the annual Henfield literary competition. I was blown out of my mind just by being chosen as a representative of Esther's class, there were so many fabulous folks writing there -- to be chosen out of the whole writing program was beyond my power to comprehend.

It is probably one of the most praised stories to never have been published (other than the college annual, of course). I lost count of the number of times I got rejection slips saying, "My god, this is fabulous, but we don't publish this sort of thing." The cumulation of the this-sort-of-thing syndrome is what ultimately led me to abandon submitting short stories at all. It began to feel like throwing postage down a rat hole. To get the right editor on the right day with the right piece seemed a discouragingly remote possibility. I did get a few things published, mostly in small women's literary mags, god love 'em, and once I made twenty-five bucks American. Now the internet gives one a more direct line to readers.