Gardner Dozois

When I was in high school I used to really believe that I had this whole writer thing in me. I’d send stories off to different magazines pretty regularly. I didn’t have any sense for where I fit on the literary continuum then. I’d mail anywhere. Esquire, Omni, Harper’s and others. One stood out in my mind, though. Isaac Asimov’s Fantasy and Science Fiction. I sent more work there than I think I sent anywhere else.

And whenever you mailed off a submission to it, you always addressed it to the editor: “Gardner Dozois.”

I even subscribed to Asimov’s for a couple years then, though I usually wasn’t able to keep up with it. I hadn’t written them in years until a few years ago when I tried to write a fantasy story that didn’t follow Tolkien. What I came up with was terrible. Not a bad concept, but a terrible story and the writing made me cringe when I re-read it a year or so later. As if I had somehow sunk back into my 15 year old self as I wrote it. I was surprised to see that Dozois was still at it, still the editor.

A few years later, I was looking at the dedication page of a collection of of short stories by Jonathan Lethem, and I saw that he had thanked Gardner Dozois, among others, for helping him out early on. It made me think of the magazine, so I checked it out and saw that, at last, it had a different editor. Dozois had moved on.

So.

Last night I was working late. Nothing new about that. I was calling through lists of my organization’s members in Philadelphia and trying to get them to come into our office and participate in helping us do voter ID and turn out for the upcoming election. Most of the people I was calling weren’t home, of course. It was a Friday night and we were calling home numbers.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the name “Gardner Dozois” on my list of members. Can it be, I thought? Well, how many “Gardner Dozois”’ can there be in the world?

So I dialed the number hoping that this would be one of the 3 in 20 that would find the proprietor at home. He was. I started the call like I would any other. I said my name, my organization and that I had a couple questions about the election. I asked him who he was voting for. He told me. Then I said I had a couple other questions for him.

The first one was, “Did you used to edit a science fiction magazine?”

He said he did. I laughed awkwardly and said something along the lines of “Holy Crap.”

I pretty much said everything wrong from that point on, but it doesn’t matter. That’s just sort of how it goes when you’re talking to a celebrity (even an underground celebrity). I asked him to come volunteer with us and I almost got him to, I think, but he checked with his wife.

(As an aside, if you’re ever asking strangers to do anything, you can pretty much guarantee that you know the answer if they check in with a significant other — it will be no).

Anyway, it was just a crazy thing. The weird thing about it is that that name had kind of become the name I think of when I think about my ongoing failure as a writer. I don’t blame the guy. I’m sure he would have loved to give me a shot, if I showed any promise. But I didn’t. So there you go. So, to me, it was still cool to talk to him.

The funny thing about it was that I just didn’t see any reason why I would ever hear the voice of Gardner Dozois. It’s a name that always meant something to me, but I never made it past his slush pile and never would. Then, randomly, because I spent last night calling strangers (and it hadn’t even been in my game plan to make calls last night), I did actually hear the voice of the guy who gave Jonathan Lethem a chance.

How about that?