'Preserved in the Documents of the Time'

I’m sorry, but I still have a few things I want to say about The Broadsheet. “Full of broken thoughts/ That I cannot repair.” I’ll do one more post and then probably drop the subject for another thirty years. Unless I want to put in one of my old Book Reviews, or something.

One of the things that struck me is that I wondered if any of my contributors even remembered their stuff from forty years ago. I mean, probably Alan Peschke does, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had his own file box on the subject somewhere. Wylie Reeves has passed away. Does Kathleen Moore remember Pegasus? Does John have any more than general memories about The Goblin? There may be some things that I think even Peschke would rather forget.  I know there’s some work I did that I would. But we were all so much younger then, struggling to find our way. And memory gets overwritten.

What strikes me now is how cocky I was, so ready to lay down the law about ‘my’ genre. While many of the positive book reviews covered classic books and established masters, the reviews of the more contemporary, low-level Fantasy that I was more or less forced to read by circumstances were gleeful occasions to let loose my bile and spout my own theories about art and life, not considering judging them on the level of mere entertainments. Or even as journeyman works. Dennis L. McKiernan, whose The Iron Tower Trilogy (TIT) drew the worst of my ire, went on to have a long and improved career with works that are now generally critically approved and he himself considered 'a Master of High Fantasy.' Not that that makes the Trilogy any better.

But what looking back on The Broadsheet does for me personally is that it helps me remember the mindset of the Early Young Me. I mean I still have memories of myself, but time tends to edit and bury the ‘scabby, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented’ conditional self of the time. There, in The Broadsheet, I can see the shyly vain and show-offy guy I was at the time, and to some extent still am. But that exact version of Me remains, visible perhaps only to my eyes, stuck in the amber of those pages. In some ways it’s better than a photograph.