The personal essay has some enemies. Oh, sure, everyone loves Montaigne, the father of the essay as we know it, but the modern essay, the one so often written by women, is disdained as too personal, too navel-gazing, and altogether too revelatory. I had an editor who once mocked Elizabeth Wurtzel, a writer known for nothing if not her intense self-absorption, by asking if, for her next trick, she was going to send in an x-ray of her liver?

I laughed along with her but I also thought, hold on now. I liked hearing about Wurtzel’s inner life.  The appearance of such a flamboyant first person is a  poke in the ribs. Ah, we think, roused from our torpor, now we are going to get a glimpse of what is truly what. As Montaigne himself said, the goal of the essay is utter frankness. 

For decades, I made a living as a feature writer at a handful of glossy magazines. I would fly around the world interviewing celebrities like Serena Williams or Michelle Obama. Afterward I would listen to hours of tape trying to fashion something that felt less like a workaday newspaper article and more like something the subject herself might have written, if she were a writer. Those articles paid the bills but they so often fell flat. Most celebrities won’t even let you into their homes, let alone reveal their true inner-selves.  I can’t blame them. Who wants some punk writer analyzing the contents of your bookshelf? 

I much preferred the essay where the “I” allowed me to be both subject and narrator at the same time. Then the internet came along, sucking all the advertising dollars out of magazines into a vast vortex called social media.  Much has been written on this topic and I have nothing much to add except this-- once upon a time, I got $10,000 for an essay. Today, I’d be lucky to get $150. 

One night, during the Covid epidemic, Bex O’Brian, a friend and fellow writer came to dinner with her husband. the writer Charles Siebert. After the usual bemoaning of our vanished world and not a little vodka, she suggested we start our own online magazine. I did what I always do when people suggest I write for free, I quoted Samuel Johnson.  “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” But I promised to think about it, mostly to keep her happy.

I resented Bex before I ever met her because her first husband, the writer Francisco Goldman, once told me she was “the next Joan Didion.”  Also, I’d seen her at parties and she was quite beautiful and vivacious (not Didionesque at all). But then I met her and saw that it was impossible to hate her. Not only was she one of the funniest women I have ever met, she was also a true writer. Despite early years of only intermittent success (due, partly, to her dyslexia), O’Brian still got up every day and wrote. Today, she has published two novels. (One more than me, but who is counting?)

I used to think it was crazy of her to keep at it in the face of so much early rejection but over time, I came to see that this was actually her superpower. For Bex, writing is as essential as breathing. She wasn’t going to let a little thing like rejection get in the way of making art.

A few days after our dinner, she called to say she had a name for the magazine. Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.  It had come to her after reading an article in the New York Times about the unlikely journey of the late writers’ remains and how they had languished for years in a filing cabinet at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore. I loved it. Like most people, I didn’t really know Parker’s writing beyond the bon mots for which she is famous. “Men seldom make passes at women who wear glasses!”  But I had a generalized idea of a woman who was talented, self-destructive, and drank too much. The perfect patron saint.

We began discussing the details of our new publication. Monthly? Or weekly?  Themes or random?  She roped in a friend of hers who ran an artists colony in France that had been shuttered for Covid-19 to help with the design. We were like the giddy neighborhood kids who put a sheet against the garage wall and put on a play.   I watched a lot of You Tube videos on how to build a website and learned what the rest of the world has known for decades--it is tedious but doable. For less than a hundred dollars, anyone can have a website.

At first, we thought we would just publish our own stuff but who, besides our family and friends, would sign up for that?  So we began reaching out to friends and former colleagues. At first, I was sheepish asking people to contribute for free. Were they going to go all Samuel Johnson on me? Nobody blinked an eye. Like me, they had all been beaten down by the new  Grub street. As Judy McGuire, who wrote the brilliant essay “Crazy Cat Woman” in our Animals issue said, “Frankly, the pay is so low these days, I’d rather just write for free.”  

As we began to get more and more submissions, not only from friends, but also writers across the country, our number of visitors began to rise exponentially. I’m not talking Kardashian numbers, but our most recent issue had 10k views.  For our contributors, middle-aged or older women who have seen a thing or two,  the act of writing is the act of living more purely distilled. Many, have spent their careers shepherding other writer’s work and now, in their retirement, they’ve got something to say. The longer we live, the more memories settle deep within, emitting an invisible, occasionally noxious gas.  By giving them form, we set ourselves free. We elongate some things, cut others short.  We probe the seams underneath for the weak spot, hoping the puncture of our attention will allow all the pent-up emotion to rush through the hole where it escapes with a long sigh.  In the end, that is the reward. (In other words, we don’t pay.)— Rebecca Johnson