Having lived in suburban California all my life, I have a hard head and soft feet. You learn early that there are things you should know, and if you don't know them you shouldn't let on. You won't get glass in your toes if you don't go barefoot, for example. It's the kind of place where you get shouted down with silence. Unhappiness is rewarded with acceptance. As long as we're all unhappy, we can all live together.

I graduated from U.C. San Diego with a BA in Writing and used it to go into public relations, then advertising, then marketing, then technical writing. I didn't cut it at any of those. I don't have the interpersonal skills to hold on to clients. I get bored easily. My memory is terrible.

I entered a graduate English program in 1990. The director of my graduate writing program took one look at my portfolio and swore to my face that as long as he was "breathing" I would not be allowed to graduate with an MFA. So I switched from Writing to Literature. Eventually, I dropped out of graduate school. I had the units and I had the requisite test scores on two of three subjects, but no one would sponsor my thesis project on e.e. cummings. I never found out why, nor did I pursue it aggressively. Admittedly, I was never able to grasp the classical method of poetry criticism, and I was not fond of meeting professors at their offices or their homes.

I started Pacific Coast Journal because I wanted to read good material. In 1990, by chance, I read a copy of The Antioch Review, and it shocked the Hell out of me. I was researching for a paper on James Joyce, and for some reason, this magazine came up. When you go through English programs in high school (and some colleges) you are led to believe that true literature stops around the time that To Kill a Mockingbird was published. Everything after that is either irrelevant or part of the scary unknown. I did not know that such magazines existed. The Antioch Review was good material. I didn't know before that such things were possible. So I started my own literary magazine. That was 1992.

Since then, I've managed to support that habit with various white collar jobs in Silicon Valley and San Diego. I've also done some ghostwriting. Books that I have written or contributed to have appeared on amazon.com and in K-12 educational materials catalogs. I write for both children and adults.

© 2002-2006 Stillson Graham and French Bread Publications