from the publisher

october 7, 2001     

Dear readers,

Much has happened since the release of our last issue on cars. For most of us, the world and our lives have changed, and On the Page offers its condolences and sympathy to those who have suffered loss in the past month.

We feel very fortunate to put together a magazine that, I believe, reveals a bit of humanity and chronicles in some fashion the way we live our lives. This month we offer short stories, essays, and more on encounters.

A few months back, we received a wonderful, manually-typed story by writer John Shaw entitled Home Plate, about youth, age, and lust among participants in a retirees' writing workshop. Filmmaker Kate Haug travels the country's budget beauty salons to reveal more than her bikini line in The Geography of Waxing. Heidi Zeiger's photographs in What We Touch capture the intersections and spaces between people and their surroundings. And in Quid Pro Quo, poet I. Halpern touches on a moment of separation and connection at the end of a marriage.

In the coming weeks, look for an interview on sex, drugs, and the CIA; short stories about ill-advised road trips and the power of a hat; poems on childhood visions and the games adults play; and other ephemera.

In closing, I had a French History professor at U.C. Berkeley who finished the unit on the Holocaust with a reading from The Plague. When I became a teacher, I learned to steal from everyone, and I took this same ending for the close of my World War II chapter. While my eighth graders didn't always get everything in Camus' novel—there are a lot of big words, even in translation—they always seemed to get the gist of it. They particularly tended to like the part about people who aren't saints but strive their utmost to be "healers." Often they argued against, but ended up agreeing with, the idea that "we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise." Me too.

All the best,

nada