WRITE magazine (1 Viewer)

If only one copy turns up, ever: $25,000.

I get excited and exagerate. That $25,000 value for Write may be too high. That's if it's unique and his earliest known published work and cool (great story, plus unknown photo or telling author bio or whatever) and at auction with fierce bidding, etc. More soberly, I'd guess it would go for $15,000 to $20,000.
 
I don't know if your first guess was far off, considering that a hardcover first of Post Office with a painting goes for around half of that, and a bookless painting just sold (apparently?) for $9k.

If Write exists and if it is of the general time we believe it is, it would be his first poetry and prose publications, so it wouldn't get any more unique, rare and significant than that.
 
unfortunately, when i was visiting Montfort this weekend and asked him about 'WRITE'-magazine, he said, he doesn't know of any Buk-appearence in a mag of that name.

of course, this is no proof that he wasn't in it. just another bad sign.
 
Adding a short-lived "amateur" writing mag to your list of publications hardly enhances it. That he mentions Write along with the vastly more esteemed Story magazine means he had the poem and story accepted by Write. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Whether he ever saw a copy, or whether they ever got around to actually publishing his work is unknown. He was not in the final, unprinted edition, so the assumption is he was in a volume that has so far never been found. That kind of sums up the Write story.

Until a copy of the phantom v.1 no.2 is found, the question of whether he was actually in Write is unanswerable.
 
If it helps, in pre-internet days I had a long running disagreement with an expert on pulp sci-fi magazines that an oddity called The Shaver Mystery Magazine even existed. I swore it did, that I'd seen copies for sale in rare book dealers' catalogs, and he insisted it did not exist, that he knew the title of every pulp sci-fi magazine ever published, and he'd never seen or heard of it or heard of anyone that had seen or heard of it except for me. Well, along comes the Web and now it pops up on eBay maybe once a year. I still don't know how many issues were published, but I have one copy and could have bought others at relatively low prices. So maybe Write is rarer than that, but it's out there somewhere, and it will turn up eventually, that missing volume with Bukowski (perhaps) in it. Keep looking.
 
Do you think he kept everything though? He often talked about people coming to his place to hang out and stealing his books, so who knows.

I have songs on 11 albums, own one or two of them. I'm with you on this, things vanish all the time. Where the hell is this stuff though? I've only read 22-23 of his books, so there's still more to go, but it's intriguing that stuff would be gone like that:confused:
 
No news on this search? >mjp, i agree adding an ephemeral amateur mag does not add much to the CV and I think Buk was being honest here. however...if i was in need of giving myself some credibility i might add a fictional piece to my CV, especially as in those days searching out things pre-inet was very tough. after all "sure, i was in an issue 1941. a copy? nah, got stolen..." hard to gainsay. However (again) if I was going to embellish I wouldn't choose a mag that actually *existed* and could be checked.

How do you think Buk came across Write? Issue in a library and submitted after reading a copy? Ideas?
 
How do you think Buk came across Write? Issue in a library and submitted after reading a copy? Ideas?
I think we touched on this before. The magazine was published during the time Bukowski was at LA City College, so a creative writing teacher or someone like that may have been informed by the publisher that a new magazine for amateurs was being published.

If it is ever found, I'm quite confident the Bukowski work in it would be crap. Still...
 
Before the Internet, one of the most common ways you found out about a little mag was in ads or listings of items received in other magazines. He may have heard about it that way. Not too many titles made their way into libraries -- mostly just the big quarterlies, the prestigious reviews. Write was likely too amaturish to be purchased by most libraries, although I could be wrong on that, not having see a copy.
 
I came across an interview that Kevin Ring of Beat Scene did with Buk in late 1990.
Ring: Can you recall the first thing you had published and how you felt about it?

Buk: No, I can't recall. Can remember my first major publication, a short story in Whit Burnett's and Martha Foley's Story magazine, 1944. I had been sending them a couple of short stories a week for maybe a year and a half. The story they finally accepted was mild in comparison to the others. I mean in terms of content and style and gamble and exploration and all that. Got another story accepted about that time in Carese Crosby's Portfolio and after that, I packed it in.
The fact that he stipulated his first "major" publication to be Story would indicate to me that there was at least one other 'minor' publication prior to that.

Not that it brings us any closer to Write, but still interesting.
 
Yup. This is something I discussed in the diss. We will never know if B. was just mis-remembering things in this interview for Beat Scene, or if he had been in other periodicals prior to Story... unless a copy of Write #2 turns up and solves this puzzle.
 
I agree. His wording "my first major publication" suggests he may have been published in several lesser magazines before STORY.

Write is probably not the sort of magazine that libraries would have actively sought out, but it could turn up as part of a collection of some writer or editor/publisher's books and papers.
 
"Internet detectives have been searching for years..." [Link deleted, article and website are gone.]
 
Last edited:
Nice piece.

"So, was Bukowski, a fledgling writer, just artificially padding his resume in that one publication?"

I really doubt that. If Bukowski were to make up a magazine, he'd give it a more lively title. He'd call it "Witch's Tit" or "Horehound of Hell" or something like that.

"Write" is such an obvious, cornball amatuer name that it rings true. I bet there was an exclamation point after it: "Write!" To denote the excitment of the writers.
 
What still sounds like a problem (to me) in the original statement is, that IF he was in the same 'WRITE'-magazin, that We know of, it should've been AFTER the 'Story' publication.
But this is an option, that we've ruled out for sure, right?

"I was FIRST published in 'Story' in 1944. SINCE THEN, a story and poem in 'Write'."
 
...it should've been AFTER the 'Story' publication.
But this is an option, that we've ruled out for sure, right?
Yes.

The last issue of Write appears to have preceded Bukowski's appearance in Story by two years. So if he was in Write it would be his first publication (aside from the letter to the editor in the L.A. City College paper).
And his blurb above would be incorrect.
And it would be even more valuable than we previously thought.
And we'll probably never find it anyway.
;)

But if it does exist it would be a hell of a thing to see. It would be a hell of a thing to see a copy of a copy of scan of a copy for that matter...
 
What still sounds like a problem (to me) in the original statement is, that IF he was in the same 'WRITE'-magazin, that We know of, it should've been AFTER the 'Story' publication.
But this is an option, that we've ruled out for sure, right?

According to that bio, yes. According to other sources, no.

It's great to see this thread coming back to life every few months...

FYI, I kind of gave up on this one. I tried to find it -and I tried hard since I did get a copy of the first issue- but there comes a time when you just have to move on.
 
Okay. I'm just bumping this thread because this piece gets under my skin. I know that if any of us had news on this we'd be on here telling all. So.... any new ideas?
 
One way "Write" may be found is when Google searching becomes smarter, uses artificial intelligent, so you can building more meaning into the results. Currently, if you search for "Write+Bukowski+magazine", you'll get a zillion hits. If you add "+amature", you'll also get porn listings. What is needed is the ability to search for website content that mentions Bukowski in the same context as a periodical called "Write Magazine" (or whatever it was called), and that mag was published during the 1940s, and it's not us talking about it here. The key is context, a way to zero in on the relevant content and filter out the garbage. Then you might find a mention of the publication with details on what issue, what date, page number, or a copy for sale on a bookseller's list, or a holding in a library, or biographical info on the editor that helps us track down a copy. The damned thing may even be posted in PDFs somewhere on-line, but how do you find it using current search engines? Not that I've tried any besides Google in years.
 
when Google searching becomes smarter...
Google has hundreds of specialized searches (scholar.google.com, etc.), and operators to do advanced searches through the regular google.com interface (try this for example: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "stooges" - it lists only WMA and MP3 files from the artist named at the end of the query).

Google can do a lot if you learn how to massage it.
 
I've done some "Advanced" Google searches but haven't really fully explored it. Does it have a NEAR function, where it only finds a term if it is within so many words of another term? Years ago, there was a now forgotten search engine that had that feature, and it was great at sorting out context. You could set the number of words that separated terms. I should spend some time and find out what Google actually will do.

Okay, I just used the Advanced search/Scholar search tool on the whole web and narrowed it down to 4 irrelevant websites. Maybe there's nothing out there now on this topic, although that could change some day. When you filter out everything on this forum, all the websites that talk about "how to write magazine articles", etc., there's nothing left about Buk in the old Write mag -- except I haven't actually checked the real name of the magazine, which was something about "...a magazine for amateur writers". So I'll need to recheck that later...
 
Does it have a NEAR function, where it only finds a term if it is within so many words of another term?
Not NEAR, specifically (Bing uses that, but I don't use Bing), but AROUND:

pizza AROUND(2) restaurant

will return pages with pizza and restaurant separated by two or fewer words. Note that AROUND must be written in all upper case and that the order of the search terms does not matter. Search terms can also be phrases, provided the phrase is enclosed in quotes.
 
I've been reading this forum discussion about Bukowski's Holy Grail off and on over the years. Recently I thought to check in, to see what was happening with the hunt. After seeing that the last post was June of 2011. I guess it's not going so well, huh?
 
I had completely forgotten about this: I did further research on Write and tracked down copies of all 3 issues. It took me a long time to locate a copy of Write #2, only to find out Bukowski was not in that issue. Yeah, too bad, really.

Anyway, that does not mean Bukowski was not published in Write --there might be yet another little called Write with his poems and stories.
 
I had completely forgotten about this: I did further research on Write and tracked down copies of all 3 issues. It took me a long time to locate a copy of Write #2, only to find out Bukowski was not in that issue. Yeah, too bad, really.

Anyway, that does not mean Bukowski was not published in Write --there might be yet another little called Write with his poems and stories.
Quite the opposite! It pretty much means we've been trying to track down the wrong Write.

It is great to hear someone finally tracked down a copy of Write Magazine #2. However, it’s also too bad it didn't have Bukowski's poems or/& story.

What are the chances that there is another magazine called Write and that it was in existence around the same time period that would contain Bukowski's early published work? Sadly, I believe the odds are not in our favor...
 
Responding to a post that's more than 10 years old is interesting; in this day and age of immediacy, it's almost the equivalent of writing a letter to Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, your input is important, but I had to smile when seeing that the original post from nymark was in April 2006. I'm going to pull On Writing out to read this, but it strikes me that perhaps Buk got the title of the publication wrong. Perhaps some derivative of "Write?"
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top