How to handle seeing my own words on these pages?
The bottom line? I have become officially insufferable.
I mean, I’ve had stories and essays in a lot of fine publications over the years of my long and happy career. But The Atlantic? Nahh, never going to happen. Yet there it is.
Up until now the pinnacle of my literary success was reached a few years ago when my Brooklyn lawyer friend Peter Flemming, with whom I had a running competition for most letters published in the New York Times, was going over fact-checks with a Times editor. He mentioned our competition to the editor who replied, “Oh, Fran — she’s one of our regulars.” Which, I had thought ever since, would be on my tombstone if I were planning to have such a thing (unfortunately, I am not.)
But now here is my byline, right smack on the same e-page with the byline of Anne Applebaum. Eliot Cohen. Hua Hsu and Jason Liebowitz. If that’s not literary validation I don’t know what is. They may not be writing home about being on the same page with Fran Moreland Johns; I get that. But they probably don’t have Big Head issues either.
I have Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to thank for all this. The idea that I would ever thank RFKJr for ANYthing other than his retirement from public view is nothing short of ludicrous. The man is a threat to humankind. Evil doesn’t even begin to cover it, IMHO.
I said as much in a letter to The Atlantic in response to their excellent cover story (that piece was by Michael Scherer, but who’s name-dropping?) on RFKJr. In the same inbox with a message saying they would be running my letter was an email from an Atlanticeditor, my new best friend Adrienne, asking if I’d be interested in writing an expanded essay on the subject. Took me about seven seconds to hit Reply.
And thus began one of the happiest writing experiences of my literary life. I was asked almost apologetically if the fee would be sufficient — please don’t tell them I’d have done it for $25; later when I apologized on my own behalf for ineptitude with the online reimbursement forms I received an immediate response from an actual person telling me everybody had issues with those forms and that he enjoyed my description of them.
Over the several weeks of writing/editing/etc — these folks fact check their fact checkers — whenever I’d get a copy of something checked or edited its subject head would say things like “Your wonderful article.” I’m thinking of collaging and framing these.
I still haven’t seen my article in print, other than the page proofs (above.) Those of us in the dying breed of print magazine readers still don’t really believe anything until we see it on an actual piece of paper. But surely The Atlantic won’t change its mind and pull my article before the print edition goes in the mail?
Now if only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr were smart enough to read The Atlantic.
