July/August 2011

To celebrate Portland Magazine’s first 25 years, and to get ready for the next 25, I deep-cleaned my desk. Until I reached my lower left-hand drawer, that is, where I keep tokens that defy filing to such a degree that their only commonality is “Contents of Lower Left-Hand Drawer.”

Let’s take a look. Below the reeling, bombastic 11-page letter from Rudy Vallee, below the Last Will & Testament of Bette Davis, below Priscilla Presley’s telephone number and the squirrel call my grandfather gave to me in 1962, below the chipped arrowhead my father picked up as a young man at Deerfield, Massachusetts, is a cover letter dated January 10, 2000, from my old friend Fred Bonnie, along with his unpublished short story, “Engage Me!” He’d submitted “A Dirty Little Secret” along with “Engage Me!” and I’d marked “Secret” for publication but kept hold of “Engage Me!” in case I might need it, say, 11 years later.

I remember scanning it before, but reading it today, I find myself completely engaged. I think it ended up in my lower left-hand drawer because Fred Bonnie suffered from a heart attack while driving home from a lecture and died later in 2000, a terrible crisis for his young family. I didn’t know what to do with this story. I couldn’t send it back. I couldn’t throw it away.

So it stayed in my drawer, lower left, keeping itself awake at night, aware of its unrealized power, waiting for you.

When he sent this story to us, Bridgton-born Fred Bonnie (1945-2000) was a shooting star. His short story collection Detecting Metal had just been named a Booklist Editor’s Choice among 28 titles by heavyweights like John Updike, Lorrie Moore, John Irving, Cormac McCarthy, Alice McDermott, and Philip Roth. His novel Thanh Ho Delivers had just rolled off the press. A publisher was combining his first two short story collections, Squatter’s Rights and Displaced Persons, into a new title,Widening the Road. And everybody loved his Too Hot and Other Maine Stories and Food Fights, foreshadowing urban America’s obsession with cuisine. We’re proud to have first published the title story from Food Fights among nine stories we’ve brought to you by this fine writer.

Who knew Fred was standing beside the abyss when he wrote, “Colin, you and I first corresponded in 1985. Congratulations on keeping Portland Magazine going all this time. I’ve always looked forward to receiving it–one of those magazines I open immediately and sit down with for an hour or two. Please tell Bill Barry hello for me. I hope you like one or two of the enclosed stories and can use them in Portland Magazine.”

Every summer, we publish fiction by a literary star. We’ve brought you startling summer stories by Rick Moody, Sebastian Junger, Ann Hood, and Mameve Medwed. The virtue of “Engage Me!” is that it cheerfully addresses a smaller canvas, like a plein-air painting, winning smiles and sending a reader back for an immediate second read. Like left field, beautiful things can come out of a lower left-hand drawer. This story, warm and capable, is yours, Fred, and your wife’s and daughter’s. Because no one ever writes, or dreams, alone.