The Marvelous Tale of a Writing Windfall
“Surprise! Here’s a Fat Check!”
It began with an intriguing e-mail message from a Canadian college professor.
“The Quebec Ministry of Education,” she wrote, “chose your short story Magic Jane for inclusion on a standardized test of literary analysis and written expression.”
She was writing, she said, to tell me how much she’d enjoyed my story, even though, as a result of its being on the test, she’d had to read and evaluate hundreds of student essays about it.
Wait a minute. One of my stories was being used to evaluate Canadians?
I hadn’t submitted this story to the Quebec Ministry of Education. I’d never even heard of the Quebec Ministry of Education!
On the Ministry’s website, I learned that, indeed, it administers a standardized test to college English majors three times a year, and that Magic Jane had been included on the last test.
Raymond Carver, too
I’d published Magic Jane many years before, in the Puckerbrush Review, a Maine-based literary mag with a tiny circulation. I was “paid” two copies. A year later, I’d posted it on a website called Fictionaut, to make it available to online readers. (To read Magic Jane, click here.)
