When I was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the seventies, my students thought Century Review was the zenith of literary journals. It was first called New Century Review, and one of my students published a short story in it; this one short story seems to have marked her zenith as a fiction writer. I don’t believe she ever published other fiction. That literary journal had a similarly short life span, lasting only a decade. I don’t mean to sound irreverent about New Century Review, or just plain Century Review; some very good writers were published in it, my former student among them.

I was never published in that literary journal. I didn’t write poetry or essays or short stories; the fiction I submitted to Century Review was excerpted from novels in progress, which I’d edited to read like short stories. Or that was what I hoped. One of my rejections said, “This reads like an excerpt from something longer, or like something that should be longer.” This was indisputably true, but the rejection pissed me off.

Though that literary journal is long gone, I remain most grateful it existed. It was where I first read Emily MacPherson’s fiction. I was aware that Em had scripted Nora’s monologues for Two Dykes, One Who Talks; I knew that Em composed many of her pantomimes in writing. It hurt my feelings that I hadn’t known Em wrote fiction. I hadn’t even known her full name—just that she’d been an Emily, who was shortened to an Em.

I read almost to the end of Emily MacPherson’s first short story before I knew Em was the author. The histrionics of Em’s pantomime performances were absent from her third-person omniscient voice. A teenage girl is fitfully dreaming; she is sexually attracted to one of her girlfriends, but she doesn’t dare to make the first move, not knowing if her girlfriend is similarly attracted to her. She wakes from her erotic dream to discover her mother in her bedroom—her mom is sitting at the foot of her bed, sobbing.

“I’m an awful mother, I’m a worse wife, and if you have my genes, you’re doomed!” the poor girl’s mother tells her.

The next night is even better. This time, the teenage daughter is dreaming about her cloddish boyfriend. It’s okay when he touches her boobs, but she knows he wants her to touch him down there, and the poor girl wants no part of his penis. Upon my second reading, I saw this scene as an obvious precursor to Em’s penis pantomime—her depiction of an approaching penis as a one-eyed eel. Not upon my first reading, when the narrative detachment and restraint of Emily MacPherson’s fiction did not connect me to Em as an unbridled pantomimist—Em’s full-body slither, her mouth in the shape of the letter O, a sightless eye.