It's a simple concept: Every story begins with the same line.
That's the premise of a Texas-based literary quarterly edited by David and Robin Labounty and aptly titled The First Line. Since its 1999 debut, each issue has provided a different opening sentence. In the Summer 2010 issue, all submissions started with "Paul and Miriam Kaufman met the old-fashioned way," then veered off into wildly different tracks.
Upon opening the yellow quarterly, the reader is faced with John Keel's version of Paul and Miriam, two supremely ugly individuals who get hitched after a drunken whirlwind where neither knew what the other actually looked like. So begins the first of Paul and Miriam's transformations as the reader flips through each story.
Robert R. Anderson presents Paul as an 81-year-old man who has never physically touched his wife. He and Miriam live in the Post-Contamination period, where everyone walks around in protective suits. Several pages away, another Miriam is walking home from Kabbalat Shabbat service with thoughts of the quiet medical student at the temple. She does not yet know that his name is Paul.
The submissions differ not only in plot but in style. Peter Cunniffe happened to be reading Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" when he was crafting the Matched.com romance between Miriam, a cottage cheese-thighed divorcee and Paul, an awkward fellow with a propensity to chuckle-sigh. And so Cunniffe wrote his story in Chaucer-inspired Middle English verse.
This kind of creativity in story-telling is exactly what excites David and Robin when they edit the submissions.
"When we choose a story, it has to be something different where you can tell that they had put time and heart into it," Robin said.
Her favorite submission of all time is one from a few years back, about a young woman who believes that she is a walrus and eventually falls in a love with a zookeeper. It was written by Keith Gay as a reprieve from his day job of serving breakfasts.
Like Gay, many of those who submit stories to The First Line are neither well-known authors nor full-time writers. They include USAF retirees, business professionals, housewives and high school Spanish teachers. But they all have one thing in common: They love to write.
Penn State sophomore Rowan Cota had used The First Line's prompt to overcome writer's block when she was working on an assignment for her creative writing class. She ended up submitting her story to the LaBountys and was shocked that it actually got published.
"To other college students, I would say that they just have to start submitting," Cota said. "I know it's hard, but you can't get published until you get out there."
According to David, The First Line offers an open platform for everyone. Sometimes stories submitted by published authors require just as much editing as those written by students, he said.
The idea for The First Line had sprung from the letters that David used to exchange with his friend, Jeff Adams. Back in the snail mail days of '92, Adams ended his letter to David with a line, which David would use as the leading sentence of his answering letter. Adams would then write from the last sentence of David's letter, and so on.
Today, The First Line has grown from a "humble saddle-stitched collection of one-page stories" to an American literary journal that is 50 issues strong.
And while David and Robin don't expect The First Line to match National Geographic heights, they do concede that another 50 issues would be nice.
