Signature magazine

Signature magazine is the now-defunct literary magazine that published all three of Richard Flynn’s short stories in a January issue, giving his writing its first—and, as it turned out, only—appearance in print. The issue began as the object of an ambitious new future: five pages in a respected magazine, a portrait and biography, and an editor who believed Flynn had promise. Its eventual absence from his hands, followed by its rediscovery fifteen years later, turned it into a particularly charged memento of a literary career that remained largely unrealized.

The Magazine and the Submission

In early December, Lisa Wheeler, a librarian at Firestone Library and a friend of Flynn’s, told him that an editor from Signature magazine would lecture at Nassau Hall. The magazine had a limited circulation but was well regarded. Knowing that Flynn wanted to be published, Wheeler secured him an invitation and urged him to approach the editor afterward with his stories.

Flynn spent the next three days wavering over what to do. At Laura Baines’s insistence, he selected three short stories, placed them with a résumé in an envelope, and took the package to the lecture. He arrived early and waited outside the building. The editor approached him there to ask for a light; Flynn later remembered the man’s corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and the long holder from which he smoked his hand-rolled cigarettes. The encounter gave Flynn an opportunity to introduce himself and deliver his work, but the acceptance came later, not at the lecture.

A week afterward, while Flynn and Baines were eating pizza at an Italian restaurant on Nassau Street, he called the magazine’s office from a telephone booth near the restroom. The editor remembered him and told him the stories would appear in the next issue, scheduled for January. He had chosen all three, allotted them five pages, and requested a black-and-white portrait in portrait format and a brief biography. He also said he had left the stories unchanged down to the punctuation. The details made publication tangible: the magazine would carry not only Flynn’s writing but a public image and short account of its author.

A Brief Literary Promise

Flynn was overwhelmed by the acceptance. He returned to the table and told Baines that all three stories would appear in Signature magazine. They spent the evening at home making plans for the future rather than celebrating at a restaurant. In Flynn’s recollection, the magazine’s name, the three stories, the requested photograph, and the prospect of becoming a published writer gathered into an almost physical image of glory and permanence.

His later perspective sharply qualifies that early sense of arrival. Signature magazine was not the New Yorker, and its writers were paid in free copies rather than money. Yet the small scale of the opportunity did not erase its importance to Flynn at the time: the editor praised the stories, anticipated that they would be read, and invited him to meet after the holidays. The publication represented recognition and the possibility of continuing as a writer, even if it offered neither substantial circulation nor financial reward.

The magazine’s acceptance also coincided with a change in Flynn’s relationship with Baines. Looking back, he recalled that she had grown distant and preoccupied, sometimes speaking in hushed tones on the telephone and hanging up when he entered. He continued working at Joseph Wieder’s house and spent his evenings with her, but she brought her work home, and they seemed to stop making love. The issue therefore belongs to a period in which professional hope and private estrangement advanced together, though Flynn initially concentrated on the former.

The Issue That Did Not Reach Him

The next day Flynn had his photograph taken at a small studio downtown. He collected four prints, sent two to the magazine, and kept one for Baines and one for his mother. The photograph intended for Baines remained in his shoulder bag when he left for the holidays; by the time he remembered the prints in Ithaca, they had vanished. Even before the issue appeared, the requested author image had become separated from the personal gesture Flynn had meant it to accompany.

By the end of January, when the issue came out, detectives and reporters were already harassing Flynn. He changed his address, and the free copies sent through the mail never reached him. He did not see the issue until fifteen years later, when a friend gave him a copy found in a second-hand bookstore on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. The publication had appeared on schedule, but the author encountered it only after a long interval and through a chance discovery in the used-book trade. He never spoke to the editor again; he learned by chance in the early 2000s that the editor had died in a car accident on the West Coast in the summer of 1990.

Flynn later considered whether the way the magazine and his literary career slipped from his grasp might have seemed like a sign to Baines. He never published anything else, although he continued writing for a time. The issue’s delayed arrival thus marks more than a missed mailing: it separates the promise of publication from the later life in which that promise could be viewed only as a recovered remnant.

A Surviving Memento

In a later account of Flynn, Danna Olsen described him as reclusive and socially isolated, with few acquaintances and no close friends. She recalled that he kept almost nothing to remind him of his college years: no photographs or small keepsakes, only a copy of Signature magazine containing the short stories, given to him by an old acquaintance who had found it by chance in a bookstore. The magazine’s physical copy consequently served as an unusually concentrated link between Flynn’s private past and the public work he had once hoped to pursue.

Olsen said she had put the copy in one of the boxes and offered to retrieve it. Although she disclaimed literary expertise, she found Flynn’s stories exceptional. Her account gives the issue a second afterlife: it is not only the publication Flynn himself failed to receive when it came out, but also an artifact preserved among the few objects that could recall his earlier life. The contrast between its modest circulation and its durable personal significance defines its place in his story. Signature magazine briefly made Flynn a published writer; the surviving copy later stood as evidence of that achievement and of how completely his literary future had slipped away.