Gray Flag #3 litzine

Gray Flag #3 by Chris Auman

From 1990 to 1993 I kept a journal. Or I should say, I tried to keep a journal. I didn't make confessional diary entries or record life's mundane moments, and I didn't write in it every day, every week, or even every month sometimes. 

Much of what is in the two notebooks is just recollections, sketches, thoughts, et cetera. Some entries end abruptly while others are impossible to decipher. The beginnings of these notebooks showed much ambition and a lot of promise. However, much like the notebooks I kept in high school and then college, the farther you go, the less organized, the more space between snippets of writing, and eventually, you reach a long stretch of blank pages with a few notes and a phone numbers scrawled here and there. 

For the past twenty-odd years, I have occasionally looked at these notebooks from this period of my life. This usually occurs after a move to a new apartment which happened fairly frequently. Up until recently, however, I could not bear to read these things beyond a sentence or two before wincing in acute embarrassment and throwing them back in the old Dubuque Star beer case where they’ve lived for the past 30 years. 

I can read them now. Most of them anyway. I was a kid when I wrote them—early twenties, anyway. Thought I knew everything. Knew a bit. I don't judge myself as harshly as I did even a few years ago.
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The result is Gray Flag which features some of the more coherent entries I kept while a student in the writing program at Columbia College in the early 1990s. I was forced to make some editorial decisions, try to decipher illegible words and sentences, fix some glaring grammatical errors, and change a few names. Gray Flag #3 is available now from RoosterCow.

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