DR. FISHER LEARNS AGAIN, "TIMING IS EVERYTHING!" -- "MY FAVORITE UNCLE!"

DR. FISHER LEARNS AGAIN, “TIMING IS EVERYTHING”

REFERENCE: KIND REJECTION LETTER FROM THE READER’S DIGEST – “MY FAVORITE UNCLE!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 7, 2009

“Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), German poet, dramatist, and philosopher

BACKGROUND:

I wrote a piece on my shocking discovery that my brilliant uncle was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and sent it to The Reader’s Digest. This was the periodical's reply, and my response.


THE READER’S DIGEST WRITES:


Dear Dr. Fisher:

Mary Berner asked me to look at your article on your experience with your uncle’s Alzheimer’s disease, to see if it might work for Reader's Digest. (I'm the health director at the magazine.) Let me say first that your uncle clearly was a remarkable man; I feel I got to know him a bit and I very much enjoyed the experience. And your description of the relationship between the two of you, and his increasing debility, was acute and very moving.

So I greatly appreciate you thinking of Reader’s Digest for your piece. I'm sorry to say, though, that it isn't quite right for us. In our limited health pages, we have to give people actionable advice (and, as it happens, we've covered Alzheimer's disease fairly recently). I do wish you the very best of luck in finding it a home.

Please feel free to give me a call if you'd like to talk further. Sincerely,
Lisa DavisDeputy EditorPhone: 914-244-7519Reader's Digest Association1 Readers Digest Road, Pleasantville, NY, 10570 E-mail: lisa_davis@readersdigest.com Visit Readers Digest Sitewww.readersdigest.com


DR FISHER RESPONDS:

Lisa Davis,

You are most kind to go to the trouble to write this very nice note to me about my piece on my uncle, the late Dr. Leonard M. Ekland.

It saddens me, however, because once again my wife, Beautiful Betty, whom I refer to simply as BB, was right. I wrote this piece more than a decade and a half ago, and published it in an abbreviated form in a non commercial engineering news letter of engineering inclined technical people like myself, who, incidentally, forgave me when I left the ranks to become, God forbid, a psychologist!

You are right, "timing is everything," and I have a tendency to be spurred on to share my thoughts and reflections at ill suited times, or times when something within the narrow range of my personal life causes me to reached out, as this piece did to The Reader's Digest.

My wife's father, who will be 92, suffers from this dreaded disease but is otherwise quiet healthy. She is at the moment on her way to Minnesota to visit him along with celebrating the first birthday of one of our grandchildren.

Coincidentally, a medical doctor, the father of a close business associate of my wife's, died this week from this disease. Others constantly tell me that they have had similar shock-like experiences to mine. I'm sure you've covered this shock, as I attempted to show in my piece.

To illustrate the way I write. I was doing some consulting to a volunteer organization in the early 1990s. There was a young African American, who was surly and defensive, but highly talented thinking the world owed him a living, not that he owed the world a life.

I wrote a piece, and sent it to the CEO of The Reader's Digest, not to get published, but to share with him my reaction to latent talent dying on the vine, wondering if that was true of RD's employees. I was looking for possible consulting work.

To my amazement, I got a call from The Reader's Digest. My piece was published as "Do Unto Others" in the June 1993 RD's issue. It generated an incredible response from readers for reprints. To add humor to surprise, my late mother-in-law was in a doctor's office, read the piece, and call BB from Minnesota to her daughter in Florida and said, "I read the most interesting article."

BB said, "Mother, Jim wrote that piece." Small world. She never looked at who wrote it.

Back to timing. I came back from South Africa in 1969 disillusioned with the Afrikaner "apartheid policy," and retired in my thirties, after forming a new company there for my American employer.

I wrote a small book in six weeks and sent it off to Prentice-Hall, who published it as "Confident Selling." It was the positive side of the negative I had experienced. It sold well and stayed in print for twenty years.

Ms. Davis, I'm one of those kinds of writers who describes situations and lets other writers design prescriptions, which I know is not the way our culture works. We are a society obsessed with solutions looking for problems instead of a society spending most of its time and energy on the defining side. We in the engineeringly trained world believe a problem well defined is more than half solved.

Stubborn Irishman that I am I do persist. Check my blog of my website (www.fisherofideas.com) or what www.google.com has on my books (reference "James R. Fisher, Jr.") under "Open Library," and you will see I am that kind of a writer.

More evidence of what spurs me on to write is this: when my best friend died young, I wrote a memoir-as-a-novel about him and our friends. It was about working class poor in a neighborhood in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of that small city, in the middle of the United States, and in the middle of the last century or during W.W.II. There is a good write-up in "Open Library" on it.

Not surprising, the first sentence of that book is about my friend who died: "The first day of my life was when I was eight years old and met Bobby Witt."

In my agent's hands, at the moment, are two books that I have completed that perhaps, just perhaps, might prove timely.

They have the working titles of CREATIVE SELLING, which encourages people in these challenging times to embrace their fears and soar above them, and CONFIDENT THINKING, which argues that we have the tools, the temperament and the talent to solve our problems today, but not in the way they have been created. As Einstein has suggested, and he put into practice his belief, you cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them. That is the problem as I see it.

Thank you for listening, and I must tell you I'm not used to getting such a lovely notice of rejection. It was not only most kind but also most thoughtful as well.

Be always well,

Jim

PS I'm now writing a novel about my South African experience with the working title GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA. Don't hold your breath for it getting out. It took 13 years of research and constant rewrites for me to finally publish my memoir as a novel titled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.