Would you like to see the introduction that the Boston Athletic Association had me write for the Boston Marathon program the year after the bombing along with a story about how it came to be?

Monday 4/21/25

In 2014, I had a short story published in the VQR called "First Responder." It pertained to--but wasn't limited to--the tragic event of the Boston Marathon bombing the year before.

The Marathon, of course, is always on Patriots' Day, which is a Monday, otherwise known as Marathon Monday, and is taking place today as I write these words. The story was written on Wednesday of that year--meaning, less than two days after the event. The story is about two brothers. That was a coincidence. Or something. I'm not sure what one would call it. Because on that Wednesday, the FBI didn't know that two brothers were behind the evil events of that day. But there I was with this story.

"First Responder" isn't about brothers in the sense that the events of that horrible day were put in motion by two brothers. It tells the story of two boys who go off together on the morning of Patriots' Day 2013.

The older boy has the intention of doing something that will gain him entry into a friendship circle that he wants to be a part of. The fulfillment of a grim requirement. His younger brother is a nuisance to him, tagging along. The latter doesn't hold with what the older boy--whom he looks up to--is planning to do, which involves the harming of a mallard along the banks of the Muddy River, behind the Museum of Fine Arts. Specifically, he has to cut off a duck's foot.

They argue and separate. The younger boy goes off on his own on a sort of walkabout. Have you ever stormed off at an age where you were maybe too young to do so--that is, you didn't know your way around well enough, and then you're just out there on your own, scared? You have that anger and feeling of righteousness that sustains you at first, but then you start to worry. Maybe it's at an amusement park or whatever. You have to tell someone you're lost. You wish you hadn't left after all.

But this was on Marathon Monday in Boston. The younger boy finds himself on Boylston Street, right after the bombs have exploded, with all of that chaos and carnage. People racing around in a different manner than was the order of the day.

He sees the scene, becomes a part of the scene, but he's this whole boy--he's intact--walking around amidst the blood and the screams and the blood. People are doing other things. Trying to help the wounded.

The boy picks up on this. The idea of service. Saving. And he sees something on the ground that believes a person will need. And it--in his mind--is a gruesome thing. A part of a body. He puts it in his pocket for safekeeping, to do with it what he thinks he must do, and his journey resumes.

We go with him as he walks--and he doesn't much know the way--to Mass General Hospital in Beacon Hill. We see him in the Common with the National Guard advancing. Along the banks of the Charles. We are also in these other points--earlier points--of this boy's life.

Finally, he gets to the hospital. His pocket--where he has kept this item--is soaked through. He waits and he waits and he waits for many hours. While the maimed are tended to. Where there is more chaos, pain, horror.

Finally, it's just him. Or close enough to it, anyway, that he's able to make his way to the nursing station unobstructed and be seen and heard. He reaches into his pocket to give the nurse what he brought that he believes someone will need.

And we see what it is and what happens.

This story was offered on that Wednesday to Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker. The New Yorker is a weekly magazine. We know all about Deborah Treisman, what she's about, from these pages. Do a search on her last name. This is a bad person who is bad at their job who does not really do a job of selecting worthy fiction so much as she feeds the galling monster of classism that is the mechanized publishing complex.

In all of those years, she responded exactly once to a story of mine directly. (Usually, another member of the fiction department--some joker like Willing Davidson or David Wallace--would just send me a boilerplate lie about a story they didn't read or weren't going to pass along anyway because it was written by me, and you have to be one of these people.) This was that time. Immediately--because she probably didn't even read it--she turned the story down with a "not right for us" type of boilerplate email.

The story could have ran that week. Imagine that? This event happens, and then a fiction masterpiece pertaining to it is available within days? How is that even possible? There is no one who has ever lived who could have done that and written something like that at that level ever, let alone within forty-eight hours. The FBI would have investigated us, because how could there be a story about brothers and the bombs in The New Yorker that same week, if I didn't have knowledge of the terrorist plan? And I live in Boston. There is no way whatsoever that the FBI wouldn't have knocked on my door.

In other words, there would have been stories about the story.

Think of how bad--and how committed to discriminating against someone--you have to be, to fail to publish that story then. That you hate someone so much, are so committed to your discrimination, to putting the same slop by the same kind of person, that you let history pass you by.

"First Responder" was then offered to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, a man--sure, we'll use that term, but realize it's for convenience sake rather than what I'd consider accuracy's--who is a blowhard bully; a nasty, egomaniacal piece of work, rather similar to James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal. Podhoretz used to be Ronald Reagan's speechwriter and is Norman Podhoretz's son, so, you know, nepotism. He said he'd publish it, but only if I was willing to change a part.

Anyway, there's a reference in "First Responder" made to the boys taking the train by themselves to school. Podhoretz said that would never happen. Children don't ride public transportation, according to him.

And as I'm sure you'd expect, I have the email. I always have the receipts, as they say.

Do you understand the galling classism of these people? They live these lives where the hired car and the hired man picked them up. "Good day, Worthington." Or that's how it should be, anyway.

But if you've ever ridden the subway--we call it the T here--in Boston on a weekday morning, what do you see? You see young kids making their way to school.

Podhoretz said that if I didn't want to make the change, that was fine, no worries, but it wouldn't be for them (meaning, for him).

I said okay. Let me think about it.

But I really didn't want to make my story worse on account of an out-of-touch, elitist, condescending person like John Podhoretz.

James Marcus at Harper's read the story, knew right away how good and special it was, and wanted it, but he needed the approval of the miserable piece of work that was then-editor Ellen Rosenbush. Marcus tried to get her to publish two stories I'd written, the other being one called "Old Pyke."

In one of these instances, I wrote Rosenbush to thank her for considering my story. Which is crazy, given that both of these works are far better than any fiction the magazine publishes, and it's more a case of me doing something for them than the other way around it, if we're looking at what the work actually is. I have the prose offs to prove it, don't I?

You know what she did? She barked at Marcus that I had the temerity to write her on a Saturday--when she was busy about her email anyway, and could have let it go to Monday if she was being honest, rather than not trying to be a word I'm think of right here, and you may be thinking of it, too--and with that, the story was turned down.

You see how childish these monstrosities are?

But there was no way this woman was going to let me in. Ever. If she had the say-so, and she did. Someone like that and the unique thing that is me? And someone as different from her as possible?

No way.

I then sent "First Responder" to Jon Parrish Peede, the publisher of the VQR. Editor Ted "Don't Call Me Killer" Genoways, who absolutely hated me--and who who allegedly bullied his deputy editor into blowing his brains out at the old water tower--was gone by then.

Peede--who'd later be nominated by President Donald Trump to be the Chairman of National Endowment for the Humanities--told me there was a new editor coming in, and he'd want to include work by his own people and friends, so, you know, sorry, Colin.

In other words, he's going to want to hook up his buddies, and you're not one of them of them, chief.

This is what you're dealing with--near-best case scenario. Isn't that amazing?

I said, "Can't we ask him?"

Peede said sure, he'd show it to the incoming guy.

This was a lie. I knew he wasn't going to. And he didn't.

I got that person's contact information on my own. I sent them the story. They wanted the story.

The money--which wasn't much--a grand--was the same at the VQR as it was at Commentary. I politely wrote John Podhoretz, telling him I wouldn't be making that change--I didn't point that he was an abhorrent classist, as he obviously was and is--and thanking him for his time.

You've seen emails from me in these pages, which will make it very easy for you to imagine how gracious I was in this one.

And you know what Podhoretz did?

He banned me.

Until I guess he felt I had kissed his ass enough that he did run a story of mine years later, called "Pikes and Pickerels." And it wasn't in my head, some figment of imagination--he told me in an email that he had banned me because of what I had done with "First Responder."

These are psychopaths. Childish psychopaths.

I'm being thorough here, so let me add that these stories I've mentioned--"First Responder," "Old Pyke," "Pikes and Pickerels"--are all in a book called Cheer Pack: Stories, along with a story called "Find the Edges" that Marcus did run in Harper's when he became editor--until he was fired shortly thereafter, to be replaced by our man Christopher Beha.

"First Responder" is the first story in Cheer Pack. You can read another story in the book called "The Last Field"--which was also accepted by Marcus at Harper's (and then kicked aside after he was terminated) and also our buddy Scott Stossel at The Atlantic, to then be unaccepted by Ann Hulbert, as I detailed earlier, and also led to me being banned at Kenyon Review, which I'll get into fully in a separate entry, because that one is another of these "That's so twisted, it cant' be real," stories, but of course it is, because this is how these people are.

That book remains unpublished, sitting here with me. And we all know why.

Since the composition of "First Responder," I've written some 600 stories, not one of which is worse. And almost all of them sit here with me.

What do you think about this industry? Pretty disturbing, isn't it? Pretty evil. Pretty toxic. Pretty sick.

But let's go back to ten plus years ago to 2014. The Boston Athletic Association--the non-profit responsible for the Boston Marathon--read "First Responder."

They were--as any unbiased party would be--floored by the power of the story.

Each year, there's a program for the Marathon. It's like a magazine. You know, like when you go to a game and you get a program.

There's a sort of keynote address--and introduction--at the start of this program.

And you know what the Boston Athletic Association asked me to do after they read "First Responder"?

They asked me to write this introduction--to in essence perform a civic duty for this city I love so much, that is such a part of who I am--for that first program in the year after the tragedy and terror of the year before.

That's the power of that story. To impact our community.

Do you think any of the garbage by these people could have produced such a response?

You know it couldn't.

You tell me--or you ask her if you know her--how a Deborah Treisman justifies what she did?

How would any of these people justify what they are trying to keep from the world?

There's no link for that introduction I wrote for the 2014 Boston Marathon program, and so I thought today I'd create one, in a way, with this post, that at least can be shared, and I'll include the whole of that introduction here.

Okay? This is what I wrote.

//////

The Forever Beyond           

If you are of a certain age, you might recall that guy who used to stand on the street corner outside the State House shouting, “aye, Boston! Let’s go Boston!”

I first remember seeing him when I was six or seven years old, and then for the last time in my early twenties. He didn’t really seem to have a political cause or anything, but I believe people thought he did, based on where he chose to situate himself every day. I liked the “aye” part because I liked the ocean and it made me think he was a nautically inclined type, or maybe part Leprechaun, which plays well around here.

I was sad when I stopped seeing him, and hearing his Boston-centric rallying cry, and someone told me that he hadn’t left at all, he had only moved down the hill and was now in fact that Town Crier fellow in the Common who tells you, should you be strolling through early in the morning, how the Red Sox fared against the Yankees the night before and if rain is due later in the day.

But I knew, really, my man was gone, just as I knew why his words began to play in my head, as if on a loop, after the events of last year’s Boston Marathon, as I walked around this city for upwards of twenty miles a day.

You don’t need to grow up here to know what the Marathon has meant, but it doesn’t hurt. If you visit to run it, or watch it, you become, in a way, of these parts, for this is a most inclusionary event, and will be, I dare say, even more so this year. If you live here, it’s cool to phone up a friend in another state, and casually mention that, yeah, we got our own holiday here, Boston in the area, baby! There’s an innocuous pride there—we got a lot of this country rolling, so we’ll take a day for us, and get the Sox in on it, too.

The Marathon, and Patriots' Day, is a constant. The thing about your standard constant is that it’s just that, unchanging, fixed. But you learn, as you go along—and, as things happen to you—that some constants possess something extra, a constancy, a fealty, an ability to bend but not break, to grow but not forget.

I grew up in Mansfield, and in the years we didn’t drive into the city, I’d watch the Marathon on TV with my friends, and then we’d stage epic bike races afterwards, inspired no doubt, but with my Huffy never carrying the day.

I didn’t realize at the time the role that the Marathon would come to play in my own life, and the role that Boston and Boylston street in particular would. I was always pulled towards the city, and if we went in for a school field trip, I always felt sad when we left, like I was now becoming a little less myself for a bit.

Our city is like that, in part because of things like the Marathon and Patriots' Day. I owe some portion of the fact that I even exist on this 2014 morning to the spirit and ethos evinced by both of them, ditto my very concept of time and how complex, indomitable, and, paradoxically, pliable it is. Which is apt, the whole time factor thing, given that we’re talking about what is a race, a concept as ancient as early man, and as lasting, no doubt, as you, me, and everyone who comes after us proves to be.

We didn’t go to the Marathon when I was six, but a big Marathon moment was in store for me that year, although I had no clue at the time. It was shortly after that year’s race, we’d done the post-Marathon Huffy thing, and I was over at friend’s house across the street. This kid hated to go out, but he was a huge baseball fan. Smurfs, too. Baseball cards and Smurfs figures everywhere.

We were watching the Sox on TV. Glenn Hoffman lost a pop-up in the sun, Mark Clear was pretty inefficient on the mound, Yaz got a day closer to retirement. I noticed that Ned Martin said what day it was a couple times, citing the month and the year as well, which I found odd, like this was really a big deal. So I asked my dad about it that night as he was watching The Fall Guy or something, if this was the only time it would ever be April 28, 1982, or whatever day it was.

“Yes. It’s the only time.”

“What? Each day only gets to go once? You only have the one time, if you’re a day, and then poof, you’re gone?”

“Well, not exactly, but kind of.”

Blew my mind. Not long after, I got a new babysitter who was training for next year’s Marathon. We’d go into the city to see that one, and I remember how she’d show up at our house looking so fatigued, just worn down despite the Culture Club buttons she had on her bag (the Quiet Riot one made me a little scared of her), and I’d ask what was up, and she said training felt like you were running forever.

“Running forever and beyond. You get up to forever, and then you’re still not done, you have to go beyond.”

“The forever beyond?”

“Well, not exactly. But kind of.”

The phrase lodged in my mind, and the next time I stood outside the State House and listened to the “aye, let’s go Boston” guy, I considered sharing it with him, like we were two inspirational sloganeers meant to swap wares. I figured he’d surely get the larger implications, even if I did not grasp them myself. Not then. Later, things have a way of becoming all too clear. We reach points that we come to believe we are affixed to, incapable of getting around their enormity, of moving out from under the weight they have so firmly pressed upon us. The challenge is to have faith that there is something beyond your given point of struggle, that even if it takes the form of the chunkiest isthmus the likes of Magellan ever set eyes on, there are endlessly open waters beyond it. Waters that might as well go on forever. The forever beyond.

The day after last year’s bombings, I was on Newbury Street, as I had a need to be out in this city that I love like I do, to be as close as I could to another street that was a large reason why I existed at all, in the most literal sense. You train for a marathon, of course, just as we train for the various marathons of our lives, even if you’re idea of running is racing to catch a B line car.

When you write something like what I am writing now, you have to be even more careful than usual with your language, so please know that I am aware of what I am saying, my fellow Marathon friend, my fellow Bostonian, perhaps, when I say that my own life was torn apart when I lost, without a single word of explanation ever to follow, my spouse, the love of that life, seemingly my future, any and all security, my home, peace of mind, absence of fear, health, ability to trust, will to live.

I then had a stroke at thirty-six.

I nearly died.

I wanted to.

Instead, I took to Boylston Street, forcing myself to keep going with a seven mile walk every day. I forced myself to stay the hell away from T stops where temptations might have proved too great, and I walked and I walked and I walked and I worked in my head, on going forward, on myself, on what I knew I had in me to give, what I had to find the strength to bring forth. I had embarked on a marathon of my own.

A street can become so much more than a street, and Boylston is certainly one of those, in large part because of the Marathon. It’s even more after last year’s tragedy, and what it is, as a concept, a belief, a testament to faith, is something stronger, a thoroughfare that doubles as a monument to what can be overcome, not matter what has been done to us, and no matter why. Even if there is no why. Especially when there is no why.

I wasn’t on Boylston for last year’s Marathon, when the bombs went off and lives acquired those aforementioned points of their own, those chunky isthmuses that must be got around, though it’s hard to even conceive of open water, the forever beyond, when you have been directly affected by something like that. Pain is one formidable beast, but one thing pain has going against it is that full-scale healing is something of an endurance runner itself, built to last, built to wait, if need be. But that’s the thing about the forever beyond, though, isn’t it? It keeps.

And you know what we do, don’t you, fellow Marathon friends, runners, volunteers—of which there were 10,500 of you last year, and so many more this year that some even had to be turned away—Bostonians, visitors, sloganeers, Town Criers, watchers, walkers?

(I do not believe I am allowed to pull a David Ortiz and swear here, but you interject as you see fit.)

We keep. Big time.

The Wednesday after last year’s Marathon, I woke up from my normal spate of nightmares with a story in my head. It was a Marathon story, which I formally wrote after standing at the base of Boylston, the road blocked off, with a couple dozen other people in shocked silence. That awful, raw silence that is a kind of sound unto itself.

I wondered if the nautical/Leprechaun guy would have done his line. Would it have been too soon? An editor who had seen many Marathons said it was way too soon for a story that touched on those horrific events, but you know what? I think what we all pick up on, in our way, is the notion that it’s never too soon to deal with anything as honestly, as openly, and with as much love, consideration, and compassion as we can muster. That strikes me as irrefutable. But maybe what matters here is that it’s never too late, either. And maybe, with the way time can be, and how seemingly fixed points can become unmoored and float around our minds, memories, lives, relationships, that’s the concept that deserves the greater sum of our attention.

I hope the direct victims of last year’s tragedy have a measure of peace during this especially special running of the Marathon, but if you are struggling, or perhaps struggling worse now than at earlier times, know, in Belichick-speak, that while that is what it is, it’s not how it necessarily always will be. Believe me, I have frequent cause to say as much to myself, but when it comes from another, the idea seems to have more valiance and traction, so I say it to you, as I suspect you would say it to me.

Like so many others, I watched brave victims make appearances at Red Sox and Bruins games, and there were specials on the news that were heartening, of course, but what one realizes, behind an isthmus, is that it can be easier to rally for a moment out in the light, but the real journey, the real struggle, takes place in private, behind closed walls, and inside individual minds. There are marathons to be run there even more important than the one we celebrate on Patriots' Day, and may you continue to run them.

I am not a man who stands on ceremony, but I always used to like that part in church when you’d shake the hands of the people next to you and say, “peace be with you.” You’d feel good after that, hopeful, secure in a feeling that everyone, for all of their differences, could be in something together, as we are involved together in what is happening April 21, 2014.

You know how this ends, which is to say, with a new start, an embarkation to a forever beyond, because that is how the 2014 Boston Marathon goes, how we go, how life goes, how this city goes.

So say it to yourself, say it to your neighbor, do the David Ortiz interjection bit if you’d like, but say it well, say it truly, and live—and race—in the same spirit.

Aye, Boston. Let’s go Boston.

Peace.

By the way: You remember our buddy Mark Warren? He saw the above introduction that I wrote at the bequest of the BAA and raved about how awesome it was in an email to me, swearing and everything, such was his ardor and the degree to which he was taken aback. Which is funny, given how I'm not even the best artist on my block here in the old town.