About twenty years ago I got a letter from Calyx, a literary journal with pages of amazing writing by women and covers like works of art. The editors liked my story but asked for revisions. I did my best; it wasn’t good enough. Although I was disappointed, the Calyx feedback helped me write a better story, and that story helped me write the next piece and the next, until eventually I had written a novel worthy of publication.

I wish I could go back and tell myself that I would eventually write something even better, an essay that would appear in Calyx in 2012 and, miraculously, in the fortieth anniversary anthology for the journal, which was released last month by one of my favorite presses, Ooligan. Memories Flow in Our Veins: Forty Years of Women’s Writing from Calyx has poems, stories, and essays by such luminaries as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. I feel so honored to be included.

The anthology is a delightful conversation with friends, acquaintances, and admired strangers. I have listened to Donna Miscolta read portions of her story “Strong Girls” in recent readings, and it was a pleasure to re-read the whole story. It’s about wrestling girl twins, about allegiances and betrayals, about how we carry our bodies through the world. (You heard it here first: Donna is writing a novel based on this story.)

Charlotte Watson Sherman’s “Killing Color” was another story I had read before, although so long ago that it was completely new. Like the narrator, I wondered why the stranger, Mavis, had come to the town of Brownville to stare at the old courthouse every day as if willing justice to be done. The ending is satisfyingly mysterious.

I also couldn’t stop reading the story of a woman who leaves a pig’s head on a platter in the refrigerator until her family finally stops taking her for granted. The head in Monique De Varennes’s “Cabeza” reminded me of that decaying rabbit in the 1965 Catherine Deneuve movie, Repulsion, but whereas the rabbit symbolized the Deneuve character’s breakdown, in De Varennes’s story the pig head seems more symbolic of the family’s dysfunction than the woman’s.

Marianne Villanueva’s “The Decedent Is Initially Viewed Unclothed” is one of the most oddly compelling things I’ve read lately. The story begins with descriptions from the autopsy of a “well-developed, mildly obese Filipina female.” The hepatic vein, we learn, is “speckled a rich nutmeg color” and the hands are “atraumatic.” These descriptions launch an elliptically heartbreaking story of a woman’s grief over her sister’s death.

So many great pieces. I think I’m especially drawn these days to work about aging, like LeGuin’s poem about women over fifty and Divakaruni’s memories of her mother braiding her hair.

Last month, I had the honor of reading at a celebration of Calyx and another important literary journal, Sinister Wisdom. I read from my essay, “Ratification,” which describes my experiences growing up during the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. I only had time to read a few pages, so I joked to the audience at the end that they would have to read the essay to find out whether the ERA passed or not. A girl in the audience turned to her mother, who shook her head: no, it didn’t pass. For that girl, the ERA is ancient history. Her mother, it turned out, was once part of the Calyx editorial collective. How wonderful that the journal continues to inspire, educate, and enthrall a new generation of writers and readers.

It takes a village to make a writer. Thanks, Calyx, for being such an indispensable part of our village.