Money changes everything even when it changes nothing. When there’s money no challenge is too great. As the beast must have reminded himself showing the beauty around the castle, “Give Cupid his bow and his arrow! I’ve got a lot of dinero.”
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In 2006 Mella’s mother died, and he faced a harsh new set of financial circumstances—he’d lived with her in her Wilmette apartment for most of the life of the journal. Now he’d have to find his own place and pay rent on it. Not in the best of health himself, he began to talk about shutting the quarterly down. “People begged him not to,” says Markwart.
Mella and his brother were cleaning out their mom’s place when the phone rang. It was Joyce La Mers calling from Oxnard, California. La Mers had contributed three poems to the first issue and been a regular ever since. Now she offered him $15,000 to keep going. “Which was incredibly generous,” says Mella. “We do a begging letter twice a year, but basically the high end was about a thousand dollars—which isn’t to be sneezed at either.”
In 2007 La Mers called Mella and pledged her third and final gift to Light Quarterly: half a million dollars.
Markwart runs the journal out of Mella’s new apartment in River Forest, which he chose to be close to her home in Oak Park. “She’s the brains and talent behind the operation,” says Mella. “Tom’s the computer guy. She’s the one who basically is moving Light Quarterly to a different level. She’s good at this stuff though she’s never done publicity in her life. She wants to get us into hospitals and set up workshops in grade schools.”
Mella observes that “love goes out the window when money comes in the door” and adds, “Love hasn’t really gone out the window yet, but there are disagreements with Lisa. Certain things.” He thinks back on the day when there was no money and no expectation of money and tells me, “I don’t recall it being this stressful.
