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Janet Gilman started writing short fiction in the 70s, and got off to a good start with stories appearing in Massachusetts Review and other small literary publications. One of her stories received the Bernice Kavinoky Isaacson Fiction Award from the New School, and another was included among “100 Distinguished Short Stories of the Year” in Best American Short Stories 1978. That was also the year she realized that raising three small children in the suburbs of New Jersey and having a full time job as a museum public relations director left little time to write fiction. But now, with the three daughters grown up, she’s retired from the public relations world, living in Manhattan with her husband, and trying to decide if she’s a beginning writer who is old, or an old writer starting over at the beginning.
Today on the subway an old man sat on my lap. He just backed right up into me and sat down. I tried to push him off, but he looked from side to side as though something slightly annoyed him, and sat there. The subway was crowded, and some boys from the high school stared [...]