The birth of Bitter Twisted

A tale of typewriters, typesetters, student magazines, and other extinct species

In which a young writer discovers the thrill of being read. First Bitter Twisted column, September 1984. (As a journalist, I’d like to give you the precise date. There is one, after all. But the truth is somewhere in a zone of paper storage that would require a tag-team of archeologists working in shifts to find the proper slip of compressed paper pulp, and I haven’t the time at present.)

The first piece of my writing ever published was a snarky opinion piece on the mixed feelings of a 17-year-old sophomore student at the University at Buffalo.

I’d arrived at 16, after graduating from Pembroke High School, a feat made possible by being sent from Montessori nursery school to second grade after intake testing in North Tonawanda.

Always loved reading, World War II nonfiction, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and other mysteries, Alistair MacLean thrillers, piles on piles of science fiction, from Asimov to Zelazny. 

What came out that day in September 1984, sitting in my MadDonald Hall dorm room batting at the portable typewriter-in-suitcase I’d gleefully ransomed from Goodwill, was angsty black humor filtered through piles of Heinlein and Hunter S. Thompson.

It felt good.

So I take the two pages and catch the Bluebird Bus shuttle from the Main Street campus to Amherst, and find The Spectrum’s office in the basement of Baldy Hall.

An editor read it, looked at me, looked at the paper. “I don’t think this is for us,” he said.

So I took another Bluebird back to Main Street, and headed for the offices of the Current, the student-run weekly feature magazine funded by student fees through Sub-Board One, the student services corporation.

The doors were locked, lights out. 

In the hallway I ran into Eric Coppolino, who was in charge of Generation, the new name for the magazine.

Copplino read the piece. Enthusiastically said he’d print it.

It would be especially helpful if I could type it into the typesetting machine, he said. Starting a publication staff from scratch, Coppolino was looking for help.

Which is how I became second-in-command of Generation at 17 years old, helping lead a staff of 50 writers, editors, photographers, artists, poets, advertising reps, and yes, typesetters.

Choosing a pen name from a half-remembered heavy metal song, I wrote more than 50 Bitter Twisted columns over four years, leading to Buffalo News internships, a lifetime in newspapers, and you reading this now.