I'm an Ooligan groupie. I never went through the program, but I hang out with a lot of people who did, and sometimes even they seem to incorporate me into their memories. "Remember when...?"

Then again, I've heard the stories enough, maybe I do remember.

A couple of years ago, I was one of the winners of Ooligan's Editors' Choice Annual Short Story Contest. And with that I finally found myself smack in the middle of a real Ooligan moment.

After Ooligan acquires a manuscript, the author gets not one editor but a whole classroom of them. Because mine was just one short story, they worked with me online, and I delighted in reading the notes they inserted electronically into the lines. Most notes included more than one comment from more than one person, sometimes individual monologues, sometimes the transcript of a dialogue among the five editors assigned to my work. Those writers who are going to publish a full book with Ooligan usually get an in-person conversation with more than a dozen editors. That's an intense process most authors never go through. And it's just one of the things that makes Ooligan and its students and faculty something to remember.