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Cyber-attacked
by Ernest Hekkanen
Not long after mailing off the Spring, 2016 issue of The New Orphic Review, I was cyber-attacked by a Nonentity who used encryption-ware to freeze my files and then demanded I pay a ransom to get them back. The Nonentity informed me that the longer I took to respond to the ransom demand the more dearly I would have to pay.
From what I could ascertain, the Nonentity had managed to commandeer one of the WebPages I had uploaded to the Telus file-manager site. I had corresponding WebPages stored in a file on my computer, for when I had to update them, and that allowed the Nonentity to worm his way into my computer, because a communication bridge had been established.
Obviously the Nonentity didn't know anything about the guy he was attempting to shake down. New Orphic Publishers and its subsidiary, The New Orphic Review, operate on a shoe-string budget. Most of my files were backed up, except for a book I was starting to write, and I wasn't about to let the Nonentity relieve me of several thousand dollars in bitcoin in order to get them back. None of my books are worth that much money, sad to say.
Unlike the University of Calgary, an institution that was similarly attacked, I don't believe in rewarding criminals who might very well use their ill-gotten gains to support interna-tional thuggery.
I took my computer down to the local repair shop on Baker Street in Nelson, only to be told the next day that nothing could be done. According to the guy at the front counter, "The ran-som-ware comes from too far up on the food chain for us to do anything."; I decided to purchase a refurbished computer of slightly more recent vintage, downloaded the programs I normally use and tried to get back to work, only to discover I was now being harassed by ad-ware.
By this time, I had expunged all of the WebPages I had uploaded to the Telus file-manager site, but one WebPage refused to disappear, namely, the commandeered page about me, the author. In the end I had to consult Telus Tech Support Plus. Support Plus commandeered my computer and proceeded to expunge the viruses that had infected the web browsers I am in the habit of employing, although the browsers were supposed to be brand new to my updated system.
That wasn't the end of my difficulties. The publishing programs I had been using for nearly ten years were no longer honored by Adobe. One must now rent such programs. I tried Gimp and Scribus, both free-ware programs. While Gimp worked well as a Photoshop replace-ment, Scribus was a major headache compared to Pagemaker.
By this point in the story, I had spent two and a half months attempting to recover from the cyber-attack. I was so frustrated I emailed the contributors to the Fall, 2016 issue of the NOR that I would be discontinuing the magazine, and why.
Fortunately, this isn't the end of the story. Two weeks ago, Tom Wayman and Verna Relkoff of the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival told me they would like to hold an event that deals with cyber-attacks.
Scheduled for August 26, it will be a benefit held in hopes of raising the sunken literary vessel that is The New Orphic Review. It will be held at 7:30 in Room 310 of Selkirk College's Kootenay Studio Arts building, 606 Victoria Street, Nelson, B.C.
[Ernest Hekkanen will give away books he has written with every $20 donation. Cheques written to Ernest Hekkanen can be mailed to New Orphic Review c/o
706 Mill Street, Nelson, B.C. V1L 4S5]
[Ernest Hekkanen, author of more than forty books, has been the mainstay of The New Orphic Review, a periodical that has had four stories selected for inclusion the prestigious Journey Prize anthology. Those stories are: Margrith Schraner's "Dream Dig"; in 2001 Journey Prize anthology, Ross Klatte's "First-Calf Heifer"; in 2011 Journey Prize anthology, M.A. Fox's "Piano Boy ";in 2014 Journey Prize anthology and Tyler Keevil's "Sealskin, in 2014 Journey Prize anthology. Keevil New Orphic story won the annual $10,000 prize.
In addition,Thomas J. Rice's "Hard Truths"; was selected for the Best American Mystery anthology in 2012 and Andre Kocsis's "Crossing"; was selected for the Best American Mystery anthology of 2013. Notable Canadian contributors to The Ormsby Review have included W.P. Kinsella,Tom Wayman, Stella L. Harvey, Craig Boyko, David Watmough, Michael Bullock and Jack Cady. - Ed.]
By Ernest Hekkanen
"The New Orphic Review, affectionately referred to among friends as our love child, is the product of twenty years of literary engagement.";
When Margrith Schraner and I started our literary journal back in 1998, we had just turned fifty-one. We were living in Vancouver, at Napier and Victoria Drive, and we were full of irrepressible-dare I say youthful-optimism. Literature, for me, had become a matter of defying the odds. To create a product of no obvious practical value, and for which there would be an extremely limited market, if any at all, seemed to me an act of defiance worth pouring some hard-earned cash into.
I've always been susceptible to romantic notions of this sort.
I've been asked to provide a brief history of the magazine. By the mid-1990s, I had come to realize that the literary community wasn't favorably disposed toward the tales I liked to tell. In 1984, Stoddart Publishing issued me a contract for my first novel, Chasing After Carnivals. It got all the way to the bound galley proof stage, and was even reviewed by several book publishing organs, but then it failed to come out. In 1987 and '88, Thistledown Press published two of my short story collections, Medieval Hour in the Author's Mind and The Violent Lavender Beast, neither of which sold particularly well, despite receiving some excellent reviews. From that time on, I found it increasingly difficult to sell my work to magazines and book- publishing houses. Literary fashions had changed, and I was left behind in the dust.
By 1995 I had written three novels and enough short stories to flesh out at least two more collections. I had a decision to make. Either I would have to give up writing or find an alternative way to succeed. My friend, Jurgen Hesse (1924-2008), a print and radio journalist, had just finished self-publishing his book, Voices in Exile: Refugees Speak Out, in which my history of resistance had been included. As a writer, Jurgen was far more seasoned than I. We had met at International PEN and Writers' Union meetings. When Jurgen purchased a new computer, he gave me his old one. His old one had to be booted up from a 5.5 inch floppy disk each time it was used. In other words, it was already obsolete. However, it did introduce me to how easy it was to edit a manuscript, and how much less typing was involved.
Jurgen familiarized me with his approach to designing and printing books. I adopted his methods, but with some modifications of my own. Back then, there was an even greater stigma attached to self-publishing than there is now. Only the dredges of the literary world would resort to such a practice. One reason I had difficulty getting published by legitimate houses revolved around the fact that I didn't stick to the same style or approach. I enjoyed a great range of writing and would flip from grueling realism to fantasy to magic realism to satire, and back again. I wrote what pleased me rather than what was necessarily marketable. Also, my modus operandi left something to be desired. I wanted to disturb my readers' existential comfort, and that approach doesn't endear one to marketing departments, which now determine what is "worth"; being published. As one reviewer remarked: "[his] work frequently points to dark but universal recesses of the mind,"; and as a second reviewer noted, "[his stories are] often flavored with dark humor, bizarre characters and incidents.";
I self-published my first book in 1995, a novel entitled From a Town Now Dreaming, and by 1998, I had gained enough confidence to start publishing The New Orphic Review. I convinced myself that it was a wise literary move to become the editor-in-chief of my own magazine. As you can probably guess, the crucible of my imagination couldn't be expected to produce an alloy all that different from my nature. I enjoy a great range of writing, some of it quite experimental. Also, I had no desire to subscribe to Canada Council mandates dictating the size of a print run, the country of origin of my contributors or what constitutes good literature. I was egomaniacal enough to think such rules didn't apply to me.
Financially, our journal has nearly always been a losing venture, but as long as I could afford to publish it, and had enough energy to do so, I got a kick out of defying the odds. For the first nine years, each issue was photocopied and then bound by me in the basement of our house-using a drill, thread and glue. In the year 2000, we moved to our present location in Nelson, where I continued to use my rather primitive methods. In the spring of 2007, I started using Pagemaker and Photoshop to create our journal, and sent the electronic files off to Blitzprint in Calgary to be printed. The cost of producing an issue of the NOR nearly always exceeded the amount of money it brought in, one exception being when Tyler Keevil, a contributor of ours, won the Journey Prize Award in 2014, and our magazine received a two thousand dollar stipend.
On the title page of every New Orphic Review is a small icon identifiable as Pythagoras. Back in the annals of time, Pythagoras was a prominent figure in the Orphic Tradition. One of the highly touted disciplines in Orphism revolved around 'theory,' which, according to an explanation in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, meant something closer to "passionate sympathetic contemplation,"; a practice that can be quite useful for writers who are trying to get inside a character's heart and mind. The idea was to enter into one's subject and thereby know its essence. It could be compared to a form of meditation, I guess. In the early 20th century, Guillaume Apollinaire referred to certain artists as Orphists. Many of those artists took exception to the label being applied to them, and so he coined the term 'surrealist,' which came to have a great deal more currency. Back in the mid-1990s, I decided to adopt the word 'Orphic' for our publishing house and literary review. I did it out of a sense of playfulness, and because it suggested that we were part of a lineage.
In the spring of 2016, The New Orphic Review suffered a cryptolocker cyberattack. I chose not to be held to ransom, despite the fact that it meant losing all of my active files. I purchased a refurbished computer and learned how to use Scribus and Gimp well enough to produce the fall issue of our journal. That increased our expenses, which were already fairly considerable. Now each issue of the NOR costs up to nine-hundred dollars to produce and subsequently ship to subscribers. Indeed, mailing costs have become quite onerous for small publishers like me. Getting a distributor isn't an option, unless your publication is being subsidized by federal and provincial grants, because distributors eat up most of the profits.
The New Orphic Review, affectionately referred to among friends as our love child, is the product of twenty years of literary engagement. We have published an amazing number of talented writers who have since gone on to make careers for themselves in the literary world. It was with some sadness that we stepped back from publishing it. Better to leave on a high note than a low one, though.
By Ernest Hekkanen
The front cover of the Farewell Issue of The New Orphic Review displays a photo of a painting I executed back in the mid-1990s, namely, Contemplation. A human figure, stylized and expressionistic in its deportment, seems to regard the viewer with a bemused, slightly indulgent near-smile. Indeed, he could be suffering the explanations of someone who's been telling him a whopping good tale that has stretched his credulity.
In the spring of 2018, after our literary journal ceased publication, Alan Twigg of B.C. BookWorld wrote me an email to the effect that I should consider archiving the NOR before it is lost to time. Margrith Schraner and I were planning a trip to Vancouver where she intended to take a course in Jungian dream theory and I-well, I intended to roam the streets, refreshing memories of when I had first come to Vancouver in 1969, as a 22-year old American wanted by the F.B.I. for my anti-war activities.
"Why don't you set up an appointment with Alan?"; Margrith suggested. "See what he has in mind.";
And so, it came to pass. On March 9th Alan picked Margrith and I up at the downtown YWCA Hotel on Beatty Street and drove us to our former neighbourhood in the Commercial Drive area. At the Prado coffee shop he introduced us to Richard Mackie, editor of the online Ormsby Review, who would be working with us on the project. We spent only a brief time talking about the NOR, but it was enough to persuade me to create an online archival version.
I didn't re-read the issues before preparing them for internet travel to the 1st Avenue lair of Alan Twigg and David Lester. On rare occasions, I took a few moments to skim a paragraph or two from my editorials, and I was amazed at the confidence and certainty I once had when it came to discussing literature. Now my confidence and certainty have been tempered, owing to age, perhaps. I feel more like that figure in Contemplation: bemused.
The online version of The New Orphic Review differs from the hard copy version in this respect only: the pagination has occasionally changed owing to different generations of computers employed to create the layout of the text. It was also affected by whether I stored the contents on 3.5 floppies, CDs or USB sticks. Also, I should add, by the programs used to produce the NOR-Windows Office, Pagemaker or Scribus. Many of the early issues were cut and pasted using a knife and glue, and those pages had to be scanned into the files. Later, as technology advanced in the do-it-yourself publishing world, issues of the magazine began to look much more professional.
If nothing else, the online version of The New Orphic Review is a testament to how innovative one can be when it comes to surviving in the world of literature, especially if one exists on the extreme fringes. Also, there wouldn't have been a NOR without our many talented contributors.
I'm happy our literary journal will have a more lasting, albeit ephemeral existence.
Not long after mailing off the Spring, 2016 issue of The New Orphic Review, I was cyber-attacked by a Nonentity who used encryption-ware to freeze my files and then demanded I pay a ransom to get them back. The Nonentity informed me that the longer I took to respond to the ransom demand the more dearly I would have to pay.
From what I could ascertain, the Nonentity had managed to commandeer one of the WebPages I had uploaded to the Telus file-manager site. I had corresponding WebPages stored in a file on my computer, for when I had to update them, and that allowed the Nonentity to worm his way into my computer, because a communication bridge had been established.
Obviously the Nonentity didn't know anything about the guy he was attempting to shake down. New Orphic Publishers and its subsidiary, The New Orphic Review, operate on a shoe-string budget. Most of my files were backed up, except for a book I was starting to write, and I wasn't about to let the Nonentity relieve me of several thousand dollars in bitcoin in order to get them back. None of my books are worth that much money, sad to say.
Unlike the University of Calgary, an institution that was similarly attacked, I don't believe in rewarding criminals who might very well use their ill-gotten gains to support interna-tional thuggery.
I took my computer down to the local repair shop on Baker Street in Nelson, only to be told the next day that nothing could be done. According to the guy at the front counter, "The ran-som-ware comes from too far up on the food chain for us to do anything."; I decided to purchase a refurbished computer of slightly more recent vintage, downloaded the programs I normally use and tried to get back to work, only to discover I was now being harassed by ad-ware.
By this time, I had expunged all of the WebPages I had uploaded to the Telus file-manager site, but one WebPage refused to disappear, namely, the commandeered page about me, the author. In the end I had to consult Telus Tech Support Plus. Support Plus commandeered my computer and proceeded to expunge the viruses that had infected the web browsers I am in the habit of employing, although the browsers were supposed to be brand new to my updated system.
That wasn't the end of my difficulties. The publishing programs I had been using for nearly ten years were no longer honored by Adobe. One must now rent such programs. I tried Gimp and Scribus, both free-ware programs. While Gimp worked well as a Photoshop replace-ment, Scribus was a major headache compared to Pagemaker.
By this point in the story, I had spent two and a half months attempting to recover from the cyber-attack. I was so frustrated I emailed the contributors to the Fall, 2016 issue of the NOR that I would be discontinuing the magazine, and why.
Fortunately, this isn't the end of the story. Two weeks ago, Tom Wayman and Verna Relkoff of the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival told me they would like to hold an event that deals with cyber-attacks.
Scheduled for August 26, it will be a benefit held in hopes of raising the sunken literary vessel that is The New Orphic Review. It will be held at 7:30 in Room 310 of Selkirk College's Kootenay Studio Arts building, 606 Victoria Street, Nelson, B.C.
[Ernest Hekkanen will give away books he has written with every $20 donation. Cheques written to Ernest Hekkanen can be mailed to New Orphic Review c/o
706 Mill Street, Nelson, B.C. V1L 4S5]
ORIGINS OF THE NEW ORPHIC REVIEW
[Ernest Hekkanen, author of more than forty books, has been the mainstay of The New Orphic Review, a periodical that has had four stories selected for inclusion the prestigious Journey Prize anthology. Those stories are: Margrith Schraner's "Dream Dig"; in 2001 Journey Prize anthology, Ross Klatte's "First-Calf Heifer"; in 2011 Journey Prize anthology, M.A. Fox's "Piano Boy ";in 2014 Journey Prize anthology and Tyler Keevil's "Sealskin, in 2014 Journey Prize anthology. Keevil New Orphic story won the annual $10,000 prize.
In addition,Thomas J. Rice's "Hard Truths"; was selected for the Best American Mystery anthology in 2012 and Andre Kocsis's "Crossing"; was selected for the Best American Mystery anthology of 2013. Notable Canadian contributors to The Ormsby Review have included W.P. Kinsella,Tom Wayman, Stella L. Harvey, Craig Boyko, David Watmough, Michael Bullock and Jack Cady. - Ed.]
By Ernest Hekkanen
"The New Orphic Review, affectionately referred to among friends as our love child, is the product of twenty years of literary engagement.";
When Margrith Schraner and I started our literary journal back in 1998, we had just turned fifty-one. We were living in Vancouver, at Napier and Victoria Drive, and we were full of irrepressible-dare I say youthful-optimism. Literature, for me, had become a matter of defying the odds. To create a product of no obvious practical value, and for which there would be an extremely limited market, if any at all, seemed to me an act of defiance worth pouring some hard-earned cash into.
I've always been susceptible to romantic notions of this sort.
I've been asked to provide a brief history of the magazine. By the mid-1990s, I had come to realize that the literary community wasn't favorably disposed toward the tales I liked to tell. In 1984, Stoddart Publishing issued me a contract for my first novel, Chasing After Carnivals. It got all the way to the bound galley proof stage, and was even reviewed by several book publishing organs, but then it failed to come out. In 1987 and '88, Thistledown Press published two of my short story collections, Medieval Hour in the Author's Mind and The Violent Lavender Beast, neither of which sold particularly well, despite receiving some excellent reviews. From that time on, I found it increasingly difficult to sell my work to magazines and book- publishing houses. Literary fashions had changed, and I was left behind in the dust.
By 1995 I had written three novels and enough short stories to flesh out at least two more collections. I had a decision to make. Either I would have to give up writing or find an alternative way to succeed. My friend, Jurgen Hesse (1924-2008), a print and radio journalist, had just finished self-publishing his book, Voices in Exile: Refugees Speak Out, in which my history of resistance had been included. As a writer, Jurgen was far more seasoned than I. We had met at International PEN and Writers' Union meetings. When Jurgen purchased a new computer, he gave me his old one. His old one had to be booted up from a 5.5 inch floppy disk each time it was used. In other words, it was already obsolete. However, it did introduce me to how easy it was to edit a manuscript, and how much less typing was involved.
Jurgen familiarized me with his approach to designing and printing books. I adopted his methods, but with some modifications of my own. Back then, there was an even greater stigma attached to self-publishing than there is now. Only the dredges of the literary world would resort to such a practice. One reason I had difficulty getting published by legitimate houses revolved around the fact that I didn't stick to the same style or approach. I enjoyed a great range of writing and would flip from grueling realism to fantasy to magic realism to satire, and back again. I wrote what pleased me rather than what was necessarily marketable. Also, my modus operandi left something to be desired. I wanted to disturb my readers' existential comfort, and that approach doesn't endear one to marketing departments, which now determine what is "worth"; being published. As one reviewer remarked: "[his] work frequently points to dark but universal recesses of the mind,"; and as a second reviewer noted, "[his stories are] often flavored with dark humor, bizarre characters and incidents.";
I self-published my first book in 1995, a novel entitled From a Town Now Dreaming, and by 1998, I had gained enough confidence to start publishing The New Orphic Review. I convinced myself that it was a wise literary move to become the editor-in-chief of my own magazine. As you can probably guess, the crucible of my imagination couldn't be expected to produce an alloy all that different from my nature. I enjoy a great range of writing, some of it quite experimental. Also, I had no desire to subscribe to Canada Council mandates dictating the size of a print run, the country of origin of my contributors or what constitutes good literature. I was egomaniacal enough to think such rules didn't apply to me.
Financially, our journal has nearly always been a losing venture, but as long as I could afford to publish it, and had enough energy to do so, I got a kick out of defying the odds. For the first nine years, each issue was photocopied and then bound by me in the basement of our house-using a drill, thread and glue. In the year 2000, we moved to our present location in Nelson, where I continued to use my rather primitive methods. In the spring of 2007, I started using Pagemaker and Photoshop to create our journal, and sent the electronic files off to Blitzprint in Calgary to be printed. The cost of producing an issue of the NOR nearly always exceeded the amount of money it brought in, one exception being when Tyler Keevil, a contributor of ours, won the Journey Prize Award in 2014, and our magazine received a two thousand dollar stipend.
On the title page of every New Orphic Review is a small icon identifiable as Pythagoras. Back in the annals of time, Pythagoras was a prominent figure in the Orphic Tradition. One of the highly touted disciplines in Orphism revolved around 'theory,' which, according to an explanation in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, meant something closer to "passionate sympathetic contemplation,"; a practice that can be quite useful for writers who are trying to get inside a character's heart and mind. The idea was to enter into one's subject and thereby know its essence. It could be compared to a form of meditation, I guess. In the early 20th century, Guillaume Apollinaire referred to certain artists as Orphists. Many of those artists took exception to the label being applied to them, and so he coined the term 'surrealist,' which came to have a great deal more currency. Back in the mid-1990s, I decided to adopt the word 'Orphic' for our publishing house and literary review. I did it out of a sense of playfulness, and because it suggested that we were part of a lineage.
In the spring of 2016, The New Orphic Review suffered a cryptolocker cyberattack. I chose not to be held to ransom, despite the fact that it meant losing all of my active files. I purchased a refurbished computer and learned how to use Scribus and Gimp well enough to produce the fall issue of our journal. That increased our expenses, which were already fairly considerable. Now each issue of the NOR costs up to nine-hundred dollars to produce and subsequently ship to subscribers. Indeed, mailing costs have become quite onerous for small publishers like me. Getting a distributor isn't an option, unless your publication is being subsidized by federal and provincial grants, because distributors eat up most of the profits.
The New Orphic Review, affectionately referred to among friends as our love child, is the product of twenty years of literary engagement. We have published an amazing number of talented writers who have since gone on to make careers for themselves in the literary world. It was with some sadness that we stepped back from publishing it. Better to leave on a high note than a low one, though.
The resurrection of The New Orphic Review (2018)
By Ernest Hekkanen
The front cover of the Farewell Issue of The New Orphic Review displays a photo of a painting I executed back in the mid-1990s, namely, Contemplation. A human figure, stylized and expressionistic in its deportment, seems to regard the viewer with a bemused, slightly indulgent near-smile. Indeed, he could be suffering the explanations of someone who's been telling him a whopping good tale that has stretched his credulity.
In the spring of 2018, after our literary journal ceased publication, Alan Twigg of B.C. BookWorld wrote me an email to the effect that I should consider archiving the NOR before it is lost to time. Margrith Schraner and I were planning a trip to Vancouver where she intended to take a course in Jungian dream theory and I-well, I intended to roam the streets, refreshing memories of when I had first come to Vancouver in 1969, as a 22-year old American wanted by the F.B.I. for my anti-war activities.
"Why don't you set up an appointment with Alan?"; Margrith suggested. "See what he has in mind.";
And so, it came to pass. On March 9th Alan picked Margrith and I up at the downtown YWCA Hotel on Beatty Street and drove us to our former neighbourhood in the Commercial Drive area. At the Prado coffee shop he introduced us to Richard Mackie, editor of the online Ormsby Review, who would be working with us on the project. We spent only a brief time talking about the NOR, but it was enough to persuade me to create an online archival version.
I didn't re-read the issues before preparing them for internet travel to the 1st Avenue lair of Alan Twigg and David Lester. On rare occasions, I took a few moments to skim a paragraph or two from my editorials, and I was amazed at the confidence and certainty I once had when it came to discussing literature. Now my confidence and certainty have been tempered, owing to age, perhaps. I feel more like that figure in Contemplation: bemused.
The online version of The New Orphic Review differs from the hard copy version in this respect only: the pagination has occasionally changed owing to different generations of computers employed to create the layout of the text. It was also affected by whether I stored the contents on 3.5 floppies, CDs or USB sticks. Also, I should add, by the programs used to produce the NOR-Windows Office, Pagemaker or Scribus. Many of the early issues were cut and pasted using a knife and glue, and those pages had to be scanned into the files. Later, as technology advanced in the do-it-yourself publishing world, issues of the magazine began to look much more professional.
If nothing else, the online version of The New Orphic Review is a testament to how innovative one can be when it comes to surviving in the world of literature, especially if one exists on the extreme fringes. Also, there wouldn't have been a NOR without our many talented contributors.
I'm happy our literary journal will have a more lasting, albeit ephemeral existence.
Submitted on August 8, 2016 in By David.
