HI, I’M ALLIE. I’M 11 YEARS OLD. Three years ago, my dad and I created the first issue of our own magazine, biff.

It was inevitable, really. I work at home as a freelance writer, and when Allie was 2, and coming to her “dadhouse” on weekends, her bedroom was my office. From inside her crib, she could make music by batting at the keys on my fax machine. At 5, she’d ask me, “How come they’re only paying you a dollar a word?”

If I made boats for a living, Allie surely would have started picking up stray scraps of wood. Together, she and I would have made elaborate tree forts or cabinets. Instead our family project is a magazine.

We work at the dining room table. Usually we start by saying, “So, uh, what do you want to write about? Um, uh, I don’t know.”

Allie sits there, bored, scrunching up the legs of her pajama pants and drawing cartoon characters on her knees. “Dad, I can’t do this,” she snarls, hurling her pen.

“Look,” my dad says, “I’m gonna take a walk around the block, and when I come back you better have your mind made up: “Either you’re doing this zine or you’re not.”

Imagine contending with all the usual agonies of writing as you negotiate the delicate labyrinth that is family dynamics. Sprinkle a little preadolescent recalcitrance on top and bring the whole mix to a rolling boil. That is the crucible in which biff, the magazine is created.

Sort of. But let me give you the big picture. Usually, when you say the word “family” you think of at least three people, typically four, and you picture sitting around a living room playing Parcheesi and drinking Swiss Miss hot cocoa.

But at the biff world headquarters, there are only two of us, and while we don’t live in a condemned hovel, our living room is a clutter of wrinkled papers and china cups, half-filled with cold tea.

As we sit amidst this mess, we think up story ideas. Biff is about us and our lives. If we see something interesting or do something that’s a big deal—like take an overnight bike trip, move across town or get a cat—it goes in there. Biff expresses who we are as a family. We’re kind of sarcastic, so when we did our first interview—with my granddad, who’d just traveled to Central America—we didn’t really ask him about Central America. We asked, “How many pairs of socks did you bring?”

But is it really sarcastic to ask questions like that? What we’re trying to do is hold the detritus around us up to the light and revel in it a bit, especially if it’s absurd. In our third issue, we wrote about various people who live within 253 paces of our new house, including our neighbors, 97 paces away, who have a collection of over 100 miniature drinking glasses shaped like cowboy boots.

Biff is funny, but it’s not all laugh-your-head-off stuff. We’ve got some serious pieces in there. For example, I wrote about how we went fishing in Alaska with the native Haida people. An old man and his son sat in the front of the boat, singing a song of thanks for the day’s catch.

When you’re making a zine, you’re always trying to grind the dust of your everyday life into stories. You’re turning your life into an art project, which is something I think every family should do, in some way. Making art is a gesture of faith in the world’s possibilities, and sadly it’s a subversive act these days. We’re supposed to be afraid now—of the terrorists, of the sin and crime lurking our street. Our nation is a fortress and the family is the most guarded citadel.

Whatever, I don’t get what my dad’s talking about—and I’m not against minivans or Parcheesi. I have two contrasting lives. Across town, at my mom’s—well, I can’t say that we are the average American family, but it’s closer to that. I’ve got my 7-year-old brother there. We have big family meals, and holidays are really done up. Then I go to my dad’s. There’s time and quiet to do biff.

When Allie was little, we worked in spurts—15 minutes here, 20 there—squeezed between trips to the playground. Her literary outlook was simple. Everything was just, “Wow, cool!” Now we’ll spend like half an hour going back and forth over whether a certain word should be in italics and we’ll arrive, finally, at a provisional peace.

For me, biff is just a peek: “Hey, this is what being a writer is.” Pretty soon, I’ll move on and try different things—swim team, maybe, or photography. Already, I’m sometimes tired of adults holding me back. But sometimes, too, I still like working with my dad. He really cares. He cares how the stories look on the page and how the words flow.

We’re in the twilight days of biff, the magazine. I have to reconcile with that, and say goodbye to a certain magic. Guiding a kid’s writing is like waiting for fireflies in a meadow. You wait, and for a long time there’s nothing—nothing great, nothing great—just a few garbled, half-formed ideas—and then (bling!) there it is: a crisp, shining sentence, and you circle it and let her build from there, in directions you could never predict or dream of.

At a certain point, we’ll be both scratching away in pen, on opposite sides of the table, and I’ll look up and think, “My God! I knew this kid when she was a lump in a blanket, and now she’s doing something amazing. She’s writing.”

It takes about three months to put together one issue. When the stories are done, I draw the pictures. We take the finished pages to the copy shop. Then we bring the copies home. We put the pages of biff in eight separate piles, and then we go around and around the room, making the piles into actual magazines. Gradually, the table fills with finished biffs, and I get little shivers down my spine. “I did this,” I think. “This was me—me and my dad.”

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