Some years later, while flipping through the phone book, Galde saw the name "Llewellyn" and decided to call about a job. As it happened, the publisher had one available, and Galde became a copy editor. Eventually, she found herself with the plum assignment of editing Fate. In 1991, Galde started her own publishing house, Galde Press, which now features some 90 titles. Galde began mostly with books on New Age spirituality and the paranormal--Enjoy Your Own Funeral is one example. But the press has since branched out into poetry and more traditional nonfiction--for instance, the best-selling World War II memoir A Half Acre of Hell.

In 2001, when Llewellyn decided to sell Fate, Galde jumped at the chance to run the magazine herself. Restoring the magazine to its former status was, she realized, her destiny.

Since taking over Fate, Galde has done her best to change nothing. The magazine's readership tends to be, on balance, rather conservative in its tastes: When Fate recently published a cover illustration by R. Crumb depicting a buxom female Yeti in a skimpy outfit, outraged letters poured in--less, perhaps, an outcry against the indecency of the drawing itself than against the misrepresentation of the noble Sasquatch.

"Our readers are devoutly loyal because, you know, it's not some big corporate thing," Galde explains. "But, boy, if we get our facts wrong, they call us up and give us heck. They also don't like anything too raunchy or sexist or too risqué."

Indeed, of all Fate's regular features, the most popular is "My Proof of Survival," in which readers write about their near-death experiences and brushes with divinity. Some of the stories are silly--a miraculous never-ending bag of potato chips, for instance--but most are sad and sweet and wonderful: dead parents and spouses returning to say goodbye to their survivors is a common one.

Reading through the heartfelt testimonials of Fate devotees, one gets a sense that they are, by and large, very much like Galde: Nice, normal people who simply choose to believe in a type of magic that's been wrung out of life. Their animating impulse is religious--a dream of a brighter, more comprehensible world, of life after death, of aliens and angels.

Which is, in a roundabout way, why everything in Fate is gospel, even if none of it is true.

Phyliss Galde's biography courtesy of citypages.com