Three Small Stories from the Big Writing Conference

The writing conference, it was big.


I.
Saturday Night: Dance Party. Third Floor Ballroom.
The music was terrible. And my friends danced anyway, and I tried, though the contemporary radio r&b that the dj mostly stuck to has no influence whatsoever on my hips. Which sucked, because I wanted to dance. I wanted, specifically, to dance. Even goofily. We all did. We had walked many blocks from a perfectly warm, comfortable bar, through falling snow to get here. This is a lot to say of people who make their homes in the South. This is a lot to say—believe me—of this group of friends.

The dancefloor was full of awkward, gyrating writers who were mostly Caucasian and mostly several sheets to the wind. It looked exactly like a cruise ship. I imagine. (Full disclosure: I have never been on a cruise ship.) When I dance, I myself am an awkward, gyrating writer. I could get with this. With a few tweaks.

We went up to the DJ, requested: OutKast? No. Missy Elliott? No. Even, maybe, Michael Jackson? Guy said he could download something for us, but he wouldn’t have it till the next day. Note: It’s 2009. We’d have happily given him the dollar. We walked back. The DJ launched into “Get On Up.” Surrounded by better songs, this old standby would have been fine. Only it wasn't, so it was somehow more disappointing.
“This," said one friend, "is, like, your cousin’s wedding. And you don’t even like your cousin.” Next up: Madonna. But not “Get into the Groove” Madonna. “Like a Prayer” Madonna. Bon Jovi. (?) At this point, I gave up, left the dance floor and moved to safety—before the opening bars of “Shout.” As in Kick your heels up and. Throw your head back and. It was worse than a cruise ship, or a lame wedding. Another friend nailed it. “I have been to 745 bar mitzvahs,” he said. “This is your 746th bar mitzvah,” I told him.

II.
Sunday Afternoon: O’Hare.
In the long security line, a fortyish woman and a sixtyish man were just ahead of me, carrying official conference tote bags. As we serpentined our way back and forth and back again, they spoke in tones that were a bit loud, looking around with that weird sort of niche-famous pride between sentences. “I think it was a successful panel,” she announced. “Famous Poet A and Famous Poet C should definitely collaborate on that project. And your essay—fabulous! Now you just need to publish!”
“Yes, yes,” he nodded, all corduroy-patched sagacity. “It’s all right.” Back and forth they went about this essay. As we alternately stood and walked, I was reading from my school’s literary magazine—this, itself, admittedly, perhaps, my own version of flaunting the conference tote. The man kept saying, “But where to publish it?” And the woman kept saying, “Oh, there must be a place,” and both of them kept making eye contact with me—or maybe, I think now, I was just staring. I might have that problem. But instead of continuing on silently with the shoe and the coat doffing, I had to say something. Like a six-year-old who imagines maybe all teachers in the world know her mommy, I held up my literary journal and said to the academic poets, “What about this one?” They asked what the journal was, I told them: We took essays, short stories, poems. The sagacious man knit his eyebrows in offense. The woman smiled benignly, seemed to sigh a little. “His essay’s on critical poetic topics in Oobolean form,” she explained as he turned his back and harrumphed on. Damn kids. “Have you heard of Oobolean form?” I shook my head. She practically patted my hand. “He’s the former editor of Poets International,” she said. “He’s no slouch.”

I nodded and apologized as I bagged my slouchy lit mag and prepared to send everything I carried through the x-rays for real inspection.


III.
Hopelessly Middlebrow.*
(aka: petty thoughts following the “No slouch” incident.)
The I-Pod is quickly dropping to lowbrow status. Maybe it’s there already. Real intellectuals do not sit on the subway nor at the airport gate, filling their ears with distracting chatter or catchy hooks. Their ears remain free of tacky white plastic knobs and the cheap, trendy status they imply, (These knobs, now, sort of the anti-tote: NPR or conference), their future, free of the absolute promise of tinnitus. Their advanced thoughts are allowed to soar, independent, unprogrammed, and unimpeded, to novel heights.
I tap my foot. This listening has absolutely nothing to do with anything but the sound.

*“Hopelessly middlebrow,” the term my old friend’s sister was tagged with by a snotty ex-classmate at a reunion, after making some ‘70s television reference. As in, “Sarah,” sigh, “you are hopelessly middlebrow.”

Predictable Me.
So of course, unemployed and with dead car (yes, that, too) and with an uncertain future in Atlanta, a weekend visit to Beachtown to turn in my thesis and hang out with friends becomes one of the best weekends ever. It was Place-under-glass good. It was Awareness-that-this-is-a-golden-memory-in-the-making good, the way only fleeting moments can be. Moments lived under the weight of awareness of their finite nature. That we know we can’t keep.

During a Saturday morning sunny drive to the beach, a friend and I listened to Smog. Smog, as you may or may not know, is the alias of musician Bill Callahan, a man whom I’ve long assumed, from the sound of his seasoned voice and wise old lyrics, to be a creepily handsome but weathered old man, in the tradition of the Devil character from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? I recently found out that he is not; this was disappointing. Rather than a figure of fable, he’s like, a completely normal thirtysomething dude who’s bedded both Joanna Newsom and Chan Marshall. (And yes, I am aware that the word “bedded” makes everything sound worse and makes me sound like a writer from freaking Star magazine.)

The album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is so beautiful, I feel kind of unworthy to listen to it and claim it for my own, and then I realized that this is precisely why I never listen to it. Even though I’ve had it for several years, my one wish with this album is for it always to feel happened-upon and new. I don’t want to learn all the words. There is so much lurvely music out there in the world, and I fill as many free spaces as possible with it. But something about this album. It’s so good that I harbor this sneaking suspicion that it’s too good for me. That it’s too good for the rest of my records, even. That it will raise the bar and wreck the happy equilibrium I’ve cultivated in my current community of cds.

Basically, there’s a concern concerning balance, Henshaw. There’s a fear of seesaws. Luckily, on this geographical end there is Marshall, who is pretty damn heavy in terms of import, and at least one amazing friend here (you know who you are, Missy-sitting-next-to-me), too, but I’ve gotta shake a leg and I dunno, where to go with this metaphor? Toss some gold ingots down over here. I am looking forward to the day when contentedness is not accompanied by some necessary “Carpe diem” sting. Does this happen? I have created a bad, bad precedent of not staying anywhere long enough to find out.