The Curse of Great Barrington

I can't remember how many years ago it was when this happened, but I suspect it's been a few. Six, maybe even seven. I was in a writing conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a group of people who were then and still are, perhaps even more so, terribly important to my life. I had met Alison at a writing conference at Wesleyan, Dawn and Laura and Priscilla at a conference in Charlotte, and I had known Fred the longest of all. I met him at a confernce on the coast. He was our teacher. There were others there too, of course, but they don't matter. As I age, I grow ever more ruthless in my editing.

Great Barrington was wet and gray in November and the inn where we stayed was charmless. Our toilet seat was not attached to the commode, there was a lot of faded chintz everywhere and each room seemed, mysteriously, to be either way too cold or way too hot. I roomed with Alison and I annoyed her because I snored. The others all knew each other but it was the first time she had met everyone, including Fred, and I was eager to braid together the various strands of my writing life back then. It's a project I've long since given up on, but at the time it seemed desirable that all my "writing friends" would know and like each other. Perhaps I had fantasies of starting some sort of salon - which would be tricky, since the people I listed all lived in different states. God knows what I thought or what I hoped for back then. But I think I knew on some cellular level that this group of people assembled in this dreary inn would turn out to be very important to me and important to my life.

Either way, we were slogging through the conference and one night - wet and dank like all of them seemed to be - the entire group decided to go out for Japanese. The restaurant had a sign saying - rather unpromisingly - that they had the best sushi in the Berkshires. But they were unprepared for a party of 12 or 15 or whatever we were so we stood, crammed in our damp coats in the tiny foyer,and waited and waited while they attempted to put together a table. Fred went out, perhaps to smoke, I can't recall, or perhaps like me he was just overcome with claustrophobia. I went out on the street to join him. It was incredibly misty, like something out Sherlock Holmes or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We stood and shivered and he looked at me and said "You know, three books will come out of this conference. Yours, and Alison's, and Dawn's."

It was an astounding thing to say. Three books don't come out of any conference, at least not a tiny one somewhere in the Berkshires populated with a group of never-published would-be novelists. It's the statistical equivalent of stopping an elevator in mid-rise and turning around and saying "You know, three people on this elevator are going to win the lottery."

Fred was prone to grand pronouncements. He liked big, bitter, grandiose analogies - I remember the first class I ever had with him in which he compared the world of publishing to a demolition derby and said the last car moving, no matter how battered, would be the winner. But this statement struck me hard and has stayed with me all these years precisely because he didn't say it grandly. His voice was devoid of inflection. He said it matter-of-factly, like one would say it was night, or we were in Massachusetts, or we needed a table for 12 for dinner.

The ramifications of Fred's prediction turned out to be many and complex...and probably fodder of a future blog entry. For a while I even considered writing a memoir entitled "Three Books" based on his casual prophesy. But for now, let me just tell you what's got that night back on my mind. Recently, when I was at MacDowell Colony, I met and befriended a young architect named Jason. Jason is freakishly smart and not a writer so he could ask some very apt questions about the writing process that always caught me off guard. One night I told him this story. Probably in the context that I usually do - that Fred was right, that Dawn and Alison published first, that I feared I'd never sell my novel, but then I finally did, and all my usual moaning and whining. Because to me that's the heart of the story....that Fred made this outlandish prediction and it came true. Now before you say "Well he must have known they were good books or at least had the potential to be good books..." let me hasten to assure you of two things. At that point it would have taken Nostradomos himself to have seen the potential in any of these books. Fred probably recognized we were all three good writers but there is nothing special about that. The hills are full of good writers. The vast majority of writers, even good writers, never publish. Especially not novels. To me it is still amazing that he saw this would happen.

And I probably told this story to Jason in just this way, as a prophecy, but Jason's reaction, as it often did during our weeks together, surprised me. He said "He cursed you."

Hmmm....Cursed us? All writers want to publish and nothing can stop them from wanting this, although some don't have the balls to admit it and very few have the balls to survive it when it actually happens. Still, it was hard for me to understand what Jason meant by saying Fred had cursed us. And when I asked him about this all he said was that he didn't know, that it seemed like an expectation and that expectations are always loaded. I started backpedalling from my own story....maybe the fog wasn't as thick as I'd originally said it was. Maybe the night wasn't so dark. Maybe the toilet wasn't as broken as I recall. Surely dear Fred, my friend and mentor, would never casually curse three women while waiting for a table at a sushi restaurant.

But it all stays on my mind. Is a prediction of publication a blessing, a curse, or merely somewhere between the two, i.e., a prediction?

More to come....

rest stop story

I'm writing in the dark morning hours of December 26th, and it's rather pleasant. A few days ago I was talking to my friend Dawn about the solstice and she said "But I like darkness...." and maybe she's right.

This weekend I am going to work on a short story, one of the ones where the idea seemed to fall out of the sky. A few weekends ago I visited Ginny in the mountains. She's a poet and I always read a lot of poetry when I'm up there....she has journals and chapbooks everywhere. The American Poetry Review, circa 1999, in a magazine rack beside the toilet, that sort of thing. Anyway, I was coming back to Charlotte on the Monday after the weekend, a little high on well-chosen words, and suddenly the idea for this short story came to me. Not exactly full-blown, but pretty much so, and I pulled off the road at one of those places labeled "Scenic overlook" and wrote the main idea down in my journal. Scribbed notes, so I'm not sure exactly how much I have, but I think it is a nice arc and that is what I intend to work on this weekend.

I love short stories. I consider them the purest American art form. I wish there was more of a market for them. Sometimes I think they're being weeded out like VHS or 8-tracks, that the whole word is being reformatted for novels.

But this weekend, I write.

Seven Pounds in the Bucket List

Due to my decision to positively, absolutely wallow in despair I'm actually feeling much better today. Following on the heels of taking my recently widowed mother to a viewing of the new Will Smith comedy Seven Pounds I rented The Bucket List, lay down on the couch and sobbed my eyes out.

I cry at stupid things. I cry at things that are designed to make me cry. Terms of Endearment? Sob-a-rama every time. So even though The Bucket List was manipulative in the extreme (although, in my defense, what sort of hard-hearted bastard wouldn't tear up at the demise of Morgan Freeman?) it was still a great relief to let it out. And my friends have galloped to the rescue in their horseless fashion, many of them sending sweet emails or calls since they knew I was blue. Happy holidays everyone!

Writing resolutions for 2009

Hmmm...

A couple of days ago, following a conversation with my writing buddy Laura, I drafted a list of resolutions for the upcoming year. They don't have anything to do with word counts, hours at the keyboard, pages submitted, etc. In some ways they're easier resolutions to keep and in some ways harder. They're all about the mental part of the game. Here goes.

For 2009 I will:

1. Keep the holy trinity going. Each day I will a) dance b) meditate and c) journal. I know all these things work wonders for me in terms of my mood and my sanity so why do I have so much trouble doing them?

2. Look for more writing colonies. Stat!

3. Practice gratitude daily. Hokey, yeah, but I suspect it might be the key to everything that matters in the creative process.

4. View the things that happen in the publishing practice as learning opportunities not punishments from a vengeful god. With this in mind, I've started a file literally labeled "Things I'll know when I sell the second book," which reminds me.....

5. Write the second book.

6. Hold tight to my writing friends and foster a sense of creative community. Encourage other writers, not in a vapid "Love ya, babe" sort of way but in terms of telling them repeatedly where I feel their writing strengths lie. I think most people know what they're doing wrong but I'm not sure most of us know what we're doing right.

7. Don't take everything so damn personally.

8. And on a related note...don't react quickly to anything and everything that happens on the publishing side, whether it's emails from my editor, reviews, feedback etc. Wait twelve hours (twelve) before responding.

9. Continue to develop my craft through both teaching and taking classes from other writers I admire.

10. Try to remember what initially drew me to the idea of writing a novel. Sometimes I feel that inital impulse waning, slipping away, being drowned out by the louder noises from the marketplace.

The old ennui

Well, guys, Christmastime is coming....my dining room is full of wrapped gifts, my inbox is full of well-wishes, my calendar is full of upcoming events and all I can do is sit and ponder my - and I use this term loosely - writing career. How sad is that?

Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day I sold my novel. Grand Central has decided to title it, Love in Mid-Air, ergo the title of my blog. (I call this "marketing.") But the novel, alas, seems also to be in mid-air. Publication date pushed back to January 2010 (which feels like forever) and I never hear anything from my agent or my editor. I'm well aware that the next year will be very challenging for me and part of the challenge will be my efforts to go from a "writer" (i.e., someone who lives alone, works alone, shuffles around in her bathrobe talking to people who don't exist, but who at least has complete control over her work) to an "author" (i.e., someone who is expected to have a public persona and convince people to buy her book and who has absolutely no control over anything.) This scares me.

Okay, now I'm getting ready to say two things that are contracdict each other and are yet equally true. I am afraid nobody is going to buy this book. I have a lot of friends who are writers and I'm painfully aware that there's a long list of things that can happen when you publish your first novel and that one of those things is "nothing." My agent only took me on as a favor to my friend Alison, who is an important client of his. My editor seems to have fluctuating enthusiasm for the project. I didn't get a big advance. Or at least not an advance of a size that will force them try and create publicity for the book just to protect their investment. I fear my book falls into the publishing category of "Let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks."

And I'm afraid that somebody is going to by this book and that I will be the one thing I've feared most in my life. I'll be seen.

I know, I know. I'm bitching and most people don't have an editor, an agent or a sold book at all.

I know, I know. Even authors who get big advances and have the publicity pushes and involved agent/editors often deal with the same sort of worry and disappointment.

I know, I know. I am, with no sarcasm intended at all, among the blessed of the earth.

Yet still I ponder and still I stew.

My only prayer for surviving a year of waiting, I think, is to try and find some lesson in this process. Try and make some sense of what's happening to me and what's not happening to me. That's why I've started this blog. Stay posted. I have only yet begun to whine.