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....