East is East, South is South, etc.

Just finished reading T.C. Boyle's East is East which includes a hilarious send up of a writing colony. Boyle's fictional colony is located near Savannah but otherwise quite like MacDowell, where he has been a resident....although I suspect it's also like Yadoo or any of the big colonies.

I heard about the book while I was at MacDowell but when I went to the Peterborough library to check it out I couldn't find it in the stacks. I approached the desk with some trepidation. MacDowell colonists are free to use the public facilities of the little town of Peterborough, including the library, but it's no secret we're mildly resented. Maybe because the colony pays no taxes, maybe because New Englanders are inherently suspicious of artsy-fartsy creative types. Maybe because the local rescue squad gets tired of running out to the colony for cases of alcohol poisoning, bear baiting, or half-hearted suicide attempts.

Anyway, the library looks over her half glasses at me and stonily informs me that someone from MacDowell took the book and never brought it back. She refrained from saying "What else would you expect?" but it hung in the air.

So now, a full year later, I have ordered the book off Amazon and I laughed out loud as I read parts, mostly about the over-the-top rivalry of two female novelists at the colony. In real life I never encountered that kind of cruelty at MacDowell. Our readings after dinner - while undoubtedly nerve wracking for whomever was presenting - were fun ways to get together and bounce around ideas and rarely sparked criticism or controversy. I may have been so far out of the loop of name artists there that I failed to see rivalry if there was any... but I don't think that's the case.

So why did I find Boyle's book so funny and true? Because I've certainly seen artistic envy in action before and I give him credit for having the balls to skewer it. (I give myself credit for using both "balls" and "skewer"in the same sentence.) Part of what made the book so biting is that these colonists are thrust by accident into the middle of a tragedy with international implications and they are so wound up with themselves and their pecking order at the colony that they completely fail to recognize what's happening. Until one of them decides it's her chance to move into the lucrative world of gossip journalism, that is.

God, you've got to love the colony world. It's so weird and self-absorbed and incestuous and out of touch with reality. I hope I get back into it soon.

Inevitable Envy

People are loathe to admit it, but envy is an inevitable (and unenviable) part of the writing life. I have been on both sides of the envy seesaw, and it's no fun either way. Envy has always seemed to me such a sticky-feeling emotion, the kind of thing where you need to shower just after you admit to yourself that you're feeling it. No wonder we call it by so many other words.

But Shakespeare felt professional envy, probably directed toward Kit Marlowe - in fact, he wrote sonnets about it. Fitzgerald and Hemingway had a famously rivalrous friendship - as did Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Melville got tired of playing second fiddle to Hawthorne...and I just read that Virginia Woolf, after reading glowing reviews of the "The Four Quartets" by TS Eliot, went out to walk in the fields and tell herself "I am I, and must follow that furrow, not copy another."

So here's the bottom line on professional envy. If you feel it...or rather when you feel it, first of all take comfort that you're in the very best of company.

Secondly, use it as an impetus to write. You can't let your friend get that far ahead of you, can you?

Thirdly, remember that this is a street which goes both ways and that at some point, if you keep writing, you will be on the receiving end of someone else's envy. It might just be a well-turned phrase in a writing workshop, it might be the Pulitzer. Either way when you notice it you're going to feel...a little sticky. Because here's the weird thing about envy. It feels no better to be envied than it does to envy other people.

When I sold my novel my friend Dawn said "The publishing process will be full of surprises. And one of them is that your friends are not going to be particularly happy for you." It's a harsh realization....for years you and your friends are lolling around in the same muddy pasture of despair. No one can get an agent, much less published. It doesn't seem possible. It seems as far away as if you were sitting there saying "Some day one of us is going to fly."

But then it happens. Someone sells her book. And the reaction is not just envy but surprise. Wait a minute. She sold her book? Actually sold it, and she has an agent and an editor and a title and a cover and all that sort of stuff? The land shifts beneath you all a little bit and it's hard not to have a jumble of emotions, with envy certainly among them.

Now here's the conundrum. If your group is full of good writers and you're committed to helping each other, the news that the first of your group has published is both an occasion for envy and, on the other hand, a boon for everyone. There's a little more of a crack in the gate....maybe your friend will ask their agent to look at your book. Maybe they'll help you when it's time to negotiate your own contract or publicize your own book.

But even if the stars align and you're able to help each other beautifully - and indeed it has happened among me and my writing friends - you still have to go through that gate one at a time. Some people have to hang back and watch their friends precede them into the land of the published and that hurts. So I guess the fourth point about envy is...

Accept it as a rite of passage. And in some ways, evidence of how far you've come. Melville envied Hawthorne because he knew him. Ditto for Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sexton and Plath, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Woolf and Eliot. We envy people who are nearby, who seem just a step or two ahead of us in the process. The language of envy begins with "It could have been me..."

We don't feel that about people who are far above us. You don't lie on your couch and re-read Pride and Prejudice of the 700th time and envy Austin. She's Austin, for God's sake, it would be like feeling envy for an angel. So when your friends begin to improve in their writing....to publish....to win awards or be admitted into colonies, your envy is a sign that you're not that far behind them. Painful as it is, you've moved a step closer to publication.

Because if it could have been you, someday it will be.