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A Gathering of Writers

A Gathering of Writers

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I spent Saturday with 200 other writers at the 2024 Washington Writers Conference. Some of us pitched ideas to agents. Others attended panels. A few of us made sure the day was running smoothly. But all of us were our own writerly selves, and that was, at least for me, why the day was such a tonic.

Writing is a solitary occupation, with much staring at blank pages and screens. It can also be accompanied by self-questioning and doubt: How can I say that better? Should I say that at all? Will anyone read this?

When writers come together they share those questions, which eases those doubts. 

In one of the day’s more memorable lines, James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor, said, “Writing is a cross between a heroin addiction and the sex drive. It’s a hunger that drives us forward.”

I looked around, and every head in the room was nodding yes.

(Above: Paul Dickson speaks to the crowd after receiving the Washington Independent Review of Books Lifetime Achievement Award. Dickson has written more than 60 nonfiction books. He encouraged attendees to support each other.)

Poetry in Prose

Poetry in Prose

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A salute in prose to National Poetry Month, 30 days devoted to verse, to words dense and encapsulated. It ends today. 

There is, as far as I know, no National Essay Month, no time set aside for the genre I know best, the one which at its root means “to try.”

The essay is the right genre for me, earnest scribbler that I am, and it is, I think, good for many of us. At the very least it’s a genre most of us know. Who hasn’t written a letter or report? Or proofread a college essay?

And so, on this last day of National Poetry Month,  I’m thinking of one of my favorite essays. Read it if you have time — it only takes three minutes — and tell me, is it not poetry in prose?

The Stacks

The Stacks

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I read on today’s Writers Almanac this quotation from Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird: “Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search the library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.”

The library stacks … I remember them well. Mine were at the old University of Kentucky library, where I went to research “bureaucracy, the fourth branch of government,” my paper topic for a high school class, Advanced Government and International Relations, taught by Colonel Coleman. (I can’t remember his first name; and was the Colonel a military term or a Kentucky honorific?)

He was an inspiring teacher, and I plunged into the research for that paper as if it were cool water on a hot summer day. It was refreshing, liberating. Hours flew by as I took notes on index cards. 

I made many trips to the library, then wrote the paper longhand and typed it up the old-fashioned way — on a typewriter with Wite Out at my side. It was more than 40 pages, and my friends never stopped ribbing me for the comment, in red ink, at the end: “A scholarly study,” Colonel Coleman had scribbled. 

“Oh yeah, it was scholarly all right. It put him to sleep!” they laughed. 

Maybe it did. But it woke me up. 

Weight of our Words

Weight of our Words

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Last night a few of us gathered to stuff folders for an upcoming writers conference. Though so much is done digitally these days, there often comes a point where the written word has a weight. Not just the weight of the words’ meaning, but an actual, tangible poundage. 

I felt this keenly when I was a magazine writer and editor, and I feel it still whenever I look through my publications, purging some, labeling and storing others. 

Last night we sorted leaflets and tucked them into folders, created name tags and tent cards. By the end of the evening, we had a tidy set of printed materials — and some heavy boxes to lift.

Raking Words

Raking Words

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A new hard-copy journal is always a cause for celebration. I go through several a year, and lately I’ve been using up the ones I have stowed away in my closet. 

The new one is not my usual basic black. It’s royal blue with a whimsical drawing of a formally-attired man (a butler?) raking “leaves” from the bountiful library around him. The drawing is titled Autumn.

Did I buy it for myself? Probably not. If it was a gift, then, I have a couple of people in mind who might have given it me me. They both have a good sense of humor.

Meanwhile, I’m thrilling to the journal’s smooth paper and magnetic-close cover. I’m four pages in; I have a lot of raking still to do.

(“Autumn” © Benoit, licensed by Riley Illustration, published by teNeues Verlag)

Bookmark Revolt

Bookmark Revolt

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I noticed the telltale threads last night. There was one on the nightstand and another among the bedcovers. No doubt about it, my bookmark was shedding, losing its jaunty tassel. The store-bought item made of laminated pressed violets and violas — such a lovely way to mark my place in the latest journal I’m keeping — is going rogue. 

I’m not surprised at these shenanigans. The bookmark is plainly not pleased with an essay I just wrote, the essay in which I disparage store-bought bookmarks and mention how seldom I use them. In fact, I’m only using this one because my current journal does not have its own built-in bookmark. 

I could repair this marker. I could collect the slender threads and attempt to reattach them. But since I spent much of yesterday tied in knots (see below), I’m unlikely to do that today.

Does a bookmark know when it’s been thrown under the bus? Apparently, it does.

Paean to Portability

Paean to Portability

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Let us pause for a moment to praise portability. Here I sit in my kitchen rocking chair, laptop on lap (actually, laptop on lap desk on lap), able to sway back and forth to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, now blaring from the radio, monitor soup simmering on the stove … and also write this post.

This is nothing new. I’ve drug this trusty machine all over the world. But given that I came of age first on typewriters and later on desktop computers, the fact that I’m able to hop around the globe or the house, creating a workspace wherever I sit, is nothing short of amazing. 

What does portability provide? Ease and freedom. Today I’m appreciating them both.

(Sometimes the laptop is almost lost amidst the clutter that surrounds it.)

Desk Envy

Desk Envy

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I really can’t complain. I may not have the desk of my dreams, but it’s not bad. An apple-green table of a desk, only slightly dented and worn (a lopsided heart carved into the middle, a few splotches of salmon-pink paint in one corner, souvenirs of the girls who once used it).

True, it does not overlook the Atlantic Ocean, or the Front Range of the Rockies, or the harbor in Oban, Scotland. But it does have a lovely view of the backyard, the main street of the neighborhood and a corner of the woods beyond. 

My perfectly-fine desk doesn’t keep me from having desk envy, though. And last night I experienced a full dose of it while watching the movie “Something’s Gotta Give.” It wasn’t my first viewing of this film, but it was the first time I had desk envy watching it. 

Instead of focusing on the budding romance of Erica the playwright, I zeroed in on her writing space. The broad expanse of the (mahogany?) desk, the perfectly placed lamp. The windows! Oh, my gosh, the windows! And the door, open to sea breezes.

I keep telling myself it’s just a movie set. But still…

Auld Lang Syne

Auld Lang Syne

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It’s Robert Burns’ Day in Scotland and elsewhere as fans of the poet raise their glasses to toast the man and his verse, preferably at a Burns Supper, where haggis is eaten, strong drink is quaffed, and songs are sung (some of them not suitable for mixed company). 

I saw little of Burns at the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. His room was being renovated. Instead, I looked at the exhibits of his compatriots, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott. 

But today’s festivities are a perfect excuse to write about Scotland, look through photos of the place, and honor one of the most famous of Burns’s poems, Auld Lang Syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak’ a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

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I’m thinking about artificial intelligence this morning, about what it knows and how it knows it, about its regulation, about the world we’re creating with it. 

Because I’ve built a career on words, and bots can now string words together so well that most of us would be hard-pressed to tell the difference, I want to think there’s a level of creativity, a depth of soul that human-generated content has locked in. But because bots use creative, soulful work to build their models, that’s not necessarily the case.

Some writers work with AI to perfect their prose style. Others rail against it with sentences not as felicitously crafted as those they critique. Who will win this battle? That’s a question we can’t answer now — and won’t be able to answer for a long time. 

(These books are filled with human-produced content. Will future books be able to say the same?)