Seeds of Change
What a Summer Writers Conference Can (and Cannot) Do for You
What a Summer Writers Conference Can (and Cannot) Do for You.
MINNESOTA is partway through its five-month winter, and I’m looking at a brochure for one of the biggest summer writers conferences in the country. It looks like every other piece of mail arriving through the slot these days, mostly other summer writers conference brochures and seed catalogues. Each is crammed with glossy full-color photos that make promises about what might happen after the snow melts.
I drink a cup of coffee at my kitchen table, flip pages, and dream. Night-blooming vines and writers in sunglasses and sandals at a picnic table laughing. Tomatoes and a young woman on a porch, talking animatedly with a poet whose work I love. Melons and a shot of distant mountains. A man writing alone in a garden. Every page promises blue skies and growth.
What exactly do these photographs in conference brochures promise, and do the actual events live up to such promises? Until I had attended a few conferences myself, I wasn’t sure. Would I learn that my favorite writer is a jerk? Could I find a new mentor or even be discovered? I asked myself these questions in the same way I considered the unfamiliar varieties of flowers I saw in the seed catalogues, equal parts giddy about the prospect of a backyard bower and dubious about whether that plant would grow in my yard. Attending a conference is like taking a chance on some new plants—some experiences won’t match the idyllic scenes in the brochures, but many will take root and enrich your writing life in unexpected ways.
It is fashionable among some writers to bash writers conferences. At an Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference one year I watched a well-known poet describe such events to his cheering audience as “places where well-known writers aggrandize each other.” I was stunned. I’d first met him at a writers conference, where he’d been—well, a headliner.
I have found the focus of writers conferences to be creative exploration and camaraderie, not oily schmoozing. The events remind me of the activist community I worked in during my twenties, which taught me that ordinary people could make a national impact. We had our demagogues, people who loved the camera and were great for sound bites. But our community’s respect belonged to the people willing to show up, dirty their hands, and wait. At writers conferences I don’t usually find myself breathlessly trying to win over a VIP’s attention. But I often find myself in the presence of someone who can recite long poems or passages of books from memory. Or someone who announces that she scanned the final paragraph of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and discovered that the sentences were full of trochees, mimicking falling snow.
Are the photographs in the summer conference ads misleading to
the uninitiated? No. (Except for the photo of the person writing, which implies hours of downtime in a place where you will be lucky to get enough sleep.) If these photos mislead it’s because they imply that the pleasures of writing are solely the end products seen in the pictures, when cocktails on a lawn are only one brief-blooming reward of a grittier but equally pleasurable process.
Summer writers conferences expose you to a wider swath of writers and a wider range of writing than you may have previously encountered. If you write alone or live outside an urban area, it may be the first time you find a community, your people, at all. You will meet writers who have attended various MFA programs but also architects, grandmothers, laborers— people who have never formally studied writing, or maybe never attended college. You may decide that a formal education in creative writing does not necessarily make one more advanced, smart, or well-read. You will write down many titles of books you’ve never heard of.
The workshop at a writers conference bears only passing resemblance to its cousin, the workshop table at an MFA program. The members of a program’s workshop have months to develop a sense of equilibrium, which at its best fosters intimacy and depth and at its worst leads to stasis. In contrast, a conference workshop table has a slightly messy feel, reflective of the ways that honest growth is gangly and unpredictable.
Conference workshops lurch and stumble, with less common shorthand when everyone reads a piece, with little established rapport with the faculty or one another, with no history or hierarchy of aesthetics. They are what poet Sean Hill calls “come-together communities.”
Hill directs the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference and has attended several conferences as a poet, including Cave Canem’s retreat and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He says he always leaves a conference encouraged and exposed to new ways of making poems. “I’m pushed to experiment with the ways I engage form and content and to hopefully develop as a writer,” he says. Your ability to approach and read work will be expanded by the blend of writers you meet; you will enlarge your vision of what’s good and what works, a great relief when you return to your desk alone.
CREEPING THYME
Thymus pulegioides Plant February–June; days to germinate: 14–21; full sun.
Attending a summer writers conference is not an easy way to be “discovered.” As Hill lightly puts it, “You can’t be guaranteed that you will find a presenter or workshop leader or even another participant who will recognize your genius.” At every conference I’ve attended, the Famous Workshop Leader encouraged me, suggesting editors who might like my work, teaching me revision tricks I still use. Yet I was one of hundreds of writers that famous writer met every year. There is no way that established writers can be all things to the many people they meet in passing.
On the other hand, who knows who you will meet, or what will be uttered that will change your life ten years later? At Mississippi’s Oxford Conference for the Book, which I attended just after I had published my first book, I met another writer who’d also just published his debut. We didn’t write in the same genre, but we hit it off, then went our separate ways. Two years later he got in touch because he wanted to use one of my poems in a book. Then he became a YouTube celebrity, and his books were made into movies. I am intensely grateful that John Green introduced my poems to so many teenagers through his videos, and I am more grateful to have had the chance to watch him move through the world in his openhearted way. However, on the evening I approached him at a buffet table and shyly told him I’d liked his reading, I had no idea that we were planting seeds for later.
POET’S NARCISSUS
Narcissus poeticus Bulbs ship beginning in September depending on ground temperatures; blooms late spring; sun or light shade.
Margaret Atwood says she keeps the following epigram tacked to her office bulletin board: “Wanting to
meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” But the truth is that many of us who dearly love words want to meet the people who created our favorite books, and while nearly all of the people you meet will be interesting, kind, and sane, a few will be toxic.
Poisonous faculty and attendees fall into a handful of easily recognizable species, some more toxic than others. Likely varieties include writers who make unsolicited promises they have no intention of keeping; lecherous authors; belittlers; selfabsorbed self-promoters; and drama queens of every gender. If you should identify poisonous writers in the field, observe their showy charisma and (sigh) amazing books from a safe distance, then move on.
The lore of any established conference is rife with stories about Writers Behaving Badly. It’s easy to conclude from such anecdotes that writers are more poisonous than the general population, but they aren’t. They just happen to make scenes in front of people who carry notebooks and pens.
ZINNIAS
Zinnia pumila Plant these small, bright flowers April– June; days to germinate: 5–10; full sun.
Some of my most important takeaways from writers conferences have not been craft-talk tips. Small moments changed my sense of who I was as a writer and who I could be.
At my first conference I learned that my workshop leader, Dorianne Laux, had attended the same conference as an unpublished poet. She had worked with Jane Hirshfield, who also taught at that conference the year I was there. These were names I had seen only in journals and books. Suddenly those writers were real to me, and I felt I had become a small part of a larger chain.
Poet Angela Narciso Torres, who has attended the Colrain Poetry
Manuscript Conference once and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference twice, says something similar. “[Bread Loaf] is a virtual literary Hall of Fame,” says the author of Blood Orange (Aquarius Press, 2013). “That these teachers showed a deep interest and investment in my work and a sincere effort to help me improve meant the world to me.”
Established writers had always seemed a different species. But one night at a reading, I peered over Peter Ho Davies’s shoulder at the manuscript he was about to read. The story was not bound in a book; I’m not sure it had even been published. It was double-spaced, his contact information was in the upper-left corner, and the story looked like every hopeful fiction writer’s manuscript I had ever seen. Plus, it was printed in Times New Roman. Peter Ho Davies and I use the same font! I felt thrilled and oddly connected. Every one of us starts with the manuscript page.
ROSEMARY
French Kitchen
Rosmarinus officinalis
“Writers leave a conference with an increased sense of identity as a writer and understand more about what the writing life entails,” says H. Emerson Blake,
editor in chief of
Orion.
Start this evergreen herb indoors; plant February–May; days to germinate: 14–21; full sun.
At one conference a fellow read aloud a poem she claimed to have written the night before. The poem was brilliant, and I didn’t believe her for an instant.
So I watched her during the next twelve days. She was present at every reading and taking notes at every craft talk. She was unfailingly well dressed and cheerful. She was among the last to leave each late-night party.
One morning I got up very early for a bird walk. As I crept down the stairs of my dorm before 5 AM, I found her with her laptop on a couch in the lobby, wearing glasses and sweats. She was writing. “She’s like a professional athlete,” I thought. I was humbled. I gained a new level of respect for the work ethic and athleticism of major-league writers. I decided to believe her about the poem.
“Writers leave a conference with an increased sense of identity as a writer and understand more about what the writing life entails,” says H. Emerson Blake, editor in chief of Orion and codirector of the Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference, who has taught at a number of conferences including the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. “Those things don’t have anything to do with craft but are crucially important for a writer to understand.”
FORGET-ME-NOTS
Azure Bluebirds
Myosotis oblongata Plant February–April; days to germinate: 7–14; sun or part shade; can handle frost.
“The biggest benefit was the chance to meet other writers, to forge friendships with people who are going through many of the same experiences and challenges that I am,” says poet Matthew Thorburn, author of The Grace of Distance (LSU Press, 2019) and a recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, about the Sewanee Writers’ Conference he attended as a fellow in 2008. “The sense of community continues long afterward.”
Nearly every writer I talked to commented not on their newfound connections, but on their new friends. At two different summer writers conferences, I have made close friends. It is these friends, not former Famous Workshop Leaders, who still read my work. One of them is in Baltimore, and the other one is in Los Angeles, and each relationship has sustained me for more than a decade. Neither of these women were listed in the brochure, but they were the people I needed to meet.
SCENTED NICOTIANA
Nicotiana alata Plant March–June; days to germinate: 14–21; sun or light shade.
Finally, writers conferences are about pleasure. A conference that takes place in St. Petersburg, Florida, in January is called Writers in Paradise. Lots of conferences could be called Writers in Paradise though. It is paradise to write near the ocean, or attend a reading in a winery, or to talk about craft amid snow-capped mountains and glacier lakes in Homer, Alaska, in June, when there are nineteen hours of daylight and it will never truly get dark.
“It was a pleasurable escape from my nine-to-five corporate life…. I have to admit, I treated it a bit like a literary vacation,” says Thorburn about Sewanee. “E-mail was hard to access and cell-phone service was poor, but the company was outstanding.”
Writing can be frustrating and lonely. When something is happening it’s often hard to tell. “Our conference is a place where writing is a shared priority,” says Angela Pneuman, executive director of the
Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and author of the novel Lay It on My Heart (Mariner Books, 2014). “It’s one week out of a year when people are able to connect over the work they love.” A writers conference is a reset, a chance to stop for a few days and reprioritize in the company of other writers. It is a rare shot of immediate gratification, like watching a time-lapse film in which a plant grows.
WE MAKE our metaphors from what we know, and I’ve always lived among serious gardeners. When I was young my parents had an enormous garden. They spent damp spring evenings after my father’s shift at Detroit Diesel moving rocks and pulling weeds. From my bedroom window I could see the orange stars of their cigarettes wink as they rested on the garden’s railroad-tie borders. The work itself pleased them—gardening is too hard unless you like the process as well as the product—and the moment they smoked at dusk, surrendering to the beauty of what they had wanted and built, was great incentive for them to keep going.
Getting to hear so many writers’ voices, engage in process as a community, and hold finished books are similar joys. When I went to the summer conference in Napa, I stayed in a couple’s guesthouse with one wall made out of glass, through which I could watch the sun rise over the valley without getting out of bed. The view was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen from a room in which I’d been given the privilege to sleep. Each morning I woke exhausted, thinking I couldn’t possibly do one more jam-packed day—but I always did. The valley spread out before the house like a new page. Anything felt possible.
All seed descriptions are adapted from the Renee’s Garden seed catalogue, www .reneesgarden.com.