So I have returned from the writing conference. Actually I was at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Can you believe it? This overt confession may land my blog on someone's search, and attract a curious viewer or two to the site, but we writers must take risks, mustn't we? Since the conference is still pretty fresh in my mind I will file a report on it, maybe a little series if I get any momentum going. Don't worry, I am not going to recount the program of lectures and readings. I know that is not what my audience is interested in.

From the literary point of view, first of all I have no problem saying that the quality of the fiction writing--which was my area of concentration--among the samples I read was actually quite good, though most people, myself doubtless included, tended to lack any kind of artistic swagger. This may not be essential to good writing, but it would help to create more of an aura, an urgent sense of an intellectual atmosphere, even if a bit contrived, that the old Europeans were so adept at creating. Not to mention that the women eat that kind of thing up. But I am getting ahead of myself. The writers there seem generally to be looking to succeed within the existing system: getting a few stories published in small magazines (short story writers seem to outnumber novelists at this place), possibly finding an agent, putting out a slim, tightly written, narrowly focused novel or two, I suppose finding a sinecure. Would I not like to do this myself? Well, it is preferable to the job I have now certainly, and at least at writers' conferences I would have something resembling status among the amateurs, assuming Thomas Pynchon or Solzenheitsen or somebody didn't decide to show up, but in our culture this kind of adhering to the system doesn't really seem to work as far as producing vital and historically important literature goes, and ultimately, pretentious as it sounds, that is what I spend most of my time thinking (worrying?) about. Of course, limits and parameters with regard to form have been always been imposed upon authors, particularly in poetry and the drama, and of course to content in totalitarian nations in all genres, and great and beautiful works have emerged nonetheless, so if market or cultural forces dictate that writers must write 200 page novels and 10 page short stories to have a prayer of getting published, then a man of real genius ought to be able to see his way all around that form and out the other side and making something exquisite of it, no? Perhaps it is this that bothers me, that compromises are only applicable to those without talent, or will, that the visionary will always see his way through whatever he is given...

But actually all this angst aside there are a number of quite charming and enjoyable things about this conference that I will try to remark upon in my next posting...