To learn about yourself, sometimes you have to leave your
comfort zone. I pushed myself WAY out of my comfort zone this weekend and
attended the Slice Literary Conference in Brooklyn.
I have discovered this writing life to be ironic. It is
the most insular undertaking I have ever experienced: sitting in a small space,
with the reflective glow of my laptop as my only companion. However, the point
to sitting alone for hours every day is to artfully get my thoughts on paper to
be shared with the world. True confessions: I miss the community nature of
teaching, the energy of other people, the dramatic highs and lows of working
with teenagers. I spent the last year writing a novel, alone, and found myself
talking to my cat and dog way more often than is acceptable. It was high time
for me to find a larger community of writers.
Thanks to the lovely and talented Celia Johnson of SliceLiterary coming to Maine and teaching a killer workshop on the business of
writing through the Maine Writers and Publishers Association, I discovered that
writers actually do leave their hovels from time to time to blink at the
sunshine of the world. I applied to attend the Slice Literary Conference and
was accepted. Then, I enrolled for a couple of agent meetings, and was
confirmed. I was on a roll – so I entered the Bridging the Gap competition. My
poem, Emotional Eater, earned me a spot as a finalist in the competition, which
gave me entry into two specialized workshops. It was all too good to be true,
and I hadn’t even left home yet. Of course, all this news came to me as I sat,
alone, in that reflective glow of the laptop. Last Friday, I had to actually
pack a suitcase with my anxiety and get on a plane.
My family, friends, local writing acquaintances, all
support my foray into this world – of course they do, they are not the ones
facing their greatest fear. As a fledgling in this world, I was about to learn
if I had what it takes to make it. The pronouns are intentional here: I don’t
even know what either “it” actually represents. I am clueless. My goal for the
conference was to become informed.
The conference was certainly an eye opener, full of
plenty of its own irony. The amount of intelligence that surrounded me was
overwhelming, but I learned that every writer there felt ignorant in comparison
to the person next to them. (Apparently we are a self-demeaning bunch.) People
traveled from great distances, including a lovely young woman who came all the
way from Istanbul, to enter a space full of people who usually sit alone. The
majority of writers agonized over agent meetings, full of passion about their
completed works, and most of them were told their work was not really complete.
Overall, the entire experience of being part of the literary community was
mind-jolting enough to make me secretly long for the moment I could be alone
with my laptop again. And so, here I am, alone, basking in the soft glow of the
computer screen, hyper-focused on my time at the conference, where I found my
people.
I would like to say I had a great epiphany about myself
or made a highly intellectual connection with another writer as my great
take-away from the conference, but I have to be honest. My greatest moment at
the conference was at the informal presentation by Neal Thompson of Amazon
Author Relations, when he encouraged us to ask ourselves, “what do I want to
get from this life as a writer?” I was taking notes on my iPad when his
question entered my existence, forever changing me. I shut my iPad and sat
there, heart pounding, not hearing another word of the presentation. And that’s
when it happened. I saw the woman next to me, taking notes on paper,
obsessively boxing for emphasis the question, “what do I want to get from this
life as a writer?” I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Mind-blowing,
right?” She looked at me, eyes glazed over, and nervously laughed. I stifled my
own laughter, and then the woman on the other side of me leaned in and added,
“I need to go home now.” As the presentation ended and the three of us
collected our things, basking in our commonality, a couple of other women from
a nearby table joined us, saying they enjoyed seeing our reaction to that
burning question. One of them said, “I have no idea what I want,” and the other
chimed in with, “I’ve never even considered what I am doing as creating a new
life.” I summed it up for us by stating that I was done. Conference over. I
could go home and spend the next year trying to answer that question.
It seems many of us “emerging writers” have it all wrong.
We are focused on creating work, and we are supposed to be focused on creating
a life. Let’s face it, not too many people can support themselves as writers.
That’s why most of the writers I met this weekend are also grad students,
teachers, scientists, political consultants, wait staff. We love our writing
work, and we produce art – then move on to our regular existence. We have all
been cheating ourselves. Writing is supposed to be who we are, how we live our
lives.
So, here I am. In my small space, trying to dull the
glare of the screen with words that will prove to you, reader, that I
experienced a great life lesson this weekend. Prepare for the letdown – my
great life lesson is that I have the ability – the freedom – the responsibility
– the need to create a life for myself as a writer. There is no great formula
to success, there is no corporate structure that I need to mold myself to,
there are no steadfast rules about hours or workflow. There are only words that
need to be artfully arranged into a platform for my life. That platform is
totally up to me – no one is going to hand it to me, or determine how it should
look. In all the confusion, it’s really very simple.
www.peggyldeblois.com
