Absolute Gentleman

This year was the third consecutive year I attended the Vermont College Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. It’s a weeklong sleepover writers’ camp for adults who, like me, need a swift kick every year. I need this kick. For example: now. I need a kick now.

I can afford this conference because I’m the self-titled “Conference Stooge,” and I’m not sure if that’s even correct. I’m more like the friendly Conference Dog: In a work-study deal, I make copies for the lecturers, for conference participants who want their brilliant manuscripts copied for all their friends (because all these people are going to read that manuscript at their earliest convenience, right?), I run the conference bookstore, which includes every out-of-print title the faculty ever had and every self-published, stapled, handwritten, photocopied book the participants decided to put out. The participants are the students, the ones who pay twelve or thirteen hundred dollars to basically promote their books. I’m being a little cynical, probably because I don’t have one of my own, and probably because self-publishing makes me want to spit. The fact is that the Conference is way more than that. It’s about meeting other writers, people who are accomplished and people with the fresh exuberance of the fledgling writer. I’m beginning to think of the Conference as a mini-MFA, or an MFA appetizer. The week features most of the best parts of the low-residency MFA: the people, the connections, the workshop (god almighty, the workshop), the readings, the lectures, the readings again, the beers, the little portable boxes of wine (not the old big boxes with the spout, but the new vacuum sealed three-glass samplers…), the sandals with the ugly feet, the crying, the self-doubt, the bedsheets without the grabby elastic that makes it look as if you thrashed in bed over visits from the boogeyman every night.

When you register for a spot in the Conference, you choose the genre you’d like to work in and the teacher you’d like to work with. I chose a writer named Michael Martone, an English professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. When you click on his name and see his faculty page, accomplishments, etc. pay no attention to his picture. He needs to update it. I’m going to find a more appropriate photo of him now…Hold on.

This is the Michael Martone I know: the glasses, the wild hair that this picture isn’t showing. The photo on his faculty bio is too manish, too condescending writer, too Bob Campos, a former neighbor of mine. The truth about Michael Martone is that he’s an incredible creative mind. He has the publications, sold his work to the big presses, but he’s so confident in his work that he’s constantly leaving open room for possibility in his writing and disregarding what popular trends might be. It takes real strength and resolve to do something like that, along with a healthy disregard for having a lot of money.

But I’m not sure if I like him so much for his writing or for the way he conducts himself as a father and husband. Anyone can lead a double-life. It isn’t difficult, especially when you’re on the road all the time, staying in dorm rooms and hotels, but I’m not cynical about this guy. I think I absorb his messages so much because of the kind of man I want to be, and when I see it in another person, especially a writer, I kind of cling to that feeling and that person.

And I guess I didn’t like his faculty bio photograph because he doesn’t look like a family man, to me, in that photo. I see the family man in the photo I chose.

Plus, he’s a postcard writer. Every time I saw him during a lull in the workshop, and there weren’t many, he was always writing a postcard to someone. He takes his time to write thoughtful messages, too, which shouldn’t be so strange since he’s a writer. Still, it’s something I noticed. The cards he picks out have significance, too. He sent me one after the Conference; I got it the other day, and it’s a picture of a farm house, one that looks a lot like mine, actually, and on the road in front of the house there’s a green sign pointing the way to the next town that reads “Story 5,” as in “five miles to the town of Story.” Am I talking to you like a seventh grader?

After watching him write all these postcards, and after the soft anticipation inside of me in waiting for Michael’s postcard to arrive, I decided to go to a local bookstore, buy some meaningful postcards, and write them to the friends I’ve made at the Conference. I spent five bucks on six postcards and sat in Lenox Coffee before a doctor’s appointment (Just being in Lenox, walking, breathing, being all pretentious in a little coffeeshop is therapy enough for me.) to write these things. At the Conference I met a writer named Jill, and she always seemed annoyed with me while we sat in workshop, but I liked her anyway. Actually, I know why she was annoyed. It was over the whole idea of simultaneous submissions, and my attitude has been that if literary journals are saying “no simultaneous submissions” (the act of sending the same story or poem to many different journals) and they take six or seven months to get back to you, then they shouldn’t expect writers like me to adhere to their unreasonable guidelines. Jill did work as an editor, though, and experienced the horrors of asking for an exclusive look at a piece, accepting the piece, then being told that the piece was accepted somewhere else. This came out in the form of an irritated snap at me and my attitude. It scared me, but I’m all right now.

While I’m sitting in Lenox Coffee, I take out a postcard I picked for her: It’s a picture of Al Pacino, circa “Frankie and Johnny,” and his hands have undone the top two buttons of his shirt. He’s gently pulling the shirt open, revealing his sparse and inconsistent chest hair. I have not sent this postcard to Jill and I’m not going to, because it’s apparent I need more training in picking out just the right postcard. This postcard would creep her out.

I’m not sure if I noted it above, but this was the second year I chose Michael as my faculty workshop guy, so there were a lot of repeated anecdotes on writing, and not on writing, and metaphors on and not on writing…but several new little quips and anecdotes, too. The first exercise he gave us, and you know how I feel about exercises, was to write something intentionally bad. Again, this was a repeat from last year, but I didn’t do it last year. Instead, I just talked to the workshop about how I’m always structuring my stories the same way: writing in the present tense and using flashback or some other instrospective device to inform the narrator’s present tense decisions. Michael was nice about my lack of work:

“An interesting way to solve the problem,” he said to me.

But this time I did the exercise, and I felt liberated from my self-imposed restrictions and all the whining I do about my problems since graduating from the MFA Program. I just started with a guy named Samuel and walked him around his driveway and into his car, painstakingly describing every moment. The work was bad, but it lifted the psychological block about my work having to be excellent the moment the ink hits the paper. It’s really an excellent exercise to do in a group setting because you end of discussing everyone’s sensibilities as a writer and their perceptions of what makes writing good or bad.