A few years ago, during one of those gratuitous and uncomfortable conversations you have with people just because they happen to be standing in front of the wine table, I mentioned to two directors of another writers’ organization here in the Berkshires, one that also hosts writers who do readings, that I wanted to get Amy Hempel to read for Word Street. They told me not to bother. “Hempel doesn’t read in Massachusetts,” they told me. “We already tried.” Did I mention Word Street is in Massachusetts?

I went to Williams College to hear Rick Moody read a few years ago, and after he finished reading some excerpts from Demonology, I watched the aforementioned wine table blockers bee line to where he was sitting, like vultures on a dead carcass, to get him to do a reading for them.

Maybe that’s why people don’t like you. You think?

I’m wondering off topic, though, like Montaigne on his fourth glass of a nice Rivesaltes.

The reading was fantastic. In fact, it was like going to a small club to hear your favorite band play and find that they decided to try out all their new material on the audience. Lydia and Amy went on stage (separately) with folders and papers and drafts and polished stuff and made everyone feel something.

We had planned to go to the Brix Wine Bar for dinner afterward, and that made me a little nervous because it’s so expensive. We, of course, were picking up the tab for Lydia and her husband, Amy and her friend…God, I forgot her friend’s name, but she was Ukrainian or Bulgarian or French or something — she had an incredible energy, was intense and feisty, and wrote screenplays, I think, and all you had to do to rile her up and send her off on a rant was mention Americans and their government.

I sent the group to the Wine Bar ahead of me, as I had to finish cleaning up after the reading, what with all the blood everywhere. “You will be joining us, won’t you?” said Lydia.

“Yes, dahling. I will be joing the party of…” what? the “party” went from six of us, seven or eight…to something like fourteen when the final count was taken.

We had an after-party a few years ago when Dave Eggers and Jim Shepard came to do our benefit. We set up a volunteer recruitment booth in the lobby of the theater, and the volunteers at the volunteer recruitment booth were instructed to give special after-party passes to those who expressed interest in volunteering at Word Street. The plan flopped, because the after-party was filled with people I haven’t seen at Word Street since the reading, and they drank the cases of free wine we got from a local liquor store.

I raced to Brix to find it closed. Sigh of relief: Word Street wouldn’t be spending $1000 for dinner that night. The crowd went across the street to the restaurant in the hotel where Amy was staying. I walked in and had to find an extra seat to stick on the end of the table. I was elated, though. We didn’t make a lot of money that night, but I got Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis to come to Pittsfield, and now I was having dinner with them.

I read what Chuck Palahniuk wrote about meeting Amy Hempel for the first time, about it being somewhat of a disappointment, but there’s nothing disappointing about her. She’s funny, charming, and brilliant — and during dinner she whispered to the person sitting next to her “Would you switch seats with Frank so that I may sit next to him…”

The food was terrible — flat out terrible, but what does any of it matter when you are the one Amy Hempel bends her head toward when there’s conversation to be had? The only distraction was the woman (not really a woman, more like a girl), 19 or 20 years old, never saw her in my life, French accent, Yoda-type speech and pretentiousness (“From North Adams, I am not”), one of those permanent scowls on her face, asking Amy to buy her drinks because the restaurant made a regular practice of carding annoying jackasses at the table.

So here Amy is, getting drinks for her, and the girl keeps apologizing to Amy for having to get the drinks. Across the room security is eyeing the girl, waiting for her to take a sip so they can bust her, Amy’s friend is cursing the security guard, calling him a fascist, and all I’m wondering is who brought this idiot. Did she pay for her ticket for the benefit? Am I paying for the drinks she’s getting through Amy Hempel?

It’s like the other day at Starbucks. Woman from the adjacent Quiznos comes over with a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and asks for a shot of vanilla for her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. The ‘Bucks girl was like, “Are you kidding me, Moron?”

I’m here and I feel out of place, which is not surprising: I feel out of place in most places. At this point, I’m like Crash Davis, without the minor league homerun record.

People are good. I don’t like people, but recognize that people are good and useful. When I decided to speak to people here, I found them genuinely good. Here’s the thing about conferences at this point: People here are either 90 or they’re 24. Or there’s a youth writing conference here, in which case the participants are teenagers.

Lydia Davis is one of these good people, and she visited campus to give a reading and an informal talk about writing, etc. Her ‘interviewer’ was Chris Bachelder. He wasn’t really an interviewer, though, and I appreciated that. He got the hell out of the way and let Lydia meander through her genius unfettered, as opposed to me, who is very much the hell in the way of this entry. I am fettering the progression of this entry.

Lydia knows me from her generosity. She and Amy Hempel came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts (50 miles from where I am now) and did a benefit reading for my educational nonprofit, Word Street. There was dinner afterward with Lydia and Amy, and I have chosen not to write about it because I loved the moment and want it to be mine for as long as possible.

I’m not ready to write about it yet.

Before what was to be an interview before a live audience, I watched Lydia talk some with Chris, most likely doing some last minute preparation for what was to come. Lydia saw me and waved quite vigorously. I know the reason for this was that she knows how oddly uncomfortable I am in most situations and especially in light of the debacle at the Brix Wine Bar.

My wife and I had our annual date night a few months ago, and we decided to pretend to be refined palates and sniff some wine corks at Brix. It was three or four days, maybe a week, before the big reading I organized, featuring Davis and Hempel, and the maitre d’ seated us just about on top of Lydia Davis and her husband, the artist Alan Cote. I knew Lydia from a master class in fiction I took with her at UAlbany, but that was a long time ago, at least a year, so when I sat down next to her, I didn’t think it was appropriate to say hello, thought I’d be imposing on a meal I shouldn’t have been a part of in the first place. Yes, I have issues. I’m in the process of getting help.

So I never said hello to her, and to make matters worse, since I thought she may have noticed me and wondered why I didn’t say hello, I emailed her to tell her what I did, that I was sorry. She emailed back and recounted the entire evening, from the things we ordered to the awkward conversation with the waiter. She thought the whole thing was humorous and put me at ease once and for all.

So when she waved vigorously to me two days ago, I think she knew what she was doing.

Like I said, she’s one of the good people.

Without further delay, here are my disjointed notes on Lydia Davis’ interview with Chris Bachelder:

Lydia read the dictionary in 1971, it was a collegiate dictionary, maybe a Merriam Webster. She still references a worn copy of the dictionary constantly – not for shedding light on a general meaning of a word, but to find the precise meaning of a word. She also regards etymology as essential.

The best writing instruction she ever absorbed was not from writing teachers, but from one or two writerly friends who would read her work microscopically close.

It takes a long time to become individual as a writer. I’m assuming she’s talking about voice and style.

Constraints in writing are often more useful than freedom.

Interesting exercises: using the thesaurus to change words — consequently rhythm; diction, obviously. There are no synonyms, after all, because words aren’t the same, each is more or less precise.

Ideology doesn’t drive her work. Davis is receptive to external elements and, usually, her ideology appears beneath or within (these are partly my paraphrasings, by the way) another intention.

If Davis is stuck on a particular day (which is a rarity), she assigns herself small writing tasks: each day this week, I will write a two-paragraph story. In forcing yourself to stay in the chair no matter what, the result is a brutal truth.

Look to models in published writing for solutions to writing problems.

Lydia Davis writes in order for the words to disappear. The precision of her diction and simplicity of the language directs the reader, ideally, away from the writing.

My own thought toward the end of the interview: If a woman is sitting in front of me and her cascading blonde hair falls all over my bare knees, isn’t she in my space? Should I allow this?

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