This is writers conference month here, and actually I’m in San Diego right now taking my son to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and laughing at the bad jokes of my father-in-law and just generally hanging out while my husband gives a presentation at a computer conference. A few weeks ago I taught you guys how to get people all riled up at you at a writers conference and what to watch out for in the way of presenters—the bullshitters and the non-bullshitters, part one and part two.
So now I’ll tell you another writers conference story.
This one is a story of hope:
Once many years ago I had just returned to the San Francisco Bay Area from a thrilling, hair-raising, and actually quite productive six months of adventure and writing in Hawaii and Australia. I’d gotten a job as a tech writer at a small computer start-up in Silicon Valley, so I was recovering a bit from the state of abject poverty into which my adventures had plunged me. And a friend and I were sitting in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s Northbeach neighborhood when he pulled out a flyer to show me.
It was an ad for the Writers Community at Squaw Valley.
“Are you going to apply?” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Are you?”
“Maybe.”
I went to my manager at work, who happened to be extremely smart and extremely cool and extremely cute, and asked him what he thought. He had a degree in Creative Writing from the University of California in Santa Cruz. Plus he was extremely cute.
“Well, you know what I think about writers conferences,” he said.
Actually I didn’t, but I was afraid he’d already told me and I’d been spazzed out on his cuteness and not listening, so I didn’t ask.
Instead, I went to the conference.
It was the first writers conference I’d ever been to, and besides that I didn’t know who Oakley Hall was (the guy running the conference), so when I got to the registration desk and the woman announced grandly that she was Mrs. Oakley Hall, I replied without a spark of recognition, “Hi. I’m Victoria Mixon.”
I had signed up to share a house with other attendees, and I wound up with five other women, among whom were two in my writing workshop. We had a great week—we went to lectures by agents and famous authors like Amy Tan, attended our workshop, read each other’s manuscripts, and drank a lot of wine. There was a big party to which we went as a gang and where we accidentally knocked a painting off the wall on the staircase and almost got kicked out by the owner of the house.
One of my roommates and I went up to an agent after an agents panel and introduced ourselves. My friend already had an agent so their conversation was kind of general, but I didn’t have an agent and I wanted one, so I was quite happy when the agent invited me to lunch the next day. (We had lunch, and after we got home I took her my manuscript, and she became my first agent.)
I had also signed up for my manuscript to be critiqued by Anne Lamott, who was right then becoming famous for Operating Instructions and had just published Bird by Bird. In my excitement and confusion, I had sent her the second chapter of my novel instead of the first, so she was understandably confused about the storyline, but she seemed to like it.
“It has a strange sort of power,” she said. “And you write like a dream.”
Then she waited politely for me to ask her to sign the copy of Bird by Bird that I had in my lap.
But I was too shy.
During that week I became particularly close to the two of my roommates who were in my workshop, whose manuscripts I found extremely beautiful and compelling. They were unpublished, like me—one a professor of Native American law in Kansas and the other a struggling English teacher at a community college in New York City. We traded addresses when the conference ended, but we fell out of touch anyway.
A few years later I thought of them and found an address for the one in New York. Her first novel had been published by the Permanent Press—she’d rewritten it from a different point-of-view and given it a different title—and become a Book Sense Selection. Her second novel was being published by Bloomsbury Publishing, and it too went on to become a Book Sense Selection, translated into several languages.
We were both married and had very young sons by then, so we bonded again.
At some point I also wrote to the professor of Native American law, saying I hoped she was still writing, since if anyone was a writer she was. And she wrote back a beautiful letter saying she had, in fact, just been on the verge of giving up when she received my letter. She was so moved that she read the letter out loud to her family over the dinner table. She was still working on her novel.
That novel was published in 2008 and nominated for the biggest national prizes in the US (which she is too modest to mention), acclaimed by NPR and Kirkus Reviews.
And now, I’m pretty sure you guys know by this time who these writers are. I’ve written about them in my books, and I use quotes from them on my blog to make me look good.
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Unpublished, struggling, dedicated craftspeople when I met them
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Acclaimed fiction authors today
I want you to know it happens—talent and hard work and dedication to craft do get recognized.
(Also, I married the cute manager.)
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