Squaw Valley post the last

Because of dual events in San Francisco stadia on Saturday -- a rock concert at the ballpark, a preseason game at the football stadium -- it took twice as long to get back from Squaw Valley to San Francisco, six hours of driving versus three. Instead of cooking in a traffic jam at the Bay Bridge, I went a certain long way around but I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say I approached SF from the south rather than the northeast.

As I said in my last post, my first urge was to start getting short stories into publishable form, though exactly what publishable form is for a short story is not something I'm very familiar with, since the very few times I've submitted short stories to litmags they've been rebuffed. I ought to know what a publishable short story looks like, as I used to edit a magazine that published short fiction, and I accepted and rejected many a story. (Pam Rosenthal, with whom I read in February, told everyone that she received her first-ever rejection from me. "I hope my rejection letter was nice," I said contritely. "It was unbelievably nice," she replied, "but that didn't stop me from thinking you were the meanest, most pig-headed person in the universe.") And I thought the stories I sent off, to Zyzzyva and Witness, were just fine. But they didn't. I'll have to take another look at them.

When we were wrapping up our workshop on Friday, two of the twelve people in our group said they would have three days off and then go to Breadloaf, the most prestigious of writers conferences. It lasts ten days; after the whirlwind week at Squaw, just about everyone who wasn't headed to Breadloaf looked askance at this idea -- it seemed to require either superhuman endurance or foolhardyness.

In any case, I feel I've had all the discussion of story and plot and characterization and structure I can stand. It was all I could do today to go to church and then come back and lie down with a cool cloth over my eyes, though I did listen to a radio broadcast of Joyce Carol Oates being interviewed at City Arts & Lectures while I rested.

Once out of the hothouse writers workshop environment, it starts to seem rather odd that one can spend a whole week thinking of the minutiae of creating fiction, odder still that doing so is what it means to be a writer. In fact, being a writer is not going to writers conferences (much less two in one month!) but just writing and, for the sake of variation, reading. So I will try to finish those stories, and read books by friends (see right column) and classic authors.

Squaw Valley writers

For more posts about my Squaw Valley experience, scroll down.