Squaw Valley post no. 7

This morning we workshopped a story by the best (and best published) writer in the group, Dashka Slater. The story was about the breakup of a friendship between two yuppie mothers, one of whom had gotten pregnant with her second child, on account of the pregnant couple's plan to move to Minnesota from the Bay Area for more lebensraum. The story was technically superior and psychologically perceptive.

I think the reason I responded to it so strongly is that it somewhat echoed a situation in my own life. I used to have a good friend who left the Bay Area with her new husband and moved back to Chicago, where she had grown up. She had one child, which rather distracted her from being long-distance friends, and when she and her husband visited the Bay Area a few years later, the toddler kept interrupting the conversations I had been looking forward to having with my friend for so many years, to the point where I became rather frustrated. A year after that, I was talking with her on the phone, and she announced she had gotten pregnant with another child. I'm ashamed to say that I reacted to this news, which she thought was joyful, with great dismay, and after that essentially wrote her off as my friend. I believed we had drifted apart and had so little in common anymore that she couldn't understand that having a second child, for reasons of her own, struck me as a signal that she wanted us to have in common nothing at all. That was back when I was still being very morally superior to everyone and an asshole. Not that I've bothered to apologize. Anyway, the story by D.S. reminded me of that.

This afternoon there was a talk, or a sort of meta-talk, by Anne Lamott, who is a regular at this conference. She read a little, answered a few questions, then had a violinist play some Bach. Then she ranted a little and read a little and had the violinist play again. She spoke passionately about writing as a vocation, with such clarity of vision that I felt equally inspired and ashamed of my own practice.

Thanks to Frances Dinkelspiel, who also blogged from here, for a link. Her earlier post about a renewed presence for fiction at the L.A. Times magazine was encouraging.