Joining the Club

I'm sorry for being a bit later than usual with my latest posting, but I've had an amazing week. I have now been to my first literary conference as well as my first literary award ceremony, so I thought I'd write about both, from the perspective of a first-timer.

I'll start with the conference: the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans (which is now one of my favorite cities). If you're like me, you've probably seen literary conferences advertised in Poets and Writers and wondered what they were like or why someone might go to one. For me, the best part of going to Saints and Sinners, a festival for queer writers and readers, was its sense of community, all-important for our necessarily lonely profession.

All the events took place in the same three gay bars, all on the same corner, so I kept running into other conference-goers coming from or going to the readings, panels, classes, and parties. Though Saints and Sinners is a gay literary festival, the things we talked about most were relevant to all writers: issues of craft, favorite authors, how to make a living, and the book business. (I even attended a class on designing author websites.) The line between the presenters and audience members was, appropriately, porous. On Friday, I attended a very helpful presentation by author Jim Grimsley on how to get through the "murk" in the middle of your novel. On Saturday, I was on a panel about virtually the same subject, how to finish your novel. Immediately after that panel, I attended a poetry reading where fellow writers, MFA students, and self-taught writers who'd been in the audience at my panel now read their work aloud while I listened. The writers I met in New Orleans were a mix of slam poets, academics, performance artists, and authors published by small presses as well as major houses. Some of us had only published in journals or anthologies while others had several books under their belt. But everyone seemed to share the same sense of seriousness about their work and the same love of reading.

A couple of days after I got back from New Orleans, I went to a much more formal gathering at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where I officially received the Rome Prize. I had no idea of the Academy's existence until I was notified that they'd given me a prize (an unexpected honor, for which I am deeply grateful). When I first dreamed of becoming a writer, I imagined the "literary establishment" quite literally as a club with mahogany tables and Greek columns. If such a club actually exists, then yesterday I wandered into it.

My day began by running into the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Donald Margulies and his wife on the steps of the building. Once inside, I stopped in a room of signed photos of famous Academy members, everyone from Henry James to Eudora Welty to Bernard Malamud, Edward Albee, on and on. Upstairs, I listened to a pleasant bearded man (who turned out to be novelist E. L. Doctorow) tell a story about watching a drunken Robert Penn Warren fall asleep in his seat during an Academy ceremony years ago. I also met John Updike, who examined my nametag and said, "Oh, you've won a prize. How nice for you."

At lunch, my father and I were seated at a table with the poet Mark Strand and novelist Alison Lurie, who made smart and funny observations about the people in the room as if they were characters in one of her novels. Then came the ceremony itself, during which I sat on a stage with one hundred other writers, composers, and artists, including Maya Lin, Cindy Sherman, August Wilson, Edwidge Danticat, Robert Pinsky, Cynthia Ozyck, and Stephen Sondheim. My assigned seat was between Edmund White and the peppery Grace Paley, who gave a rousing cheer when my name was called. I was just hoping I wouldn't trip over Tony Kushner and Edward P. Jones on my way to the podium.

The whole situation was wonderful and more than a little overwhelming, and while I was there I kept wondering what it all meant. Was I truly admitted into that club I'd always hoped to join? Yet now that I've had some time to reflect on that question, I realize I've always been a member without realizing it. The person accepting the award on that stage and the writing student I'd once been, the one who'd never published a word, have a lot in common. The only difference is that hazy term "success." But what is success or failure, really? In five hundred years, none of our work will be read. Or if it is, we'll all be long gone and unable to glory in that fact.

Just as Pulitzer Prize winners still get hungry and get sick and get depressed, they also still have to struggle with sentences, the same work we all do as writers. What matters is the pleasure that struggle gives us now, at this moment. I can take pleasure in award ceremonies and literary conferences, but I also take greater pleasure in arranging words on a page, reading work I love, guiding a student toward progress. The meaning comes from the pleasure, not the other way around. That's not to say that every moment of writing is wonderful, just as not every moment of a party or a literary gathering is wonderful. But the highs you get make the lows bearable, and in life, it really doesn't get much better than that.