I received an email from Josie on Friday afternoon saying:
Dear lover,
I am going to see a conference by Peter Balakian at the Delta tonight. You're not invited. Wait for us outside and we'll have lunch with AT after.
love,
Josie
She was reading Balakian's book Black Dog Of Fate this week, pretty rad coincidence that the dude would parachute out of the sky and give a conference in town as she was reading the book. So like the child of my time that I am, I googled this shit up. I found that Blue Metropolis Festival was happening and there was a crapload of writers invited. I didn't know any of them but James Frey. Following my significant other's lead I registered for an activity the next day called: "Becoming A Writer" which was, according to the festival's flyer, different accounts of successful roads to publication by local writers.
I'm local and I want to be published so I figured out I could learn a thing or two from these people. There were five of them: Isabelle Lafleche, John Calabro, Joan Carter Roberts, Catherine Mackenzie & Claude Lalumiere. I didn't know any of them, talk about a rocky start. I had joined the Quebec Writers Federation a few weeks before though so I perservered through this, telling myself I would come to know these guys somewhere down the line. I thought that 75 minutes with the writers was kind of a short time to get comfortable knowing them. I had yet to understand this was a security measure.
As I stepped in the room, I understood I was in ennemy territory. Greay heads, everywhere. I have nothing against old people, but when people with their hair bi-colored by age in this kind of meeting, I can feel the winds of despair and frustration blowing in the smell of rotten dreams. Notebooks also, notebooks everywhere. Looks that were desperate for attention and recognition. Not exactly what I had signed up for. I paid five dollars to hear writers talk about their road to publication, but with a few circular looks, I knew what I was going to get.
The writers themselves were great, very humble. They exposed their story without vanity or self-indulgence. I clicked with some, more than others, especially Claude Lalumiere who seemed to share some of my ideas on writing. I say often that you need humility in order to get good at something. If there is a parrallel to trace in between fighting and writing, it's that you need to go through a thousand failures in order to achieve one success. I was sitting with fifty other people walking through the desert of failures with me and apparently not coping as well as I was with the hunger for success. The pain is always lesser when you don't have anyone mirroring it to you.
Things went downwhill when the question period kicked off. First person on bat was a middle aged woman with a spring in her buttocks, waiting to fire off:
"I HAVE WRITTEN A MEMOIR ABOUT MY LIFE, I SELF-PUBLISHED, I SOLD 250 COPIES, I DON'T KNOW WHY NO ONE WANTS TO PUBLISH ME *breathes in* I ONLY HAD GOOD COMMENTS, PLEASE TELL ME WHY PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO PUBLISH IT, IT'S GOOD *breathes out*"
That's the kind of questions they had. I felt really bad for the writers who had to fend off broken dreams more than talk of themselves and their road to success. People in the audience were infuriating, they had no respect for the writers, they seemed jealous more than happy to talk with them. The "why-did-they-pick-you-instead-of-me" attitude. Because they were more humble I guess. I tried to break the cycle that was making up spiral downwards into our impending doom by asking a question about how they balanced editing into that writing process, which is something I find self-destructive at times. I have two failed novel projects to account for this.
John Calabro didn't quite understand the question and though it was dumb. "I completely disagree" right off the bat, in polite language can be decoded as: "You're dumb, but here's how you do this..." As I was debating the fact of whether to tell him or not that I thought it was incredible to meet an Italian person with the word "bro" at the end of his name, Claude Lalumiere caught on to my question and basically told me that I was on the right track. Writing is a question of time, dedication and patience. Knowing that my method (writing at first draft, THEN editing and getting feedback) can work, I feel better going on with "Solace". He also said that a lot of writers had a lot of crap to writer before getting good. Maybe that's what Dead End Follies is for. Filtering the gnarly stuff and occasionally producing gems since 2009.
There was this woman sitting next to me (grey head also), she was wielding the notebook like Paganini on his violin. Back when I was in school, I always felt bad to take less notes than the possessed chick in front of me, but when I peeked over her shoulder to see what she wrote, I understood that despair and retardation had met and crushed her soul:
-LAWYER, NEW YORK
-SEAK
-QWF
-WRITER, LAWYER, ARTISTIC
-NOVELLA, QUATTRO
-BUTTER, TUNA, MILK
-DON IS A TIRE
-DA DA DEE DA LA DA
She was willing to sell her soul to find the magic trick that would land her a publication deal. I don't know if she has one or ten manuscripts ready, but she was looking for something magic that would give her recognition. She(and everybody in the room) betrayed Sgt. Brown's rule applied to writers: "Story, Readers, Me". That was sad. I was sad when I left this place. I would've had a coffee with Lalumiere and I would've got the same result. I'm going to check out his Objects Of Worship book. I should check out of this mentorship thing with the QWF too. I'm not successfull yet, neither could I call myself a writer, but I know something from now on. I'm not a worldly writer.
