I was on a panel tonight at The College of Holy Cross. The moderator asked me what I was doing when I was college age and in the few years after.  Fucking up, battling depression, gaining and losing tons of weight, having bad affairs, eating cheeseburgers, smoking Marlboro’s, wearing cowboy boots, going to poetry readings,  sending mental signals to guys I liked in my literature classes, failing typing tests at major publishing houses, frequenting coffee houses and haunting book stores, alienating friends, stock piling Percodan, and writing bad poems. I know, I’m an inspiration.

What were you doing?

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If you’ve been checking in here at Forest for the Trees, you know that I am a devout atheist. Today, while walking to the subway, I asked myself  how I could be so sure that there’s nothing. In a world of such obvious uncertainty, where did I get my certitude? THen I had the realization that it makes me feel good. And I think it’s why I believe so deeply in art, that it exists in the face of nothing. We need to make food, clothes, shelter, movies. But art, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, music. It comes into the world like a child, unbidden.  Some people believe that they create to honor god, or glorify god. When I look at a Blake I get that. But I’ve also had a similar experience walking through Serra’s tilted walls.

I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. But what I’m curious about tonight, a rain-filled night, is whether writing has a spiritual component for you and what that’s like.

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I gave another informational interview today to a young woman about to graduate college. I was super distracted the entire time, wondering if I could avoid the bread basket at lunch, if a certain author was going to blurb a book, how annoyed I was to get a one word response (“Thanks”) to a three page editorial letter. I was looking at her resume and it all looked good (Swahili! Varsity Tennis! Poetry Prize!), but my mind was on whether I could take the week between Christmas and New Years and finish my fucking screenplay, if I left the money on the kitchen table for Pam our dog walker, if I was ever going to finish vetting the contract on my desk, and get the twenty galleys off  on my desk to my foreign agents. Or was I going to die under a pile of manuscripts, or crushed under an Ikea bookcase, or crushed under the huge wheel of the M5, or electrocuted by a live man hole, or go into anaphylaxis as a result of eating a pine nut and die?

The  girl looked up at me and said, “Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Do you like what you do?”

I love it, I said. I looked around at my book shelves and all the books I’ve sold or helped come into this world. I looked around at our beautiful office, which is a book and light filled loft. I really love it, I said. And she smiled, reassured it seemed, of what I’m not certain.

Do you like what you do?

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Last week at our agents’ lunch, we bid farewell to one of our founding members who is leaving the agenting fold. It’s been a decade since we first got together to commiserate and offer support. What unifies our group is that we were all editors, now agents. I think it’s a very strong bond because we all take an editorial approach to our work, for better or worse. In any case, someone asked our departing agent what he was going to miss most. “Being a writer’s first reader.”  We all mewed with identification. It is a sacred position to hold.

Some writers will share their work with fellow writer friends, or spouses, or their editors first. But for some writers, their agents will be their first readers. And there is something magnificent about that. Not always, of course. Sometimes it’s a slog. But when you are in the presence of truly great writing and you get to read it first, it’s not unlike falling backward into a drift of pristine snow and spreading your wings. Ew, did I really write that?

Who is your first reader?

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Dear Betsy-

Here’s a question that falls into the “there are no stupid questions” but it in fact it might be a stupid question. If you have never published (or sent anything out for that matter) but you have taken a writing workshop with someone who has literary clout, should you mention it? And I mean just state it, not say he/she fawned all over your writing or thought you were the next Aimee Bender. Or is that a Who Cares?

Thanks,

Name WItheld:

Dear Who Cares:

First of all, to set the record straight, there are such things as stupid questions. I always hated it when teachers said there were no stupid questions. There are and we all know when we hear one because we slap the palms of our hands to our foreheads and shake our heads or rolls our eyes. That said, I like your question. And no one has asked it.

I think when you mention that you’ve studied with this famous writer or that famous writer, there is an implicit endorsement of your work on the part of the writer. Presumably, this famous writer would give you a blurb. That’s about all you could hope for, but those blurbs are hard won and much beloved by publishers. Let’s say the famous writer barely knew you were alive or worse hated your work, I think I’d still mention it even though it’s false advertising. Look, you’re trying to stand out, why not say: I’ve studied fiction writing Charles Frazier, Charles Baxter and Charles Manson. No more, no less. It’s a credential.

Who have you studied with and would you mention it in a query letter?

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Today’s Style section in the NYT devoted a great deal of space to group of highly educated, underemployed kids who started their own on-line magazine called THe New Inquiry, in case you missed it, which would be nearly impossible given the ginormous picture of these really attractive lit slits and boy toy. Not a Flannery or Eudora among them. God, they’re hot. The literary world is really stepping up.

When Methuselah here was a cub herself, she started a magazine called Big Wednesday with two fellow poets from the Columbia Writing Program. We featured the work of Denis Johnson, Kate Braverman, Rick Moody, David Means, and others. Once a month we hosted a kind of free for all reading called WHeel of Poets and we had an actual wheel and an emcee called Jennifer Blowdryer with platinum blonde hair and a sexy snarl. Fuck if we didn’t have a lot of fun.

Making a magazine is the young writer’s equivalent of putting on a play. It’s that fantastic time in your life when you are nothing and everything, when you have to take what you want, create what you don’t have, band together or die. Algonquin Round Table, Bloomsbury Group, Merry Pranksters, THe Lost Generation, Big Wednesday. What is the point of being a writer if not gathering with other like minded assholes at a bar or cafe and insisting on your superiority. Writers hate each other and need each other and, I believe, will better survive this impossible Darwinian struggle and the world’s general indifference if they have a place to go, a magazine to behold, and a respite from being so alone.

How do you roll?

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