November 7, 2010
Sunday

Daylight Saving Time ended during the night, and when I woke up about 6:00, the morning had the look and feel of what 7:00 has been for the last few days. I’m farther north and east from where I live. At home, the winter grayness can sometimes seriously affect my mood and my energy, and people who have been to this facility warned me that the weak north light reaching the valley could make things worse for me. I did have a brief bout of the homesick blues last week, but in general the weather has been milder here than I expected, with at least an hour or two of sun most days.

This morning I took my C&C to the Mason House conference room, as usual. I closed my eyes and counted my blessings, as usual (you, reading this, are among them), and then I made an outline and some notes for the two scenes of a nonfiction piece about “a life with food” that I am adding to the two scenes I wrote last summer. I’m reading on Tuesday at the second residents’ reading. I get ten minutes, (twelve, maybe, if the roster isn’t filled), twice the time my classification is allotted at Bread Loaf.

And then I turned to the November/December issue of Poets & Writers that I acquired during my Gallivant-during-the-Gallivant to Burlington yesterday. I read an article about Heather Sellers, a writing teacher and coach whose exhortations in Page After Page and Chapter after Chapter to put the pen to the paper (or the fingers to the keyboard) and Go! Go! Go! I have found useful. I also looked at an article about “indie innovators,” small independent presses and magazines that are using new ways to package and distribute literature. It is not surprising that such edgy efforts that push paradigms attract work that is itself edgy.

I’m not edgy.

I read the ads for new titles, announcements for conferences and residencies, calls for submissions. I wondered, not for the first time, what I thought I was about with all this scribble, scribble. Can my stories about people who sigh after lost love, worry about dead cats, spend their weekends driving their half-brothers around, and go to funerals of people they don’t know, stories with too many characters and not enough action, really be worth the effort that is being expended to create them?

Finally, I got to the back of the book. The last article was “The Speakeasy Message Forum,” by David M. Harris.

I am a member of the Speakeasy. I fell into it in May of 2008, when, as happens every year, Markings started getting hits from search strings like “Bread Loaf rejection,” “Bread Loaf acceptance,” “Bread Loaf notification.” I looked at some of the other returns that the search strings were giving, and I found the Speakeasy, where Bread Loaf acceptance angst was in full swing. I joined, and started offering what I knew about the way things work at Bread Loaf.

What I found was a warm and welcoming community of serious writers who know what they are talking about. Most are not well-known outside the Speakeasy and their own communities (that is, they haven’t been on Oprah or had a Lifetime Channel movie made from one of their novels). But they are serious, and many are successful, publishing in magazines that matter (to me, anyway), acquiring agents and book deals, and being republished in Best American Short Stories and other prize anthologies. I was soon contributing regularly.

“The flow of information through the Speakeasy is enough, in quality and quantity, to give anyone’s career a healthy shove,” writes Harris, who goes by the screen name “Pongo.” “The most important feedback we give comes in the form of encouragement,” he goes on. And that is certainly what I have gotten. When I had the trauma of my initial rejection by Bread Loaf in 2009, I wailed my pain to the Speakeasy. What I got in return was not just “poor little thing” pats on the head, but constructive advice for dealing with the setback and genuine sympathy from those who’ve known more rejection than I have (because they risk more).

According to the sidebar in the article, the Speakeasy has 35,695 registered users. As with any electronic discussion group, very few, no more than a few dozen, contribute regularly, and you can wonder who is out there, lurking. In fact, people at Bread Loaf and Sewanee have introduced themselves and said they know who I am from the Speakeasy. And in 2009, when I seemed to go on and on about my Bread Loaf rejection, every time I posted a link to a Markings piece where I’d talked about the conference (and I do name names), somebody using a Middlebury College connection read it.

Although many are silent, Pongo notes that “We have an ever-growing core of contributors who share their experiences and help newer writers.” He names first a writer who goes by “Ayamei,” who has shared her road to publication, from finding an agent to landing a sale to choosing a cover for her first novel. In the next sentence, Pongo says, “Silkentent has shown us how she got into and made the most of the Sewanee and Bread Loaf conferences.”

Silkentent. That’s me. That’s the screen name I go by (although I use my real name and my picture too).

Pongo, (David), a man whom I have never met (he lives in Nashville but we were unable to connect when I was in the region last July), mentions only four Speakeasy members by name, and he chose to make me one of them.

So I guess I can say I’m mentioned in Poets & Writers, sort of.

And I will go back to work tomorrow, on the story about the boy with all the half-brothers, a lot less discouraged.

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