Nonfiction Pizza Party
Prepare for me to drop some names and mention numerous meals. Last week I got to play Writer at a two-day conference hosted by Binghamton University called Writing By Degrees.My travelogue:Day One- Driving, listen to The Roots, Fiona Apple (“Let's pretend we're eight years old playing hooky”), WTF podcast, Longform podcast.Longform came highly recommended—shout out to Lisa—and I get into the interviews with journalists like David Grann, Janet Reitman, and Hottie Joshuah Bearman. Quick Story: Last year Bearman Skyped with my class and all the women thought he was super hot. Guess you had to be there.
- Make up colors for the primo foliage: fresh rust, scab, dirty Big Bird costume.- In Binghamton get called out by a cougar for doing homework in a bar.Day Two- Wake up, realize I forgot my dress shoes at home in New Hampshire. The Nike Dunks aren't going to cut it. Powerwalking to a men's suit store downtown it starts to rain. Inside I check out the price tags and realize all the shoes cost over $200. Admit to the salesman I don't ball that hard. Dash across the street to Boscov's, a kind of discount department store selling lots of Southpole apparel. Boat shoes for $20! Need those anyways! Wear them out of the store.- Inside the conference's home, the Historic Bundy Museum, I check out the iron horse statues and gold baby angels and the restored barber shop (for real). Listen to the first nonfiction readings, eat lunch with strangers, people constantly asking where everyone is from and what they write. Poetry reading. Academic panel, whatever that means. A talk about “the writing life” by the night's keynote reader Christine Sneed, author of the short story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and the upcoming novel Little Known Facts. Sneed says, “Nobody asked you to write” and developing a consciousness on the page is the most important part of a story.- Eat with Sneed and new friends and Binghamton University peeps. Smoked mozzarella ravioli! (Your boy here loves him some good rav.)- Reception after the night's keynote.- Free wine”¦Day Three- Wonder if conference campus organizers picked greasy Chinese food for today's lunch just to mess with afternoon readers like myself. Dip a spring roll in sweet and sour sauce and picture vomiting in front of the audience.- Read my essay about being a boy and Florida and having snakes and lizards for pets. Really sell the funny dialogue because four months after submitting the essay, I think its childhood voice sounds hacky. Answer audience questions about literary models and family reading work and the futility of memory. Give clumsy, vague answers because freestyling thoughts out loud is much harder than writing. Tear up my essay into dollar bill sized rectangles and make it rain*. Thank new friends for their complements, wish they happened to be editors of literary journals.*Didn't happen.- Before the final reading by poet Marie Howe—she will say, “Don't let publication change you in any way”—I tell a friend I'm glad the moderator didn't let my question and answer period drag on in a post-lunch slumber like some of the others, “letting us sit up there talking shit for another ten minutes.”My friend says, “Isn't that what we're all doing here, just talking shit?”