I didn’t want to expend any energy writing about the writing “conference” I attended led by a freelance writer whose mind and approach to life was as narrow as a parrot’s ass.
The day was to be composed of three workshops all dealing with the writing, publishing and marketing of a book. After giving her enough rope to hang herself with, I left after an hour, eating my packaged lunch outside while waiting for Jane to pick me up. If I had to throw up it would have been chunky as opposed to creamy style, the kind of splat we saw as kids in grade school. I have so much to say that I will interpolate here and there, intrude into the narrative for additional associations that arise, given what I observed this past Sunday.
What I experienced was mind-numbing, the low level functioning of a personal and desiccated enterprise geared to merchandising and marketing the free expression of ideas. It had nothing to do with writing as I know it, but it had everything to do with writing as most people experience it. Consequently it was a thriving business. The chutzpah was monumental. The head dweeb never wrote a serious novel of fiction, nor to my mind, a serious non-fiction work. No book of essays, no book of short stories and no novel. She had written about everything else, all geared to the making of money and investments. Churning what little inner self, I imagine, she had into a kind of business and living the American dream which is essentially money, more and the creation of more and more.
I thought the conference would have some interplay between the attendees; she used all the worst teaching techniques down through the Middle Ages — the lecture, the endless prattling on. Nor did she learn our names or even deign to hand out name tags; we were disparate atoms on the top of pins all stuck into her pincushion. We sat in rows like bleachers, eggs in a cardboard crate. In short, much humanity is in writing and this weasel bespoke none of that. A conference about money-making I can deal with, but she had the balls to blend that into writing although the conference was not advertised as such. In her mind she was instructing about writing. In my mind she was teaching Adam Smith as applied to the writing of books. She was a non-creative person posing as a writer. Her “creativity” was elsewhere, hair tonics, nineteenth-century vibrators, medicinal oils and such.
(I associate to that parvenu, Joyce Maynard, who at a very young age had an affair with J.D. Salinger and for the rest of her life has churned that into profit, by all definition a literary whore.)
It got so repulsive to who and what I am that I chose to leave not without deciding to take some notes on her behavior and performance. After all, I am an author and retired therapist and here was a chance to assay her character, literarily and psychologically. Here is my montage: A New England type, pinched face, pinched personality, with dark gray pants and a blue shirt, no lipstick or cosmetic to address her face, that I called her the “angry mouse,” for she had a way of emitting her aspersions in little hiss-fits. Scratch the surface and you unearth a Hawthornian puritan, my way or the highway. No sexual creature this one. I examined her from my chair, taking notes about her sense of humor, her restricted self, her anality, her non-expansive self as she addressed the entire class without once inquiring about who we were, or much less what our aspirations might be. We were a product and she was processing words like stuffing a Polish sausage. She was a business woman, not a writer, mind you, selling her product with what she thought was efficiency and efficacy. Product is all. She lacked charm, any kind of mild effusiveness and more important when dealing with wannabes or people who wish to learn how to write, charity, patience, the ability to listen and empathy. Think of Katherin Hepburn with a penis and you have it.
An interpolation. When I visited Paris about ten years ago I recall vividly standing before the expansive entrance to the Louvre. If I recall it took many years to complete and had over 100 rooms for the aristocracy of the day. What surged through me was the human expense of these craftspeople, the waste of rooms, and how justly fair it was that now the French people owned this profligacy; how can I say it? I felt that I would have grabbed a musket and stormed the Bastille. I dearly identified with the pain the workers experienced as they built this stone madeleine for the one-percenters. It is something inside me that I have owned for decades and am very comfortable with. I abhor class distinctions, pretense, unfairness of any kind; I admire justice, although that is rare to come by, I admire the better part of ourselves which wants to do good but is often stymied by our very selves and society, mostly. The history of the country has shown us that all men are not created equal in practice, and for me that is the American dream and not the conspicous consumption during this second and most egregious Gilded Age.
You got that about me, pistachio and not vanilla. I have always kept my powder dry.
Let us return, boys and girls, to our story. Arrayed on her desk were seven classically, cheaply self-published books mostly dealing with making money with stock investments, gardening, achieving your dream, the usual dreck I used to see in the back of comic books as a child — airplane kits, investments, pets, stamp collecting adverts and so on. I will not be fair in any way about this woman. I will sink into the juice of snake venom. She was a merchandiser with a gimmick, and that gimmick was to approach writing in steps, in an organized (her mantra word) manner. In fact she thought it quite original, poor deluded self.
Consequently all of her workshop was not about the inspirational, psychological and emotional aspects of writing as if they were extraneous to the task. Her approach was American — produce a product. I fully realize that books are products and marketing is all. I write on the Holocaust — an unproftiable approach, I am sure, in this instructor’s eyes. Yet I write about it. I can explain the market out there, but can you explain to me or yourself why is it you come down to express yourself. What is that all about? Ask me and I will give you a seminar that will blister your ears. And if you write simply to produce a product, well, move on to another blog. This penile Hepburn had no concept of what I was about. I write books. Let me be fair to myself. I write literature and I am proud of that. She writes products. I am unAmerican.
An interpolation. Speaking about selling your book, she went into an extended 
anecdote about Shakespeare. I intend to be slanted and biased here, as I have been throughout this essay. She says that his first two plays were not fully attended and that he was backed by some patrons who had lent him money. He needed to increase attendance in order to fill the rows and pay off his loans. In short, he wrote his plays and that his third play had to attract more of an audience, perhaps throwing in more humor here and there, more blood and guts in order to interest the hoi polloi.
The stunner she offered to us was that Shakespeare was a very good businessman. And consequently that is why writers, past and present, admire Shakespeare, and why he is so important to writers. Sit there and allow that to sink in. And in that comment was her entire perspective, her worldview and her very limitations as a person and a writer. I was being spoken to by a thing. Or , in effect, what she said later on, to wit, the secret to selling a lot of books is to have something for everybody. So this withered husk, this wintried, February field corn stalk makes her appeal to the great unwashed, the slaves among us, or most of us, if you think about it. And she has all the perks, well-to-do, a full calendar of future seminars across the country, a RV that takes her all about, giving abusive seminars about “writing.” I often catch myself about that impulse to be envious, for that is the viral infection in the air as soon as you open the front door. But at 72 I pretty well have mastered that. And it has made me free.
In a self-serving slap on my back, I was the only one who got up and left in disgust. For that I am grateful. I am aware.
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