Diary of a Literary Festival
by Amethyst Vineyard

They lost my contest entry, and in recompense they have offered me a free pass to their festival. Because it is free I feel obligated to go. The only problem is that I don't like these things. I went to the Alabama School of Fine Arts from grades eight through twelve and was a creative writing major there, and we had several opportunities to go to literary festivals. I've been through the drill.  Invariably, I am the youngest person there. Also, even if I like the panelists, I generally dislike the audience because I am a snob. I despise their questions, as though knowing whether someone writes every day or just every other day or just when they feel like it holds the key to literary success. They always ask that, too. "Do you write every day?" Why do you want to know?

I like to think up what I would say if I were on the panel at a literary festival. This is something I do fairly often, it's how I came up with the idea for my first novel, by conducting an imaginary interview with myself while walking to Cyndi Lauper's "She's So Unusual." Here are a few things that I would say.

"Of course I write every day. You can't call yourself a writer unless you complete at least ten pages before five p.m. every day of your life. I write ten pages on Christmas day. I write ten pages on my birthday. My grandmother died and I wrote ten pages." This is, of course, not at all true. Also, I would say things like, "There's a huge pile of complete crap getting published every single day. You're all just adding to the pile." This is actually true, and I say it to myself often so that I will feel more confident when I mail out stacks of queries to agents. "Just adding to the pile," I say as I walk my pounds of envelopes to the mailbox, "Just adding to the pile" when I get my rejection letters.

Today is the first day of the Festival, but I can't go because of work. By a small miracle, however, tomorrow is my one Saturday off from the disability clinic I do reception for, and so I am actually free to use my free pass. Maybe it's been fated.

Another thing about this particular Fest is that I greatly dislike the woman who is directing it. Not that I know this woman personally, but I know enough. She's Alabama's Poet Laureate, and it says so after her name on every piece of paper pertaining to her. Sometimes it says "Alabama's Poet Laureate" instead of her name. But here's the catch: all of her poetry collections are either self-published or published by her friends. Does it count if you don't put your work into a competitive market? Does it count if you and three other people think you're awesome, and you never bother to test yourself against the wider world?

Even her literary criticism has appeared in self-publications such as The James Dickey Newsletter and The Carson McCullers Newsletter. These people are dead. What news is there about them?

And on a pettier note, I have met this woman on several occasions, I have been recommended to her for my work in various capacities, and every time I introduce myself she throws my hand away and immediately looks around the room for someone important. She never remembers me. I'm sorry, but my name is Amethyst Vineyard. My parents were thinking of my career when they named me this, they knew it would be a hard thing to forget, the Amethyst and the Vineyard. Generally I can count on that alone, and not just my incredible personal magnetism, to fix me in a person's memory. But Alabama's Poet Laureate does not care.

I'll just tell anyone who asks that they lost my contest entry and that's the only reason I'm there.

At the Fest

Eight-thirty in the morning. I go downtown to the historic hotel this shindig is happening in and ask an octogenarian for my name tag. The contest director hears my name and comes over to me. "Oh, Amethyst, I am so glad that you're here, and I am so sorry about your entry." I am immediately appeased. I will keep her secrets for her. I will tell no one that they lost my entry. "You just make sure to get my card and you can send next year's entry directly to my home address." Well, the entry they lost was walked in by my very reliable boyfriend and placed in the hands of someone who claimed to know what they were doing. I know what happens to packages in someone's house. I have a bookshelf full of letters for people who rented my house years before me.

The first panel is "Publishing the First Novel: That First-Time Thrill". The person closest to my age is one of the panelists, and even she is several years older than I am. I'm almost used to it, though. I can talk to old ladies.

There must be some kind of boiler underneath the conference room because my chair is vibrating. It feels like a hangover, and so I ask the man behind me if he can feel it too, just to make sure that it isn't a hangover.

"Um, maybe a little bit," he says. I don't blame him for not wanting to talk. You don't want to get to friendly with the people at lit fests; most of them are totally insane and they all love to talk with the belief of people who think good talkers make good writers. You could find yourself with a remora in a matter of minutes. However, I don't like being mistaken for such a person.

The room fills slowly. The panelists are two men and two women, all of whom have just had their first novels accepted for publication, one of whom actually has a book on the shelves. I liked the book a lot, so I'll tell youthat her name is Helen Scully, the title of her book is In the Hopes of Rising Again, and she was the most normal person there.

They start with a synopsis of their work. The wild Southern man on the end describes the wild Southern man he wrote about. Helen Scully quickly summarized her historical novel. The Southern lady wrote a historical novel, too, about a black Southern man during the Civil Rights movement. I make a note. Why do white southern ladies write about black men during the Civil Rights movement? I can't figure it out, but it happens so often, I can reel off a handful of names whose books would fit the same description. Guilt? Then there's the regular guy at the end who fictionalized a decade-old train disaster.

They discuss agents, publishers, contracts. They discuss the conscious versus the subconscious. Someone asks if they write every day. An old man stands up and gives this speech: "Given that publishers do not like to receive unagented submissions, and given that agents receive hundreds of submissions each week, and given that there are a lot of people of little talent who nevertheless want to live the literary life, why the hell aren't there more literary agents?" I clap for him. A youngish guy in the row in front of me brings up the subconscious versus the conscious mind again, asking, "You say things come 'to' you, and then you also say that they come 'from' you. So, which one is it?" This silences the panel for a moment, and I don't blame them. I am thinking that if I were on this panel, I would say "That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. They're just prepositions."

Thus concludes the first panel. We spill out onto the hotel's mezzanine, and I hide behind a potted tree until Helen Scully is free and I can go up to her and say something really dorky while smiling hugely. Ouch. Mystery fiction, Historical Fiction, a lecture on the short story. I look at the panelists for these things and decide to go home for a little while, and maybe get some actual writing done on my second novel.

Later

I make it back for the literary agent's mini-class. The room fills fast, and I talk to a woman sitting a few rows behind me. Turns out, they lost her contest entry, too, but she wasn't smart like me; she actually had to pay to get into this thing.

"You know," she says, "if I wanted to learn to write, I'd be in the wrong place."

"That's not what these things are really for," I say. "It's more about meeting people who might help you. Although, I don't know that that  happens too much, either." I am the nay sayer.

I have a really mean thought as the room gets crowded. This thought is that I can see inside these people's heads, straight to their dreams of publishing that series of murder mysteries or that civil-war era historical novel. They want to buy a farmhouse. I know what their author photos on the book jackets would look like, highlighted hair, a white button-down shirt,
sitting in their cheerfully cluttered antique kitchens in their brand-new farmhouses.

Why am I like this? After all, I'm here too. The Southern ladies who have written novels about black men during the Civil Rights movement have actually had their books published, unlike me. Hell, I conduct interviews with myself for when I get to go on NPR.

The literary agent starts talking about packaging, about formatting. She says something about word count. One hundred thousand? My little novel isn't even half that, but I know it's a novel. Technical thrillers? Mystery series about dogs?

I get the agent's card and ask her about literary fiction. Is there an agent who works with her who specializes in literary novels?

"No, but we'll read it. Just send in the first five pages and a synopsis. What's it about?"

My head is full of the new one I'm writing, so I come up with something fairly lame. "It's about a girl who's trying to write a biography of a literary prodigy, there's an element of magical realism and it's sort of about fame and the life of prodigies and the power of the narrator." Shit, I think. Could I be more vague? She nods politely, I take her card and move on, through the hotel and out onto the street where I stop to pet a pug dog and watch a gay pride parade before going home, unreasonably tired.