Belated Good Idea

The Sewanee Writers' Conference is about to crank up again. Last year's conference seems like yesterday in that I can still remember every detail of every room I entered, etc. I'll just come on out with it--I didn't have a great time at Sewanee. I did find it a valuable experience, just not in the ways I expected to. Anyway, I don't feel like going into all that, I was only going to mention that I was struck by an idea today, approximately one year too late.

I was reading a book by Margot Livesey, who was on the faculty at Sewanee last year, and I was thinking that I guessed she and my own workshop leaders, Jill McCorkle and Tony Earley, would all be convening again pretty soon. And I thought, wouldn't it be neat if the story I took to be workshopped last year had been published since then. I'd mail Jill a copy and she'd get it after breakfast one day, on that table in the dining hall where they leave your mail.

And what made me mad was that if I'd had this brilliant thought right after I came home last year, I could have made it happen. The thought of Jill McCorkle picking that package up from the mail table would have been inspiration enough for me to actually submit the thing to the requisite four million places until somebody took it.

Instead, what really happened was that I procrastinated for months before I FINALLY revised it in light of the comments everybody in the workshop had made, and then one day in a burst of energy I had about ten copies made of it, and then I dumped them on my office floor where they've been gathering dust ever since.

I'm not sure whether to say that the Sewanee workshop dampened my enthusiasm for the story I took, but I don't know that I'd ever care to participate in another. I dislike dissecting the work of others--I always have, even in literature classes. And I'm afraid it's been detrimental to me to picture a roomful of people dissecting mine.

Before, when I sent out a story, I imagined a lone editor reading it (sometimes, I know, only a paragraph) and either tossing it on the "not my taste" pile, or continuing, liking it, maybe fighting to get it into an issue of the magazine. Now I'm afraid that the workshop--the one and only workshop group of my life--will stick in my head forever like a Greek chorus muttering. Passing judgment.

I think it's one of those life situations where I was happier when I knew less.