Saturday evening

gad i'm tired. they actually allotted 2 hours and 15 minutes for my talk. i did not fill the time. jesus. who would listen to me for that long?

i had wanted a discussion, but the room and the AV requirements don't really allow it. i sit in front, on a little stage, and have to speak into a microphone so that i can be recorded.

if people have questions (and thank god they did) they have to go line up at another mike and speak into the microphone politely, and then i answer their question.

the question and answer part is the liveliest, but even then there's no way for give and take (other than between me and the one person who is asking a question). if someone else wants to say something or be part of the discussion, they have to get up and walk to the mike, where there is already a long line of people waiting to ask questions.

so it's very formal, and it gets kind of tiring and i kind of hit the wall after an hour and 45 minutes and sent them all on their way.

i think it was fine, though later i thought of many many things i could have told them about narrative that i forgot to tell them.

still, how much will they really remember anyway? i cannot possibly tell them everything. one guy told me that mine was the best session he'd been to all weekend, and that was truly all i needed to hear. i immediately handed him $500 and my firstborn son.

after it was over i went back to my room and got my coat (it's very chilly here) and walked for an hour, up boylston street and down mass ave to the river and back again. and that's where i took these incredibly artistic photos, for you, my dear blogettes.

now i am ready for bed (the noisy people in the next room woke me up extremely early this morning, but that is another story) but it is only 6 p.m. and i am supposed to be attending another HUGE GROUP DINNER. but i am not hungry, and i am sick of talking. and i think instead i will sit here and think about nothing and say nothing, nothing at all.

Saturday afternoon

You know what? Two hours and fifteen minutes is a long time to talk. There were a lot of questions, but we were done a half-hour early. And I think that's just fine.

Now I am going to take a walk.

Saturday mid morning

a pretty morning, the river a deep sparkling blue, rowers scudding past, gulls wheeling.

i ponder unanswerable questions: why, in a king-sized room in an expensive hotel, are the walls so thin that i can hear every single word spoken in the room next door?

why chocolates on my pillow on thursday night, but not on friday night?

why am i so hungry when i'm eating nonstop?

the feeling at this conference is entirely different from previous conferences. in the past there have been writers treated as rock stars ("there's tom french! there's tracy kidder!") and mobbed by writer-groupies. in the past, the atmosphere has been one of excitement and privilege. people had tons of questions about who the best editors in the country are, and how one can finagle jobs working for them, and, of course, lots of specific questions about narrative.

this year, after the keynote speech, a lot of the questions were about the future of journalism. one woman got up and said she writes for magazines and now she's been asked to start a blog, and she doesn't know anything about blogging, and she hates blogs and she never reads blogs, and her editor told her, "ah, you'll love it! every day, three hundred words about anything you want to write about," but she doesn't want to write three hundred words, she wants to write three thousand words, and ...

she didn't really have a question for the speaker, she just poured out her frustration into the microphone, her arms flapping in agitation at her sides, and the speaker listened with sympathy and finally interrupted her and said something soothing.

i moderated a panel on writing short narrative--me, another editor, and a videographer-- and when the talk was over most of the questions were for the videographer.

one anxious-faced older woman, who spoke softly and was dressed elegantly, said she was a long-time writer but now she was being asked to do video. she had a whole list of questions about it: where do you stand? when do you zoom in? when do you pull back?

it was almost as though the group had patiently endured our 45-minute talk about writing short narrative so that they could get to the important stuff, the questions about how to do video.

i might be overstating it, but i sense desperation.

there were about 40 or 45 people listening to our panel. but another talk at the same time--a pulitzer winner who was talking about ethics--only had 13 people at hers. ethics! ethics won't save your job in this digital age!

after dinner i sat in the bar with some of the other speakers, and even though it was fun and we laughed a lot, the topic kept circling back to the same thing, over and over: what's your plan? what's your exit strategy? what will you do when your paper folds?