The whole reason for being there

There will be fire! Note the hologram flames in sconces on each side of the stage. 
Not sure who took this picture---it was tweeted during our talk

The conference was on Saturday, and it was, to me, a small miracle. How did the folks at this little magazine--in existence only a couple of years--manage to pull off something of this magnitude? Fly in four American journalists, find space at a welcoming private university, secure sponsors, and sell out all the seats? All in the matter of just a couple of months? While still putting out a magazine? With a tiny, tiny staff?

I was an editor at a magazine for two years, and while we put on events, too, we never did anything of this magnitude, and we certainly never did anything this quickly.

But here we were, and on Friday afternoon we went to the university to meet the director and check out the space for Saturday's conference.

It was orange. Very, very orange.

The view from the stage

One of the Romanian journalists happened to be wearing an orange sweater. He sat down in the middle of the amphitheater and said, "Do I look like just a floating head?"  Truthfully, he kind of did.

Editor Adi, in his infamous orange sweater, at dinner on Friday night.

The orange was impressive, but our favorite feature was the fire--hologram flames that trembled and flickered from sconces at either side of the stage. (They fooled me; I thought they were real.) We must have the flames, we told the PR guy from the college, who was doing the walk-through with us. Please turn them on during our keynote. And he promised he would.

The three other Americans had been working on their keynotes most of the time since getting to Bucharest. Me, I'd been hoofing it around the city, going to museums, befriending feral dogs, eating warm pretzels stuffed with apple ... yum ... and on Saturday morning, the jig was up. Each of us had to deliver a keynote of about 30 minutes in that big auditorium, followed by a Q&A with all four of us. 

In the afternoon, we were to break into smaller groups for two-hour workshops on various aspects of writing and reporting narrative nonfiction. And when those workshops were done, we would get a little break, and then we'd do them again.

It was shaping up to be a long, long day. I wasn't too worried about the workshops--I'd taught this topic (short narrative you can do in a day or two) many times before. But the keynote! We were supposed to inspire. I'm not sure I'm the inspiring type.

 I had written my talk before leaving Minnesota and since then had edited it repeatedly on paper. I had not brought my computer and couldn't make a fresh printout, so when the time came I stood in front of that sea of orange and read from a script that was so scribbled on, with so many notes and marginalia and things crossed out and things inked in, that I feared I would lose my place. As I spoke, I looked out at 200 faces, and what I saw was this: many heads bent over cell phones, thumbs flying.

I was, briefly, horrified.

Oh my god, I thought. I'm boring them. I didn't prepare well enough! They are all texting their friends about where to meet for lunch!  I'm a failure--an international failure!

But as it turns out, they weren't texting; they were tweeting--live-tweeting the keynotes. (You can check out #powerofstory on twitter, though I warn you that many tweets are in Romanian.)

The purpose of the conference was to talk about the power of narrative, and how to report it and write it. The journalists who brought us in, as well as those in attendance, were well-educated, savvy and smart. They were very familiar with Western-style journalism, and some of them had been educated in the United States. They spoke English. Thanks to the Interweb, they read The New Yorker, and the New York Times, and Harper's online. When I mentioned Dan Barry and Susan Orlean and Calvin Trillin in the afternoon workshops, many of them nodded knowingly; they had read them and were very familiar with their work.

They were passionate about bringing this kind of deep reporting and storytelling to their country, where this kind of journalism is rare but beginning to grow. They were tech-savvy, with smart phones and iPads and more adept than me at using the Web and its many tools. This was a far, far cry from my trip to the Soviet Union in 1986, when Russians watched, agape, as Polaroid photos developed right before their eyes.

After the conference we were all pretty wiped out, but it was down to the Old City once more for an end-of-the-conference celebration. The other three Americans were leaving pretty much first thing Sunday morning. But not me. Me, I had one more day.