Unfortunately, a ribald and playful satire of the Miss America Pageant that Philip had published in one of these magazines attracted the attention of one of that year’s contestants. Philip, having grown up on the East Coast, had always been fascinated by the West, so he chose a western state for one of his fictional contestants. Both the actual contestant and the state that she hailed from took umbrage at the fictional character’s antics, and they sued Philip.

 

Fortunately, the magazine had good lawyers and stood by Philip, so even though the suit went against him in the state court, they appealed the decision and got it reversed in national court. I think, though, the whole thing traumatized him. Not surprisingly. I guess he figured it would be hard to raise much of a ruckus with poetry. Later, he moved into playwriting and film directing. Once he had recovered, I suppose.

 

At any rate, it was fun to have a friend to go on bike rides with and eat dinner with. This year I didn’t meet anyone I clicked with the way I did with Caryn and Juliet, or Philip. But I did luck into an outstanding workshop with the best instructor I’ve ever had. Looking back, I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of George Garrett before the conference—he was famous in literary circles and had written successfully in every literary form there is: novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and screenplays.

 

He was not only well-respected for his craft, he was well-known for his generosity. When he gave a reading, a former student—now a successful poet and one of the faculty for the conference—introduced George and told this story: A prestigious university press had held a contest to publish a chapbook of poetry. George’s chapbook was among the final three, which also included a young, promising poet whose work Garrett knew and admired. In order to give this poet an even better chance of winning the award, he withdrew his entry from consideration. The young, up-and-coming poet did in fact win, and a career was born.

 

Garrett had the most amazing knack of taking even the most faltering piece of work and critiquing it in such a way that not only did the writer learn how to fix it and improve their writing, they felt really, really good afterward. I’ve attended workshops where the instructor abused their position to trash a writer they didn’t like or whose work they didn’t like. I have friends—excellent writers—who have experienced this treatment and it wounded them so deeply they didn’t write again for a year or longer. You’d think grown-ups would behave better, but they don’t always. Knowing that this sort of shitty stuff went on made Garrett’s approach all the more heartening and admirable.

 

George also taught at the University of Virginia, which was renowned for its creative writing program. I can only imagine what a treat it must have been to study with him for an entire semester, or to have him as your advisor. As it was, I felt like I got more from him in one week than I’ve gotten from possibly all other coursework I’ve taken combined. He was a master at communicating nifty tricks of the trade—such as to never let yourself get stuck when working on a first draft. “If you get stuck, just make a note to yourself about what you want to come back and do,” he told us, “and pick up the narrative wherever you can. I have a friend who’s a TV writer and writes for a hospital drama. When she’s writing her first draft and gets to a place where she needs to have some technical material, she’ll just jot down, ‘Doc talk here.’” The rhythm is what’s important, he told us. And getting that first draft finished. You can always fill in and revise later.

 

He was also a treasure trove of great stories about famous writers and other creatives, such as the story he told us about Marshall McLuhan. There are no doubt other versions floating around, but this is the one I remember: McLuhan was fascinated, Garrett told us, about what constituted perception. How do we know what we’re looking at? How do we make sense of the visual data? To gain greater insight into this question, McLuhan and some graduate students went to a primitive tribe in some remote location, one that had no representational art. They filmed different aspects of life in the village and then sat the villagers down to watch the footage. “When you see something you recognize,” the filmmakers told them, “raise your hand.” So they watched for a while and then one of the villagers raised his hand. They stopped the film and asked him what he saw. “Patterns of light and dark,” he said.

 

The filmmakers said that this wasn’t what they were looking for, explained what they wanted in greater detail and started the film up again. The villagers sat watching for a while without making any response and then finally, another guy raised his hand.

 

“What did you see?” they asked, once they had stopped the film.

 

“A chicken,” he said. “I saw a chicken.”

 

Not possible, they told him. There was no chicken in the footage. The man was adamant. He was so adamant and they were so sure that he was wrong, that they rewound the film and advanced it frame-by-frame. Amazingly, a chicken did appear in some of the frames, but there are a minimum number of frames that must be present for the human brain to consciously register an image. The chicken appeared in so few frames that the image was in fact a subliminal one, not a conscious one. But this guy had seen it.

 

This so amazed McLuhan and his colleagues that when they returned home, whenever they saw a chicken in a movie, they would shout out, “Chicken!” After awhile, a mythology developed that every film that was either a box office hit or critical success had a chicken in it. Somewhere. So filmmakers started putting a chicken into their film. Somewhere. Just in case. Once Garrett pointed this out and I started paying attention, it became really quite amazing to realize how often a chicken of some sort would make an appearance in a film. Maybe the chicken theory of filmmaking has fallen out of vogue and filmmakers are no longer including chickens as a talisman; I haven’t been paying attention lately. But maybe I should. It might be that the Chicken Theory of successful filmmaking is alive and well.

 

Some readers might remember that the last year I attended this conference, my workshop leader didn’t care for my work. So I was prepared to have that happen again, even though I felt confident that, even if Garrett didn’t like it, he would still be kind and gracious. I was completely flabbergasted when I had my individual conference at the end of the workshop with him and he told me that he had really liked what I had brought to workshop, thought it was a nice piece of writing. He wrote down the names of a number of editors and agents, including his own agent, and told me to contact them about my novel and tell them that he had recommended them to me. As you might imagine, I was thrilled. I was feeling so happy and so expansive that I decided to go get a beer at the Hotel Jerome, an upscale hotel where someone had mentioned conference-goers and faculty were gathering to have a drink.

 

I walked in and saw that there were quite a few people in the bar. I didn’t recognize most of them, but I did spot author Ted Conover, who had given a wonderful reading at the conference and seemed like a super nice guy. I went over to tell him how much I enjoyed his reading. He smiled and thanked me. Then I noticed that someone was standing next to him. I couldn’t quite tell if they had been in conversation or not, but I did notice that this person was smiling at me, too. I glanced at Conover, thinking that perhaps he would introduce me, but he didn’t. That seemed odd, especially since the guy kept smiling and smiling at me. I thought maybe he would introduce himself, but he didn’t. He did look sort of familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I didn’t think he was teaching at the conference. So I smiled back and said good-bye to Conover and was feeling awkward enough at that point that I thought maybe I wouldn’t get a drink after all. I went back to my condo where some of my roommates were hanging out and told them I’d just been to the Jerome.

 

“Oh, wow!” said one of them. “John Denver’s wedding reception is taking place there! Did you see him?”

 

 

Oh, well. Nothing could dampen my mood, not after my conference with George Garrett. And I was even happier when his agent’s new partner took me on as a client. Like many hopeful young authors, I thought that this was the first step to a brilliant career.