We didn't just clap- we cheered. Most stood.
Favorite panel today was with poets Matthew Dickman, Melissa Stein, and Matthew Zapruder...who discussed how to survive as a writer (They Paid Me with Drinks: How to Navigate the World of the Modern Poet). Zapruder warned against equating the teaching of writing with being a writer---the beauty of writing outside the profession is that you can mine your job for topics...
Dickman suggested thinking of writing as the intersection between the spiritual and secular world...with submissions as the secular chore.
This afternoon Wells Tower discussed negotiating the grotesque in fiction. He referred to Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize Speech.
The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
Which brought me back to Athens, where just last Thursday Judy Long arranged that amazing tribute---my favorite Athenians reading Faulkner's works aloud, marking the 50th anniversary of his death.
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