If attending a writing conference doesn’t inspire a blog post, nothing will.
I spent the last several days in Mexico at the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference and Literary Festival in a charming town about four hours drive north of Mexico City. I was proud to hold the flag for Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, where I serve on the board.
The conference inspired me to try to write more often and more carefully. It also reminded me that writing is about conveying ideas and standing for something.
The town of San Miguel made the event unique. Every day, we would walk from our rented house on the hill overlooking the old town to the conference hotel, finding a different route through cobblestone streets just wide enough for one or two cars and hemmed in by tall walls of red, orange or blue clay. The walls hide shops, houses and gardens ranging from dirt and concrete to something that would be aspirational in Santa Fe's Canyon Road neighborhood.
At the conference hotel a few hundred mostly older folks met for seminars and hobnobbed about writing and publishing, but the real energy was outside.
San Miguel's population of about 100,000 is less than 10% gringo but their money — plenty of 1 percenters here — supports arts and boutiques, plus dozens of fancy restaurants. The haves and have-nots are pretty clear, but the town has grown without becoming a Disneyland. It reminded me of cross between Granada, Nicaragua and San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico — on high-end steroids.
The conference highlight was a keynote speech by Margaret Atwood, who talked about the need to keep advocating for individual rights, a sustainable environment and a future where freedom isn't just a memory. While she advocates for those things in her writing, she seems clear about her limits. For example, during a Q&A she was asked what she thought of a local protest against the Canadian government intended to stop a Canadian company from expanding its nearby Mexican mine. Her response: The last I checked Mexico has a government who's job is to govern Mexico. If you're asking if the Canadian federal government will do something because I say so, the answer is no. If you're asking me if I'll stand in front of a bulldozer, the answer is no. In a brief conversation later she reminded me that there are plenty of smart, well-intentioned people in every government (including, despite the tone of her commentary, in the Harper administration).
This being Mexico, there was lots of handwringing over the crackdown on drug cartels and accompanying risk to journalists from the violence. PEN representatives called for vigilance, though it wasn't clear what specifically they were asking for. As a former journalist, obviously I think the injury or death of any innocent individuals is unacceptable. Still I think most attendees, most of whom are at least arm's length from reporting, missed the key issue. More than anything, journalists in Mexico and elsewhere need to a business model that funds good work (including their security) and allows good people to make a living. Mexico also needs better education and more passionate readers who care what the hellraising journalists write. I couldn't help notice that I never saw a single Mexican reading in the neighborhood where I stayed.
I was also struck by the sense of powerlessness among writers. When asked in a Q&A session, Elena Poniatowska, a Mexican writer most famous for her political interviews and stories, didn’t offer many solutions for Mexico’s challenges. She said she wouldn’t want President Calderon’s job and that it would be the worst possible job for anyone. Huh? She was talking just as the news that New York Times journalist Anthony Shadid had died attempting to bring news from Syria to the world. This disconnect was hard to take for someone who considers journalism and politics to be on the same continuum.
For me, inspiration came from a brief class by publisher-turned-successful author Gerard Helferich on the art of nonfiction writing. Many of his tips were straightforward journalism of the sort my first editors tried to teach me. His contention that nonfiction needs to be well written and accurate, even more so than fiction, which has narrative force to compel the reader, was spot on. He reminded me to add Tracy Kidder to my reading list (also, I'm adding David Lida's First Stop in the New World and Suketu Mehta's Maximum City.)
Writing isn’t just for memoirs; it should aim for change. I keep thinking of a quote from John Goodman’s character in the TV show Treme, a professor railing about cuts at Tulane University: "It’s all about identity. Let’s not learn how to do anything. Let’s just sit and contemplate the glory of me, in all my complexities. Who am I? I am black Jewish woman, hear me roar." I happen to be a white middle-class male but my writing, blog posts included, shouldn’t just be about "me."