Visiting a Village
Writing community from afar
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of being a presenter at Barrelhouse magazine’s Conversations & Connections Conference, hosted by Temple University. I know I’ve gone on and on about it, but it really is a wonderful conference run by good, organized people who really love literary magazines and want writers to flourish.
But I also love it for selfish reasons: it’s one of the places I find writing community. Living, as I do, close to an hour away from the nearest independent bookstore and being hours and hours away from my closest writing friends, to simply be in a gaggle of writers is a delight. The day itself is a temporary community: here, this, us. A chance to form the small ties of “oh, we’ve both chosen all the same sessions” and “we’re nodding at the same places.” The held doors and book-bulged bags.
And there is the continued community of the conference, the kind editors of Barrelhouse who’ve supported my work and the work of so many others, and the local-ish folks that are brought together by this conference that shifts between D.C. and the corners of Pennsylvania. It’s a chance to see old friends I’d met elsewhere, and it’s all simply a glorious relief to exist in the shared shorthand of it all.
The night before the conference, we took advantage of being in Philadelphia to go to a Phillies game, which constitutes another temporary, shared community, another collective shorthand. My friend Jamie Nelson wrote a beautiful essay about the communitas of sports fandom for the late, great The Classical1 (which is archived, thankfully, via the internet wayback machine). I teach this essay not only in my baseball literature course but also in my medieval-themed first-year-experience class as a way to illustrate notions of pilgrimage beyond the explicitly religious, and to explore how quickly we might form alliances, connections, and shared experiences based on nothing more than laundry or a temporary geographical location. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, we’ve met at this waypoint because we’re going to the same place, and what is there to do, then, but tell each other stories?
But though such connections might be formed easily and on potentially flimsy stock, they can just as easily be strengthened with relatively little effort because of the shared ground already established. A shared journey, in Nelson’s essay, to a Giants game is a chance for deeper connection; for writers at a conference, it’s the shared crucible of drafting and submission and rejection, I think, that helps. It’s a difficult process to try to explain to non-writing family and friends. So many of the steps are really labyrinths; we remind ourselves that if we’re going to succeed, the process itself must to be a large part of our reward.
But there are other rewards, and one of them is this shifting village of writers that holds its doors open in so many ways, even for those of us who don’t live close to cities and the beating hearts of Big Literary Events. In online workshops and classrooms and convention center spaces and even the conversation of books shelved and unshelved in our local libraries, we find a village that helps us welcome and raise the writing we come to share.
My debut novel Heading North arrives on November 7! Preorder a copy from Braddock Avenue Books or make plans to attend the launch on November 8 at Midtown Scholar Bookstore!
The “Every Game A Story” feature was my absolute favorite thing to work on as an editor for The Classical. I miss it very much.
I love this! Also, I got your ARC in the mail yesterday, woo hoo!