SoMa Literary Review

Book Camp

What Happened At The Squaw Valley Writers Workshop

By Dusting L. Wells

I was working as the kennel manager of a no-kill animal shelter. A woman there knew I was a writer. She presented me with a Squaw Valley Writers Conference application. I didn’t want to apply because I was a hack and the conference was one of the most prestigious in the country. Besides that, the entrance fee was nearly a thousand dollars for tuition and room and board, well out of my budget. But the lady kept hounding me, so I printed off the first chapter from my latest compost pile of a novel and mailed it in on the last day. I was amazed when the director called me two weeks later and informed me I got the one scholarship they give out each year.

At registration three months later, the organizers congratulated me on getting the scholarship and how funny my piece was. I couldn’t believe it. My whole life as a writer I was treated like an outsider. You write books, mail them out, agents reject them, and then you shove them under your bed --that’s it. Even my parents wouldn’t read my stuff. The praise unnerved me, so I got the map to my room and got the hell out of there.

I couldn’t believe that the castle house perched majestically on a sloping mountainside had been deemed “bunk style accommodations” by the brochure. I was embarrassed to park my rusty truck beside it. I should have worn better clothes.

Five minutes later, I knew this prestigious writers’ conference was a scam. I knew this because a beautiful woman stumbled through the door flinging expensive luggage into the parlor. “I’m Bronte,” she squeaked, placing a delicate hand in mine. I knew nobody read the submissions, because mine was all about trying to screw beautiful women with delicate hands named Bronte. No one in their right mind would house me with a beautiful young woman with delicate hands.

We went through the house searching for our rooms. The rooms were assigned by letters. I tapped the A on my door and said, “The Scarlet Letter.” She dashed into E and slammed the door.

My room opened onto a deck with a bubbling hot tub. While checking out the view, I accidentally looked into Bronte’s room and saw her changing clothes. I turned away, but Bronte must have seen me leering, because she came onto the deck in a body-length sweater with its hood pulled up. She nervously asked, “What do you write?” Her hands juggled her cell phone as if getting ready to dial 9-1-1.

“Trash,” I said.

She laughed, “No, really.”

“I write about this guy riding his bicycle around the country towing his dog.”

“Like a . . . Blue Highways meets Travels With Charlie thing?” Bronte had nearly translucent skin and a perfect French manicure. “So, it’s kind of like that, huh?”

“Naw, man, my character just wants to fuck girls.”

“I’m married,” Bronte blurted and darted into her room and locked her doors.

Then came a barbeque at which all the famous writers seemed to be having a good time. I spied on them sitting around a picnic table eating, laughing, and getting drunk. I hoped that all the big time writers would see me and say, see that freak in the stupid cowboy shirt, in five years, he’s gonna be big time. In reality, I’m sure they thought --Why is there a rodeo clown here?

Then a guy sporting a post-beatnik goatee found me and handed me two stories to read for the next day.

As everybody left, I sat under a streetlight to read. One story used only five-syllable words. It was indecipherable. The other story was a crappy James Joyce rip-off. How could reading bad stories help me?

Back at the castle, another housemate was sitting in the parlor by a roaring fire. Only his curly hair and the tops of his glasses stood up from the pages held in front of his face. Trying to be social, I introduced myself. He told me he was a high school teacher. Asshole as I am, I disregard teachers. Anybody with brains wouldn’t be a high school teacher. Nevertheless, I asked to read his story. Nicholas said, “I don’t have an extra copy.”

Bronte chirped in from the kitchen, “You can read mine!” She dove into the room and threw pages into my hands. Nicholas reluctantly tossed his story into the middle of the floor.

Bronte wrote in a bad imitation of Flannery O'Connor. Or is it Eudora Welty? I’m not sure, but there’s a lot of flowerpot symbolism this, flowerpot symbolism that. You can’t get through one paragraph without the voice-of-a-sympathetic-God narrator telling you about that damn flowerpot. Example: A wispy cloud passed by the window and cast a hazy shadow through the partially opened blinds onto the droopy leaves of that damn flower in that damn flowerpot.

Nicholas’ story was more interesting in that he had a red folder. Red folders meant he was part of the non-fiction bunch. That made it more interesting already. I expected some teacher’s woe-me-mucky-muck, but I was astounded. On his Caribbean honeymoon, while Nicholas was supposed to be jogging, he was meeting some dude who was slipping his Rasta rod up his ass. Now that’s a story. Nicholas nervously watched me. I mean, I’m some rough-looking, unemployed guy with stupid tattoos and a beat up pickup truck. To Bronte I said, “You write like Flannery O’Connor.” Her pallid cheeks flushed. To Nicholas, I said, “That opening bit is so great I’m gonna steal it.” He hid behind his paper waiting for the gay bashing. While they jabbered about writing, I slipped away to the hot tub to wait for Bronte, who never came.

I signed up for this early morning workshop led by a “Hollywood Director.” His class consisted of students orally telling stories while the others wrote them down. I liked listening to the others, like this rambling old lady from Georgia who insisted she wasn’t racist, but that black men were always plotting to rape her. Writing every spoken word was exhausting. Our fingers blistered and cramped on the first day. Most of the stories were boring. Young writers got nothing. One time this guy’s daddy didn’t come home until late. Boo-freaking-hoo. Someone got mugged once. Yawn. I told a story about realizing I was a psychopath. My first semester of college didn’t go well, so I set the posters on fire in my neighbor’s room. I got kicked out of school and went to jail and suddenly decided to become a writer instead of some useful member of society who could complete the first semester of some shitty public college. People laughed during my story, and that upset me, because I was spilling my guts.

The more traditional workshop that day was lead by a famous writer of the Detail School which promotes stories in which little happens but which gives endless descriptions of kitchen drawers and the memories the cooking implements hold for the narrators. Famous Writer wore a Sunday-School-in-Kentucky-dress with faux-pearl buttons. We talked about Mr. Vocabulary’s story first, that one that read like jkuyknh hkujkym mhmuyjh thfer kghtrfd bfgstuseo thgoslgtse pulekse qqwfiurtm for twenty pages.

No one said anything because the story was indecipherable. So I said, “Maybe a string of fifty archaic adjectives in a sentence is too much?”

Famous Writer said, “Well, that’s just his style.”

The sycophant writers in our group took the cue from that and chimed in. Some middle-aged Barbie-looking lady said, “I love his use of language.”

Famous nodded.

It went on like that for an hour. “I like the use of the words tuquoque tunicate descant,” someone said.

“That’s a very interesting style,” famous writer said.

The old guy beside me would pick out one phrase between his cat-naps and say, “See when he says dervish microbarograph, now that’s interesting, why does he say that, in that way?”

“Because he sucks,” I muttered.

Famous heard me and scolded, “We don’t all have the same style.”

“Yeah, who would want a readable style?” I asked.

The next story wasn’t readable either. This octogenarian handed in a novel he penned fifty years ago. I remember the line, He rode down the golden golden lane and over the happy happy bridge.” I called it Portrait of a Young Plagiarist as a Young Man. The guy was old, old, and couldn’t hear, hear and he wanted someone at Squaw to publish it, publish it. After people made fake praise for about ten minutes, I couldn’t take it anymore. My comment was, “In the past, the more difficult a book was, the better it was supposed to be. But storytelling evolves. We don’t need to do Joyce’s thing again. Modern readers won’t work this hard. We want to be spoon-fed information. I don’t want to work. I want to be entertained.” The octogenarian screamed about Thomas Mann and how one needed to go back over a text over and over again.

The workshop people argued about this for a while, and then Famous turned to me and sneered, “Well, you’ve certainly achieved a pirate victory.”

***

Everyone ignored me after class. I ate a peanut butter sandwich by a man-made pond strangled by cow shit and algae. My story was up for critique the next day so I only had to read one. The story was about all these beautiful people with teenage kids having affairs, Bridges of Poontang County. The characters ride around in shiny new convertibles. This basketball coach/English teacher passionately quotes poetry about stars before fucking his star player’s mom. The women are all sexy perfect mothers. Then there was my story. I read the first page and it read like dirty toilet paper.

In the afternoon I went to lectures about how to get a big book deal. I sat behind the lecturers and looked out at the pretty girls. Then I lay down and took a nap. When I took my boots off, my socks stank really bad.

Most folks skipped the afternoon lectures to do their reading and then returned to the main terrace at night for dinner and to hear the published writers read. Squaw provided nerdy good fun for discovering new writers. Squaw Valley was like Friendster for nerds. Oh, wait Friendster is for nerds. It was like Friendster for literate nerds. Oh wait, don’t Friendsters write to each other instead of actually talking? So, fuck it, Squaw was just a nerd cult. I don’t want to glorify it too much, because I hate it when people think they’re better than others for having read a few books. If you got time to read, you probably don’t have much of a life. Reading and writing is the last realm of the lonely. It’s for when TV has lost all its shine and your genitals are sore from masturbation. When you tire of reading, you write. Then when you can’t get published, you go to a conference.

Interestingly, the conference had a soap opera undercurrent. The whole shebang is run by a dynasty of writers. What a great family enterprise to work three weeks a year and earn enough to live in Lake Tahoe, eh? Some hack married into the clan, probably just to get published, then I guess he fucked one of his students, because the patriarch of the place kept reading about how adultery is bad and then slamming the book shut like Moses breaking the Ten Commandments.

Early the next morning in the Hollywood Director’s class, Bronte cried while she told of a kitten that died in her arms. There were some good stories about floods, deadly spiders, and a husband fucking a fifteen-year-old girl. I talked about being a jerk. The last line was, “You can get out of jail, but how do you stop being a psychopath?” I thought I was being profoundly pathetic, but everyone laughed.

In the more traditional workshop, we sat around a dark ski lodge where we could barely see the words on the pages. Our moderator, Anne Close was a senior editor at Knopf. “Holy shit,” I thought when I read her little bio in the resources packet. She was like Phil Spector or something, because she worked on lots of good books. She was a petite, modestly dressed woman with an aristocratic Southern accent. She picked the other writer to go first. Everyone said something rather nice until it came around to me. Then I said, “You portray this basketball coach as a hero, but he’s scum.” Suddenly everybody let all their criticisms fly, and essentially said the story was crap. Nevertheless, we spent two hours on it. After break, we only had forty minutes for my stuff.

Since I had a big mouth and called the previous stories crap, my fellow workshoppers felt justified in not even pretending to like my stuff. After the workshop, Ms. Close called my name. I veered away from the bathroom line. “You have to work really hard,” she said.

“Ok,” I murmured and turned to go.

She grabbed my arm. “You need to work really hard for the next year.”

I always believed in myself, but I never expected an editor from Knopf to somewhat believe in me too. I wasn’t there yet, but I could be there if I applied myself and worked even harder. How beautifully encouraging is that?

I went to the lectures in the afternoon where agents and editors talked about what they liked. Impressively, a novice writer could obtain access to folks they would never in a million years have access to, such as an agent or the senior editor for a major publishing house. I felt sorry for the lecturers though, because they got mobbed. Especially agents.

The Squaw Valley Conference had a lot of absurdity, but you could meet people who could make a difference. The secret is that you can’t expect everybody there to influence you. It’s kind of like books. Every tenth one might really move you. Most of the lectures were bogus too, but I went to them, because it seemed like a waste of money not to, even though I didn’t really care about Historical Research or Publishing House Mergers. Occasionally I lucked into someone worth listening to, such as the Hollywood Director guy, Gil Dennis. This guy vocalized a brilliant but unpopular philosophy of writing, which is writers don’t really know what they’re writing about. His class proved that writers are psychotic uncontrollable babbling idiot and that people are usually writing about something other than what they think they’re writing about. A writer’s passions, lusts, loves, fears, and unsatisfied appetites leak into every line despite their best intentions.

I talked more than the moderators in most of my workshops, until I got fed up, and said nothing for the last three days. Hacks always beg for complete honesty, then boo-freaking-hoo when someone doesn’t jive with their work. Lots of people talked shit about other writers behind their backs, but during workshop no one would say, You know, this story isn’t working. Maybe some honest criticism might cause a writer to try something else or really get in there and fix the problems.

Squaw Valley was very cool, because I like writers. They’re my rock stars. However, my favorite writers wouldn’t be caught dead at a writer’s conference. I’d pay good money to see James Ellroy and Nick Tosches fight it out. But, at Squaw, we got Michael Chabon walking around acting like a stoned out surfer. Chabon read a good story he wrote for a Baltimore newspaper. It irked me that someone wearing such stupid clothing could write so well.

One night at dinner, Michael Chabon gasped when he saw me. The food literally fell out of his mouth. I thought it was prophetic. He knew I was the mythic chosen one. If I were to film this, there would be a beam of light cast down from heaven upon my pate. In hindsight, not to libel him, but he seems like a big stoner, so he probably was just stoned. In greater hindsight, I must have been a pretty funny sight. The cowboy shirt. The tattered jeans. My penguin-like physique. In his stoned mind, a penguin dressed like a cowboy was stalking his table.

I got to meet one of the truly great writers of our time, Diane Johnson. Her books captivated me. Les Divorce is funny and engaging and above all charming. Ms. Johnson’s lecture got delayed because she got run over in the street and broke her arm. Like a true literary trooper, she persevered and gave her lecture with her arm in a sling. I didn’t like her advice much –“Readers must like the character right off the bat.” I write more in the tradition of Dysotoyesky: I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. When I approached her and told her I was a fan, she asked my name and said she’d keep a lookout for my book. This is the lady who writes about throwing dinner parties in Paris for the New York Times, and here she was chatting sweetly with some bizarrely dressed hack.

I scared the shit out of Alice Sebold. The Lovely Bones rode bestseller lists for months, but her memoir about being brutally raped impressed me more. She was always swamped with fans, and I wanted to say something like: It’s a weird predicament to be a professional raped person, at the same time it’s very brave too. I love when writers vivisect themselves on the page too, and Lucky is the greatest example I can think of. Truth be told, I wanted to meet Alice because I had a crush on her. She’s so New York City pretty; a woman with daggers in her eyes and bright red lipstick making her look a bit vampirish, but in a good way. At Squaw, it’s totally possible to get close to writers, and there’s an hour or two lull before dinner for just that purpose. As I followed her, I tried to work up my courage to speak to her. When we came to an area near the forest, Alice saw me coming at her and she bolted. You know someone’s a city person when they can run that fast in high heels. I felt like a complete asshole. Rapists love to read survivor books and wallow in the pain. Alice thought I was one of those perverts.

Anne Lamott did a misogynistic speech called, “Get a Wife,” in which a writer should hire someone to be their wife and do a lot of meaningless bullshit for them, like encourage them no matter what and clean. Yeah, Anne that’s what women are for –unconditional support and ironing. I liked her although she kind of packaged her personality. I’ve heard her speak five or six times, and she always started the same way, “I should have written something for this.” Then she went on to recite line for line the speech she performed before. Her I-should-have-written-something was just a plea for clemency as well as complete bullshit. I liked her though, because she knows style and showpersonship, dyes her hair green, and has a weird relationship with the Virgin Mary, like I do. Writing is indeed mystical. When the lines are flying out of you just right and you make connections you do not have the knowledge or experience or intelligence to make on your own, you develop faith in something other worldly. Anne, I’m a witness to your faith.

On the last day, I was bopping through the barren ski resort going to hear about how to get published in a literary magazine even though I hate literary magazines. When I got stopped by the director of the program. “There’s been a note for you in the office for days,” she squeaked excitedly, “it’s from Kitty Mal, the agent.”

My heart stopped. This was going to be just like the movies where the badly dressed guy gets whisked off to stardom. Did Anne Close say something to her? Did Gil? On the board in the office were three notes asking to meet with me. The final one said, Dustin, I’m leaving today. Please meet me at two in the ice cream shoppe. It was one-thirty. I never buy coffee, because I can make it at home cheaper, but I bought a cup of coffee, being that I was going to be famous in thirty minutes. When I tried to sip it, the top popped off, and coffee spilled down the front of my shirt. I ran to the bathroom. My t-shirt looked like a shit rag. I wanted to appear as a calm, cool, collected literary genius ready to sign the six-figure book deal. Trying to wash the stain, I splashed around in the bathroom sink like an ostrich in a birdbath. Then my pants were wet too.

Inside the Old Fashioned Ice Cream Shoppe, the agent sat talking to an obese woman in a mu-mu who had a cardboard box filled with pages on one of those roll-around carts all crazies seem to have. I didn’t interrupt. They were doing business. Two o’clock came and went. After twenty minutes, I finally walked in and blurted out, “I’m-m-m-m sup-p-p-osed to m-meet you--”

“And the research is solid,” the mu-mu lady said.

Kitty said, “I had just about given up on you.”

“I didn’t want to disturb your meeting.”

Kitty rolled her eyes while the mu-mu lady rolled her cart out.

“I’ve been writing for ten years and you’re the first agent I talked to,” I blathered.

Kitty pulled out the first chapter of my novel. “I read this on the plane and I laughed so hard I fell into the aisle.”

Were we talking about my Cappuccino Cowboy book, the one that was my answer to all the frustration that built up over the last ten years, the one that set out to break every rule? Flat exposition. Unlikable characters doing unlikable things. It was truly a gob of spit in the face of all those How-To-Get-Published books. And Ms. Kitty Mal, big time literary agent liked it. She said, “I’d like to see the whole thing.”

“It’s in my truck, because I’m afraid my house might burn down!” Remembering what the senior editor of Knopf said to me, I thought about asking for a year. “I need two months to polish it up.” In reality, I needed two months to write the rest of it too.

Kitty fished in her briefcase. I expected her to pull out an agent-client contract, but she just gave me a business card with her name embossed in gold. “Keep in touch,” Kitty Mal said as she hurried away.

To a writer who had been pecking out words in a lonely room for ten years, Kitty’s words meant everything.

Back at the castle, I told everyone what happened. The other writers congratulated me but looked heartbroken. Then they got cheerful after a few glasses of wine. The lectures and workshops had pumped us up. It was like literary boot camp. We were coming out of there with our teeth sharpened and our fingers itching for our keyboards. Surely with all we’ve learned in five days, a bestseller was just a few keystrokes away. Three years later, none of us has a book published.

Also by Dustin Wells on SoMa Literary Review:

Why Donna the Buffalo Sucks, H-U-S-T-L-I-N-G, Oranges in Niggertown & Loser School

Dustin Wells lives in San Francisco and is the author of the novel Cappuccino Cowboy. He teaches Advanced Non-Fiction at an MFA program in The City.