Wow. What a week at Squaw Valley. Here’s my bleary-eyed attempt at a recap. If you’d like details on anything in particular, lemme know.  

It really is a community of writers
I met a ton of cool authors and aspiring writers. The laid back family vibe starts with Oakley, Brett and Sands Hall, and Lisa Alvarez who run the conference, and permeates every aspect of the week. I could go into intimate detail of the workshops, the meetings, the parties(!) but you really have to experience it to understand. It’s such an intimate week that to blog about it feels like kiss and tell. I hung out with some über-famous authors, who are just really cool people.

Sharp doses of much needed reality
Mark Childress told us he wrote three books before publishing his first, and even then it took him six years—rewriting it 12 times! He was a wonderful workshop leader, and kept us grounded in the competitive reality of this business. The challenges as a writer are the same with each book. It doesn’t get easier. Are you in love with writing, or the idea of being a writer? If it’s the latter, do something else. You could read his message between the lines (don’t quit your day job).

Quit your day job
Andrew Tonkovich (Editor) gave me so much praise during my one-on-one it was almost narcotic. Not only did he tell me that I needed to blow my 6,000 word short story “I am Chinese” up to novel length, but that I needed to do it NOW. He told me to go after grants and fellowships that would allow me to take the time to finish my research and bang it out. He though it had huge commercial possibilities and said I shouldn’t shy away from that direction, rather than making it some deep metaphorical retrospective that might be noticed in literary circles but only sell 1,000 copies. By that point I was in la-la land. I’ll just write it the only way I know and see where it goes. I’ve already contacted the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle for someone to bounce my research off of.

I found the deep pool in which I want to swim
The novel version of I am Chinese is tentatively titled The Panama Hotel after that less-than-famous Seattle landmark. I wrote the short story, not realizing I was writing historical fiction––mainly because I had so much fun doing the research. It came easy. And it was so personal that in my writerly neurosis I couldn’t imagine anyone actually wanting to read it. Boy was I wrong.

At Squaw I got a meeting with Kathleen Anderson, a literary agent, and pitched her on my tale of the Japanese interment in 1942, told through the eyes of a 12-year old Chinese boy. She loved it and took a copy of the short story. She represents a gaggle of historical fiction authors and was all over the genre.

Killing my firstborn
Surefire, which I renamed Rabbit Years is officially on the backburner. I’m about 80 pages into the 4th draft, but it just has that stench of a writer’s first-attempt. While I was there I pitched the concept to an agent and he loved the idea, but after hearing all these authors talk about how their first books stunk, I’m sheepish of making a bad first impression.

Authors of note
Aside from the obvious luminaries like Amy Tan, Janet Fitch, Alice Sebold and James Houston, there were some lesser-known authors worth looking for:

• Michael Lavigne––read from his debut novel Not Me about a Jewish man discovering that his father might in fact be a Nazi war criminal. Very compelling story.

• Will Allison––read from his soon-to-be published collection of short stories, What You Have Left. Simple and powerful emotional hooks. Impressive read.

• Kris Saknussemm––one of the more unique readers of the week read from his novel Zanesville. Hard to describe his work, but if I were to hazard a guess I’d call it gonzo-slipstream. A nod to sci-fi with a wild literary edge.