WRITER EVIDENCE IN THE HOUSE OF BOOMERPDX

via leatherbindingandgoldleafpages.com

A hard rule among writers: avoid talking about a writing project. So what do writers talk about in writer meetings?

Last night while attending a Willamette Writers meeting I saw writer evidence all over the place across a crowded room. I scanned the crowd from a plush chair inside Tabor Space on SE Belmont while many sat in hard chairs.

The writer evidence was sparked by the speaker, a freelance editor in Portland after years in the big publishing houses of New York City, which means she was a New Yorker, a real N’yoka in Nyuk Nyuk.

Abby Ranger in Portland doesn’t seem any worse for the experience. She brought a load of writer experience from the other side when she moved ‘out west’ where too many New Yorkers think ends in New Jersey.

Writer evidence came in the voice of a man who just two hours earlier had finished his memoir as an FBI agent close to former boss J. Edgar Hoover. I wanted to ask him about Hoover’s right hand man Clyde Tolson, but didn’t. I was in the building for writer evidence, not a new take on a weird relationship at the top of America’s police force.

Besides, I was already listening in on other writer conversations. I sat in front of a man talking about meeting Ernest Hemingway face to face. They had a date the following year to see another bullfight together, but Papa didn’t show up. He died a week earlier, his travel plans on earth finished.

My writer evidence at the meeting included my own Hemingway sighting in La Pepica, his favorite paella place in Valencia, Spain. I was face to face with a Hemingway mural. My passive-aggressive contribution didn’t fly too high. Neither did questions about Hemingway avoiding writing from America, biographer Carlos Baker, and my dislike reading For Whom The Bell Tolls.

At least I wasn’t talking about my writing project. But I broke the rule and told the Hemingway fan what I was up to. He couldn’t get away fast enough. Can’t blame him for that. Not everyone wants to hear about a book chronicling cancer treatment, medical marijuana and weed culture from the seventies, and the rise of sexually transmitted hpv16 neck cancer.

Writer evidence says make the story better than the separate parts when they’re all linked together.

I left the building and walked down the steps where two young women sat talking, probably about writing. It was a nice moment of peace after driving up Belmont’s busy blocks of chipped paint buildings.

Back in the car I checked my email and found a message from a publisher that included a writers agreement I needed to sign. If I’d seen this before the writer meeting I would have piped up with the news. That’s one of the features, standing to tell the assembled group positive writer news.

Was I excited? My first impulse was to buy cans of spray paint and start tagging the town with writer news. But I resisted.

Another email gave me a nice writing prompt that ended with, “Why don’t you write about this?” It came from someone who said they were blocking me from ever communicating with them the rest of my life.

Like all confused, out of control, people, they forgot that dumping someone in the digital age is a two way street. I’m staying in my lane, but still like them.