A Love Letter to (Sun Valley) Writers' Conference
YWR #155
Dear Sun Valley Writers’ Conference:
I like you. Do you like me?
Check:
Yes
No
I don’t know
So you know how most days, we have the same conversations, with the same people, about the same topics? Our colleagues. Our families. Our friends. And along with the monotony, there’s beauty in this routine. There’s comfort. There can even sometimes be mastery of our careers and lives and hobbies (I’m told).
But if the warmth of fortune shines upon you, for just a few days, you find yourself in a new and marvelous swirl of intellectual inspiration and humility. With people who seek out learning and experts, who are kind and funny, who are surprisingly unpretentious. Listening to authors you love and writers you’ve only just discovered, who stoke the embers of your mind that you really sincerely worried might be entirely dormant, but which - hallelujah and finally! - were just waiting for the right words to come along and make you remember what it was like to feel creative and inspired and hungry for not just accomplishment, but the work that gets you there. And maybe a nice walk among some good-natured trees and a cookie at lunchtime.
I am pretty sure that the best place to find this experience is at any book festival or writers’ conference. I’m certain that you can find this at the annual Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.
Ugh, is this sounding too poncey? Like any great in-person experience, it’s hard to describe accurately and what am I, a humor columnist? For me, simply put, it’s a joyful highlight of the year and I leave with a full brain and a full heart and ready to come back next year. So if you’re a reader, a writer, or just someone who needs to blow the dust off the old cabeza, consider it. Or any other writers’ conference in your preferred city. I don’t know your airline status.
For the 99.99% of you reading this who were not there (hi, Carole! hi, Mitch!), permit me to do the voodoo that I do if not well then regularly, and pepper you with a pastiche of authors, book recommendations, musings, out of context soundbites, and FUN FACTS from my weekend in Idaho. Let’s go.
Obviously, when Anne Lamott is talking about writing, you plop down in the front row. What has she learned after 30 years of writing? “To be quieter, less critical and more gentle with my writing … and not to name a main character ‘Brian’, because the computer autocorrects it to ‘Brain’ and your copy editor WILL miss it.”
But seriously, how have we never talked about Bird By Bird, a manual to writing and life. Have we even talked about Anne Lamott, in my Mt Rushmore of writers? What have I been nattering ON about for 155 weeks?!? Okay go order it, right now.
FUN FACT: Amor Towles apparently wrote A Gentleman in Moscow in its entirety and THEN did the historical research. Which is mind-boggling, and also metal as hell. This is according to a terrific historical fiction panel with Abraham Verghese, Jon Burnham Schwartz, and Kristin Hannah.
I’m not going to embarrass either of us by asking if you’ve read A Gentleman In Moscow. Either you have, or you have some homework.
Sorry if you want to escape from our current moment, because a panel cheerfully entitled “On the Frontlines of Chaos” was not here for your childish anxiety. On the upside, these were fascinating and riveting conversations with Clarissa Ward (smart, didn’t love her memoir), Niall Ferguson (zero chance I am reading a two-volume set about Henry Kissinger but you might and good on yoiu) and David Miliband (deceptively youthful and startlingly intelligent.)
Chaos soundbite: “The one thing that gives me optimism is that Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Khameni - none of the regimes have a succession plan. They don’t survive forever.”
I’ve not (yet) read Alejandra Campoverdi’s memoir, First Gen, but I left the weekend not only putting it at the top of my TBR list, but also ready to vote this Harvard grad, first-gen Latina, former Obama staffer, empath and stylish dresser into all available elected positions. Did you know that over 50% of 1st year undergrads in the US are first generation students? ME NEITHER, guess that’s why we need to read her book.
From Jean Hanff Korelitz, who wrote two excellent and different books, plagiarism thriller The Plot and family drama The Latecomer: “It is a commonly held writers’ superstition that if you are lucky enough to have an idea, if you fail in your commitment to get it down on paper, then someone else will write that book.”
FUN FACT: her OWN editor rejected The Latecomer twice!
Sorry Salman, agree to disagree, because I would LOVE to have Padma Lakshmi start every one of my mornings off with her beguiling storytelling. (Read »> her memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate. A great entry in the celeb memoir canon.)
And then we’d end our days listening to 86-year old Judy Blume talk about ANYTHING SHE WANTS. A legend.**
Longtime readers will know that I not only j’adore Erik Larsen’s non-fiction (faves: The Splendid and the Vile, Devil in the White City) - I wish virtually all non-fiction was written by Erik Larsen, who knows how to tell. a. tale.
So I asked him, “what non-fiction does Erik Larsen think I should read?”
FUN FACT: Erik Larsen does not, almost as a rule, read non-fiction - in fact, he adheres to a strict “Fiction After Five” reading regimen which favors dark Scandinavian noir murder mysteries and, I kid you not, The Thursday Murder Club. (swoon) But he gamely suggested:
We’ll read these and meet back to discuss, okay? Deal.
EXTREMELY FUN FACT: Margaret Atwood READS PALMS. Absolutely NO NOTES.
Appendix:
As always, all links go to Bookshop.org, this week in support of Hailey, Idaho, bookstore Iconoclast Books. Because as Anne Lamott said, “You have to buy your books at indie bookstores if you want a good seat in heaven. The one near the dessert table, or the cheese board. I’m a Sunday School teacher, so I have inside information on these things.”
If this love letter was not your cup of tea or hit too close to your middle-school inner child, check out the archive! Plenty of every other kind of book to peruse!
Likes, shares, comments all welcome! It’s a more wholesome way to engage on Al Gore’s Internet.
**I think there’s a tiny circle of Indisputably Beloved and Good Americans, which currently contains Dolly Parton and Judy Blume. Is there anyone else in this pantheon?