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By Root 309 0

people who drink wine and count their change, who quiver with naughty conspiratorial glee at the suggestion of having more than two glasses at a sitting. These are quiet people, reading or scribbling, or calmly and earnestly going about their conversations. Some are fretting over essays to be presented at panels before the most discerning audiences possible; some are vetting after having just done so. The more time you spend in this atmosphere, the more you realize how missing it is in the world outside these walls. These are people who live and thrive on research. To them it is fun. They don’t watch television, except when something “quite good” is on. And although many are Luddites to whom the computer is an unwieldy and frustrating scourge, for most, the dawn of the Age of Process has made their professional lives so immensely easier, those joys of discovery have taken to soaring higher than ever. As they rethink their own processes, they find it a greater joy to teach, and share in the experience with others.

My wife’s panel, for which she and the four other panel members had been preparing for weeks, went smoothly. She was talking about the use of a photograph as metaphor in Howard Norman’s novel, The Haunting of L. Norman himself slipped into the room, furtive-like, as though he might be entering a trap, as if perhaps one of these scholars had detected a flaw in his craft. He was accompanied by legendary poet, teacher, and essayist Stanley Plumly and the keynote speaker from the night before, Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod.

MacLeod had delivered his address after tipping back quite a few beverages, it seemed. He had decided to get up in front of a largely American throng and give them all a long, doddering, pixilated discourse on the history and development of Canadian literature. The audience, peppered with earnest intellectuals and snappy, impatient agents from New York, Seattle, Chicago, and LA, was restless and condescending. But I loved it. I sought out the commercial-press bookstore the next morning and bought every title of his they had. He is a delight to read, with great depth of descriptive feeling about wilderness towns and life in the woods and lakes of the North. His prose is clean, bold, and unafraid, like the waters, forests, men, women, and beasts that populate his stories. Everyone I met said I was crazy to think what he did was cool. Everyone there was professional, on the best stage they have to display their work, and like true North Americans, they expect to be sold to, they want the pitch, and they want it delivered well. That’s not what McCleod was all about. So be it.

Some of the attendees at the AWP have taken on mythological status with the rank and file. Certain names are whispered with reverence or unexpected joy. Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, Galway Kinnell—these are literary minds of first rank who should be leading the discourse of the nation, but they are not. They dwell in the minor offshoot presses or independent presses. You can get their books, but you won’t happen upon them. They might distract us from our real mission in life which, as we’ve been told again and again, is eating fast food, watching television, and letting others do our thinking and voting for us. “Americans watch six hours of television a day,” Gore Vidal once said. “How can they defend their liberties when they’re busy watching The Gong Show?” Insert American Idol, and I think you see his point. But we need to know what we are missing.

On the plane over, in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, who had recently killed himself, I was reading Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, which, by the way, is still as fresh, bold, and death-defying as when it was written. A book like that can spike one’s testosterone or estrogen level, up the ante on one’s refusal to compromise, remind one that the truth, plainly spoken, is a devastating thing to hear. We are all so starved for it these days; we look furtively about when we hear it, feeling suddenly naked in public. That’s what it’s like listening to these people make