Sailing the literary citizenship

“Be a literary citizen.” This is one of the tenets by which we live at LAR. What does it mean? It means we write and read and write and read and write and read some more. In other words, we are writers sustaining writers. As LAR‘s nonfictionista, I love reading published memoirs and creative nonfiction pieces and seeking out their authors to let them know their words mean something to me. It’s like sending literary Valentines, except instead of messages such as “Be Mine,” I dole out invitations: “Please Submit.”  Like my fellow LARers, I also try to ingest a heady dose of readings, slams, and other “lit” events.

During the President’s Day weekend, I volunteered at the San Francisco Writers Conference, a fascinating window into the business of the written word, as well as the blogged, YouTubed, podcast, and Internet-radioed word. As it was my first such event — yes, I was a newby — I imagined the best place from which to gauge the lay of Writers Conference Land would be from backstage. I was right. Not only did I get to meet many of the agents, editors, and featured authors one-on-one, but I attended the conference for free. As a volunteer, my first duty was to assist with timing and seating for “Pitchcraft: How to Excite Agents in 25 to 50 words or less,” presented by literary uberagent Katharine Sands, author of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye. Apparently I had already caught Sands’s eye because we had shared an elevator the evening before and she had thought she recognized me. “Brenda, isn’t it?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I must just look like Brenda.” Not recognizing Sands, I asked if she too was a volunteer. “No, no,” she said, and smiled as if amused. As I exited onto my floor, I heard her speaking to the remaining passengers. “This is getting bad,” she said. “I tried to kiss someone I was sure I knew yesterday.” So much for my proverbial elevator pitch.

Yet one of my roommates at the conference hotel had solid success pitching her novel. From this roommate, I learned two things that really surprised me. First, vampire novels are still hot in the commercial literary marketplace, and second, I sleep like I’m dead.

Bottom line: We’d all like to be published. That’s one of the reasons we write and polish and submit. We also all love to read. But, as literary citizens, we can’t let our relationship with words stop with words. We’re obliged also to act — to support our fellow wordsmiths. On many levels, volunteering at a writers conference is a damned fine way to lend that support.