Monday: Stewart O’Nan reads in the evening at Pitt, in the 5th floor room where we have workshop, featuring arching gothic windows and the occasional wintry breeze. Afterwards a few of us join O’Nan at Chuck Kinder’s house for beer and snacks. As we stand around Chuck & Diane’s new great room, Diane makes nachos that look entirely delicious, but they end up inaccessibly between Chuck and Stewart. I never got one. I really, really wanted a nacho.
Wednesday: Ann Pancake joins us for our evening fiction workshop (yep, same room). Afterwards, she reads from her lyrical novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, about a West Virginia family dealing with local mountaintop removal mining. After that, a few of us join Pancake at Chuck Kinder’s house for beer and snacks. I stop for beer, which we’d mostly finished off two days earlier. This time I confess to Diane how good her nachos looked, and this time, I get a few. Thanks, Diane.
Thursday: Don Lee visits campus as the first Fred R. Brown Literary Award winner. He lunches with grad students (including me), reads from his work — in a different room! different building, even! — has a handful of story conferences, and does a craft talk (back in the workshop room) on getting published. As he was at Ploughshares for a gazillion years, I would have loved to get his feedback on a short story I’d written; too bad I don’t write short stories. And if beer and nachos were on the agenda again, I missed it — too pooped.
So much literariness in one week! You’d think this was New York or something.
