I’m Sticking with My Pack (Warning—Long Post, Rant, Not Really About Dog)

Dogs are innately pack animals. They instinctively need to belong to a pack because they know they cannot survive without a pack.

I think the same could be said for writers.

A few days ago I ventured into the Big City with a friend for a writing workshop taught by a Big Time Literary Writer—author of award-winning books, writer of articles published in fancy places like The New York Times and Esquire.

I love taking writing classes. I love the interaction with other people who are smart and fun and like to think about things and who have similar aspirations. Some classes have been awesome, some not so much. One thing I have learned is that no matter how pathetic and boring and horrible a class is, you can usually glean at least one teeny bit of information that you will find useful or inspiring.

True to my theory, the one valuable thing I learned from this class was that if you want to write something about someone that you think might bother them, you should first say how incredibly good looking that person is. Then you can get away with almost anything.

Lesson learned. Let me say that the instructor was wildly handsome—a total dreamboat hunk of a man.

Now onto the rest of the story….

A little background… My friend and I are the kind of writers that literary snobs and Big Time agents might call hobbyists. Between us, we have five kids age 12 and under. We are plenty busy with essential non-literary activities like carpooling and cleaning toilets and slathering organic apples with non-hydrogenated peanut butter.

Our quest is for balance between general conditions that could be considered sanitary, our own sanity and serenity, with hopes for a little serendipity on the side. I think it’s a sanity thing that drives us by some wild, uncontrollable urge within ourselves to write. We write because we must.

Our ultimate fantasy does not involve white sand beaches or George Clooney, but the luxury of taking a month off to run away to a writing colony or the freedom to get so inspired that we can write for 24 hours straight. (And, ok, if George were there on the beach when we were ready for a break, that would work, too.)

But that’s the dream. The reality is we have to interrupt the Great American Novel every so often to check the homework and at least microwave dinner.

We write for the love of it, and because the ideas spill into our brains and we can’t help ourselves, in spite of all the external consequences and demands that suggest we would be much more productive by doing the laundry instead.

So, here we were, going to a class at this very cool, artist collective in the Big City. It’s a wonderful idea—get a big warehouse space and subdivide it into small offices and rent them really inexpensively and create this big pool of creativity.

I had met the founder (a Very, Very Big Time Author who was so nice and friendly and also genuinely handsome) and asked him about renting a space—even if I couldn’t use it full-time. He told me they only wanted full-time writers and artists—the collaboration was a very essential part of the idea and they wanted the offices full.

Of course, that only made me want it more.

What did Groucho Marx say? That any club that wanted him as a member he wasn’t interested in? Of course, the opposite is true, and any club that wants to exclude me is irresistible.

I wanted a space in that building and I wanted it bad. Fueled on a pre-class glass of chardonnay and the adrenaline of driving over the bridge and seeing the lights of the city emerge, my friend and I devised a plan. We could split the rent between the five writers in our writers’ group! We would each go in one day a week and that way the space would always be occupied and we would get one day each in the city to be energized by these mythological writers who could spend every waking moment in the pursuit of literary greatness.

But, there was a catch. We could not be ourselves. We would have to pretend to be “cool” to gain admittance to this exclusive clique of “artistes.” We took a vow of silence. Under no circumstances were we to reveal the name of the suburb where we lived, the topics about which were writing, or the numbers or ages of kids waiting at home for bedtime stories.

We were busted the moment we walked into the room. It was two minutes until the class was beginning and the room was full—yet there was no sound. Lots of dour-looking individuals with crossed arms and black clothes. (Not that I have anything against black. It’s so slimming! But maybe not from head to toe, including tattoos, nail polish and lipstick.)

Maybe it was the subject, “Writing from Experience,” and the instructor’s history (which I neglected to research in my enthusiasm for a cheap, geographically convenient class.) It turned out that the instructor’s specialty was memoir-type writing focusing on S&M and proclivities that could be most delicately described in polite company as sexual deviancies. The title of his most recent book, “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up” might give you some idea.

Looking around the room, it was clear that he had targeted his niche and that my friend and I had somehow slipped between the lines.

One might think that this realization would be the worst of the evening. Oh, No.

My friend, an Erma Bombeck-type, has a distinctive, shall we say, boisterous laugh and personality. This did not sit well with the literary vampires. A few moments into the class and her joviality was so disruptive to the worshipful atmosphere of the class that we were immediately shunned.

Soon we were admonished by the teacher as “The Bad Kids” of the class. At first I thought he was kidding. We were basically laughing at his lame jokes and participating in the class when he asked (what were obviously in hindsight rhetorical) questions.

When he asked for an example of a “protagonist/author” novel and I offered up “The Lovely Bones,” and he looked up at the ceiling and stammered that he wasn’t quite sure and I spoke up, challenging him, quoting the first lines of the book, “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie,” and he reluctantly sighed and wrote the title on his whiteboard I knew I had burned that bridge.

We were not going to get an office space. We would not get to go into the City and hang out with the cool writers.

I felt bad for about a minute.

Then I remembered when my friend and I were talking earlier about the passion and love of the five members of our Writers’ group...

We started meeting several years ago, when we were mostly wannabe writers with a lot of heart and not much experience. Since then we have among us, two newspaper columnists, a freelancer who has been published in notorious places like The Christian Science Monitor, an award-winning, traditionally published book and two novels that are being shopped right now.

We all have husbands and kids and we are fiercely devoted to our families, but also fiercely devoted to writing. And to each other.

We have nursed each other through form rejections letters, big birthdays ending in zeroes and cancer scares. We know we can count on each other for love and support, whether it comes in the form of a funny e-mail, a referral to an editor, or watching the kids for a weekend so a friend can finish her book.

I love these women in a way that, even as a writer, I cannot put into words. They are my pack.