Let’s face it: writing can be a nasty business.  Writers must face the fresh terror of the blank page every day — and we must do it alone, as writing is, at the core of it, a very solitary endeavor.  We must face our own doubts, and our own fears, as well as the fears and doubts and sometimes the anger of the people we love, who might appear, even in drastically altered form, on our pages, or who are in some way neglected so that we can attend to those pages.  We must learn to prioritize, to sacrifice.  We must strive to find time for our work in a world of dishes and diapers and dust pans and things which demand ever more of our time.  We must learn to be ruthless enough to know when our work isn’t ready, and to know when it will never be ready, and to cut away words and lines and pages that we love — often, the ones we love the most — for the health of a piece.  We must be ruthless enough to throw away entire books.  And if we are very lucky and find the time for our work, and find our way to the end of a piece, and, after countless visions and revisions, find that that piece is ready, we send it off to wait in a slush pile.  We face dozens, even hundreds, of rejections before we can find a piece published.

Now add to that scenario the fact that there are thousands of other writers who struggle and lose sleep and slice pages just as hard as you do, and that all of those writers also have pieces sent off to wait in a slush pile.  All of those writers want it – success, publication, finding a place for their work in the world — just as much as you do.  And add, also, the fact that for many, if not most, of those writers, the fact is that their very livelihoods — if not their very lives (if one considers not just employment but also health insurance) — depend upon achieving it.

It’s easy to see why the writing community can sometimes not be a very pretty place.  At times, writers can be knife-at-the-jugular-vein competitive.  At times, the community can seem more like an incredibly complicated series of squiggles mapping out connections, showing who knows who and who one needs to know in order to get where one wants to go, in order to achieve it. At times, it’s easy to become so disheartened that it seems as though there really isn’t a “community” of writers at all.

Though it seems as though writers conferences would remedy this situation, I often return from them more downtrodden and depressed and disillusioned than I was when I arrived, having felt, while at the conference, like just another cog trying to find some way to sneak into the machine — so much so that, earlier this year, I swore off of writers conferences completely, and promised myself that I wouldn’t risk the aforementioned Triple D-Words of Doom again.

I broke this promise to myself, and I’m incredibly glad that I did so.  I returned today from the first annual Auburn Writers Conference.  This Conference was the brain child of the amazing Chantel Acevedo and the incredible Jay Lamar, and was co-sponsored by the Auburn University College of Liberal Arts/Department of English and the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities — and this conference showed what writing conferences can be at their best: an inspiration.  A reminder of why you started writing in the first place.  A reminder that you love writing, and words, and language.  A reminder that there are others out there who love those things, too, and a reminder that there are human beings behind all of those other manuscripts in the slush pile, and that those human beings are engaged in the same great beautiful and frustrating struggle.  A reminder that though writing may be a solitary activity, writers are not alone.  And more than a reminder — a promise — of what can happen if writers push past the frustration, the competition, the struggle to find a way to slip into the machine, and instead speak openly with each other about their craft — and about all of the above — and work together to learn, to grow, and to make not only the writing community but the entire community a much better place.

The theme of this year’s conference was “The Child on the Page,” and, now that I’ve come back to my own blank pages and scrawled notes and slashed lines and trashed books, that phrase has all the more resonance for me.  I remembered, this weekend, what it was like when I was a child and first experienced that brilliant thrill of language — the joy of the sound of it, the wonder of creating a world on a page.  I remembered picking up a pencil and facing the blank page not with dread but with excitement, and wonder, and that thing with feathers that seemed to have flown away permanently: hope.  I remembered what drew me to this art in the first place, and I remembered that others felt — and feel — the same way.  And I remembered something else: how amazing it was when, as a child, I met someone else who liked words, too, or who liked the same color of Keds that I did, or who liked to read about rocks as much as I did.  I remembered what it means to be part of a community bound by a common interest, and I hope I can keep remembering this — and working to be a part of this community, and to make this community a better, broader, more inviting place — to return the great gift the Conference gave me.