I confess I’ve never had a parade before but I got one Saturday when a Nimrod Literary Journal intern carried a “Follow Me To The Memoir and The Blog” Master Class at the Nimrod Conference for Writers and Readers in Tulsa. My students followed the sign to our classroom across the barren plaza. I loved Tulsa from the first, a viscerally American town – Native-Americans walking the streets in braids and tasseled shirts before dawn, art deco neighborhoods, giant Churches,  the haunting new Woody Guthrie Museum, the feeling of a Western town, an oil town, a flat and ugly landscape, a town in transition –  surprisingly hip now, full of culture, concerts, old neighborhoods getting re-discovered wonderful old architecture. I could not, alas, find time to go out and photograph it, there just was no way.

On Friday, I got to ride around a bit, saw the storied Cain’s Ballroom, the new Woody Guthrie Center ( I almost broke down when I saw the original version of This Land Is Your Land.

I loved my memoir and the blog class, we could have gone many more hours, the students were focused, eager, smart, filled with questions. But it was a bittersweet weekend in some ways, I had that old familiar feeling of being outside the tent, outside the circus, out of place at the conference, which was a very literary thing, and I have never really been all that easy around literary people (or border collie snobs, either), nor are most groups ever – ever – at ease around me. I make some people nervous and click with others right away, this life I suppose. Like the joke goes, there has never been a group that wanted me to join, or that I really wanted to join.

I clicked right away with the yearning audience, I could almost touch their passion to be writers, their eagerness, openess. At the panel discussion on publishing, these anxious writers were desperately trying to understand the new publishing landscape, and I figured I might as well set the stage, I didn’t go to Oklahoma to give them a lot of BS, I told the first questioner that I had just finished Brad Stone’s new book on the rise of Amazon – I will review it in a day or so – and I was struck by Jeff Bezos’ comment that Amazon did not change publishing, the future changed publishing. I said my blog had become the most powerful memoir I could possibly have written or be writing and people reading my blog had a greater understanding of my  life than many people who only have read my books. I urged them to face the future, not the past.

I said the blog was a book, I urged these writers to get their stories out to the world, to not worry yet about agents and self-publishing versus commercial publishing, they could move around the gatekeepers and find their voices, take their chances, as writers have always done.  I said 15 years ago, only one fifth of the country ever went into a bookstore, and now more than 50 million Americans are reading books in one form or another. I told them that lots of people are worrying about bookstores, writers and publishers, but hardly anyone  seemed to have been worrying about readers and understanding what they wanted or needed all this time, and I said that change is always painful and difficult, but it is neither good or bad, it just is, I do not wring my hands about the changing world, that is both pointless and unproductive. I guess you don’t hear that that much at literary workshops.

I’ve been saying and writing this for years, and no one in the publishing world has ever paid much attention to it, but as the panel went on, I could almost feel the scrotums tightening around me, the lips pursing, the fingers gripping the tables.

One writer said that she could never share her life or work outside of her paper books, she simply could not let anyone see it until it was ready, she had to hold it within herself. Another gave the writer’s this advice: read poetry every night. I don’t think Jeff Bezos was the person they really wanted to hear about or my ideas about blogs something they wanted to talk about  (one poet, who is also a psycho-therapist, has been selling her poems online for several years – I think the people in the audience grasped the meaning of this, I could see it in their eyes.) I must confess, the reality of writing has changed so profoundly, there is a sense of urgency for me to talk truthfully to new and young writers and help prepare them for it. And it is by no means all bad news, there are more opportunities to write – and read – than ever before in human history.

After that, I taught my memoir and the blog class, and it alone was worth the trip to Tulsa. But I have to be honest – I always ask my self how do I feel, and is it the truth when I blog – it was not always comfortable. I rarely have trouble talking to people, but there was a big chill around me after my talk, the literary writers – I write commercial fiction and non-fiction, I do not consider myself a literary person – just stopped talking to me. All day, they would gather to sip coffee, compare notes and they just stopped speaking to me, moved away when I came by, said nothing in the car on the way  back to the hotel, and pointedly did not chat with me or invite me into their discussions or coffee sessions. Definitely outside the tent, with the flaps closed.

What, I wondered, am I missing? If I am not comfortable with my fellow writers, then who?

It was interesting and ironic. Everywhere I went, I was introduced by the organizers as “the dog guy” and people asked me if I wanted to go to their homes and meet their dogs, or look at the photos they carried. I often find myself wanting to say that I love dogs, but that I am not defined by dogs, it is a part of my work, it is not my identity or my existence. I do not need to meet everybody’s dogs, this does not define them either.  Why do I find this assumption patronizing? If people ask me who I am, I don’t say “I am the dog guy,” I say I am a writer. Maybe I should just get over myself and accept life as it is, not as I wish it to be,  always a healthy exercise. But identity is important to me, I have worked hard at it, and worked hard at being a writer ever since I was eight, and I don’t care to be called anything else.

The truth is, I am pretty happy with who I am these days, I don’t think I’ll give that away to anyone again.

Perhaps I was supposed to talk about dogs at this conference and urge the yearning writers to follow the rules and study Jane Austen and Proust and read poems aloud to one another. I I read three of mine at the afternoon invitational reading – more silence. Maybe they thought I would not get into my views about changes in publishing, and the impact of blogs and memoir.  Perhaps, more likely, they had no idea what my views are. My blog is my living memoir I said, and the audience sort of gasped and there was stony silence alongside of me.

There was much I enjoyed about the visit, I especially connected with the brilliant and legendary Fran Ringold, the retiring editor of Nimrod after 47 years. She brought me a book of poems called Dog Days: A Way Of Speaking, the first third of the book is about her rescue dog Pete, who she urged me to meet. At the party, people were dragged over to me, usually with this introduction: “oh you should meet Jeremy, he loves dogs,”  as if that would seal a friendship and nothing much else would matter. At the farewell party Saturday night, Fran drove to her house to get Pete and bring him to meet me, then drove him right home.  Pete, an easy going mutt, a rescue of course,  more or less reacted to me the way the other writers did – he was not impressed. As I left, the hostess stopped me and asked me if I wanted to and meet her dogs upstairs, they were waiting. I said I was tired and had to go pack, thank you, maybe another time. I felt guilty. What am I missing? Is a farm in upstate New York the only place I can be myself?

It was great to go to Tulsa – always healthy to see something different – and I will write more about it. I loved teaching the class, I enjoyed meeting Nancy Gallimore, one of the members of the Open Group at Bedlam Farm, I was touched by the heartfelt passion of so many people who came to my class to be writers, to be published. I wished I could give them the names of agents and wave some magic wands for them. Many of them had never even heard of a blog, had no idea how to create one or what to say when they did, clearly no one had ever suggested these things to most of them. It is a gift to ignite those sparks, I saw all kinds of light bulbs go off when I said writers don’t have to just sit and wait for agents and editors and publishers to anoint them, they can start writing right away deal with their  big decisions later. And of course, it is a selfish thing, I remember no one did this for me.

I said their stories are important, their lives are interesting, and they should take the plunge and share them with the world. That message is, I think, my calling, my purpose now that I have learned something worth sharing. People have to make up their own minds, take their own path, but at least they ought to know how the deck is stacked. I saw their eyes open and could hear the wheels turning in their mind. This is not the end of writing and stories, I said, this is the beginning, a Golden Age and they have many of the tools they need to begin right at their fingertips. If just one hears this message and grasps it, if one finds his or her voice,  the trip will have been more than worth it. At the end of the day I called Maria and told her much I enjoyed the class but that the reaction of the other writers made me feel like I was in Middle School again, all kinds of groups clustered around me, none of the wanting me in or letting me in.

Over time, I came to learn that I didn’t want to be in, didn’t belong in groups and also that there are so many of us who are like that. They are my group,  my community, the tent I can walk inside of and feel at home. And this is the power of identify, you learn just as much about yourself from the people who don’t talk to you as from the people who do.