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What I Learned from David Hockney

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:38:36 GMT

I always plan to go to museums. There’s a fine exhibit of Dutch masters at the de Young museum here in San Francisco now that everyone’s kvelling about. I want to go see it, really I do, but I won’t. (You should see it, if you live in the Bay Area: it’s here in until June 2 ^nd. I’m lazy – what’s your excuse?)

When I’m out of town though, and looking for something to do, I will go to museums, and even if the exhibit wasn’t that exciting, I feel smug, and smugness is its own reward.

A couple of decades ago when Michael and I were visiting his parents, we went to the Los Angeles County Museum, where his mother was a volunteer, and where they were showing a David Hockney retrospective.

A lot of modern art escapes me. Once at the Guggenheim Soho I saw an exhibition of cardboard boxes that had been flattened and framed by the artist. When I thinkof what I put out in my recycling bin just last week…

Hockney was a different story. I wasn’t terribly familiar with his work. Let me put it another way: I hadn’t heard of him until then.

I loved the way he recreated the shifting water of swimming pools. But the best works were at the end of the exhibit: a series of photomontages. What he did (as far as this lay person can tell) is to take anywhere from one to many dozens of snapshots of a subject, say, a chair, or in one case, three friends sitting around a room. Then he attached, however he attached (with glue or tape or I don’t know what) the photos to the page in a staggered arrangement, so that they overlapped one another.

Well, anyway, thank G-d for the Internet, because I can’t describe them adequately. So, here’s a link to a selection of these masterpieces. Do look at a few of the samples, and Google up a few more, because some illustrate my eventual point better than others. That point, you ask?

This is how we see. Not one complete image at a time, but a series of fleeting images that we put together over time. Granted, that time is very short: we can take in an entire scene in a less than two seconds.

But a lot of writers, myself included, forget that. We begin a scene like a playwright describing the set: “A ratty couch. Two chairs, one stage left and the other stage right. On the walls…” –this is what playwrights need to do, but we are novelists. (Or short story writers; same applies.)

When I walk into a room, I don’t stand at the threshold and describe the room to myself – unless, perhaps, it’s an open house for a condo I might buy. No, I walk in with some agenda apart from my surroundings. I might be wondering if the guy I was hoping to see is at this party, or if my mother is still mad at me. If I’ve ever been in this room before, I’m not likely to notice anything that isn’t new.

In other words, the way a person takes in his or her environment, via sight, sound and those other three senses, you know the ones I mean, will be determined by a long list of variables. We let those sights and sounds dribble into our consciousness, filtered by their importance. (If I walk in and Ryan Gosling is standing there nekkid. I won’t notice the color of the carpet for a looong time.)

And then, as always, there are the exceptions. Early in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations,the hero Pip walks into a strange room – strange in both the sense of unfamiliar and strange in the sense of odd. Dickens stops the action for several hundred words to describe what Pip sees, which is an elderly woman sitting at a “fine lady’s dressing table,” almost but not quite fully dressed as a bride. “She was dressed in rich materials – satins, and lace, and silks – all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil…”

We already know that this is one Miss Havisham, and we will learn that many years ago, she was dressing for her wedding when she learned that the groom was a no-show. In an act that today would get her a reality show faster than you can say “Honey Boo Boo,” she literally stopped everything. The hands of the clock are still at twenty to nine, and she is wearing only one shoe, as that was all she had on when she got the news.

This is a good time to stop the action for a description. It’s not every day that you see a woman sitting in a decades-old dress. (Certain personal hygiene issues arise, and they are not pleasant to contemplate.) The power of this image would only be diluted by stretching it out.

Dickens even kindly thought ahead to prove my point, because in the middle of this description Pip tells us, “It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things…” (He continues to add details of this ghoulish place over the next few pages, intensifying the mood.)

This staggered way of recreating how a person takes in information applies to characters as well. With the exception of spotting one’s blind date at the end of the bar, and having a chance to examine him thoroughly before deciding whether or not to crawl out through the ladies’ room window, one doesn’t usually take in every detail of another person’s appearance at once. It’s true that we tend to notice other people’s hair first (though it gets old in a novel to have everyone known by his or her hair color) but the hair-and-eye-color trap aside, one usually takes in details of another person gradually, and at an uneven pace. You might notice the bright teeth right away, but not the bitten nails until he or she hands you the grape Nehi.

The Hockney photomontages don’t translate into a formula; a writer doesn’t dole out the details at a prescribed rate, let alone in any kind of order. I worked with a writer once who did exactly that: He introduced each character by listing height, weight, age and profession in precisely that order. This writer had a computer background, and I imagine that was the source of his approach, but wow, I wish I had a computer background. I might be able to find a job right about now, or at least not pay someone $300 to show me how to format columns, but for a novelist the formula just isn’t very effective and that’s that, period, dot, ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies.

I have a little more background in the fine arts than I do in computers, but even there, my judgment of what’s good, bad or a joke on the public can be summed up in one of my favorite quotes, which is what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

I knew it when I saw David Hockney’s photomontages. Still don’t get the flattened cardboard boxes, though.

Fruit from the Bitter Tree

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:15:34 GMT

I have been struggling for a long time – about twice as long as it takes me to get my fake nails redone – over whether or not to use a person’s real name in this post. This person is, like the parrot of the famous Monty Python sketch, dead, deceased, no more. Expired. Gone to see its maker. Bereft of life, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

I can use his name (for it is, I mean, it wasa he) without fear of repercussions, because not only is there no jail time for defaming a dead person, there is no cause of action. That is, not only can he (somewhat obviously) not sue you, but his survivors can’t either. This is why people make so many uncalled for remarks about Herbert Hoover.

But I have finally decided not to use his real name because otherwise I will be guilty of the same crime that I am about to accuse him of – and accuse him of without any evidence at all.

First, the fake name. I.P. Freely? Old joke. How about Buzz Killington? Just perfect – but I stole it from Family Guy. Kill Buzzington? Okay. We’re set.

I went to my first writers’ conference some years ago. Yes, this does relate to Fake Name Guy – I mean Kill Buzzington. Stay with me, now.

The conference was at UC Berkeley and run by one of the la-de-dah professors in the English department, the same Kill B. of whom I was recently speaking, and the la-de-dahest of them all.

I remember a number of the other attendees, but the stories of two will serve my purposes. Both were old ladies, not just past their prime but past hope of accomplishing anything in their lives, that is, they were about 40.

(Unlike, say, an Olympic gymnast, 40 is plenty young enough for a writer. The joke is that I was young enough to think that they were old. Now that I’ve explained it there’s no joke, but I had to clear it up.)

One woman had written a post-Apocalyptic novel about a world in which women have enslaved men and found a way to make them get pregnant; the other had created a 1000 page memoir of her time spent tending her flower beds.

At our first group meeting, Professor Buzz read the opening sentence – the opening sentence only– of Knocked Up Men and then let the entire page drift down to the floor. “I would look into macramé,” he remarked dryly.

Next he read the opening sentence of Flower Bed Journey, and announced, “You know they cut down trees to make paper.” This page he folded into a paper airplane to the nervous and feigned laughter of the rest of the group.

After that performance (by which definition dissecting frogs is “a performance”), I did not dare show Prof. Buzz my work. I had arrived with a suitcase stuffed with new clothes (which since the age of 11 have been my bulwark between myself and a dangerous world), and a short novel I’d written over the past nine months. When I’d finished the novel I’d thought it was brilliant, but suddenly, strangely, I doubted myself.

I returned to San Francisco after the conference and didn’t write for two years. Had I had a passion for anything else, whether it was the practice of law or running the PTA, I doubt I would have ever written again.

But I didn’t have another passion. Remember Morales from A Chorus Line? She prays for help and a voice inside her says, “This man is nothing. This course is nothing. Go find a better class.” Something similar finally happened to me although to my knowledge St. Mary was not directly involved.

Professor Buzz had burst on the literary scene a few years before with a collection of short stories that was nominated for a National Book Award. He was hyped within that insular New York I’ll-blow-you-if-you-blow-me world as the next Philip Roth and Saul Bellow.

Indeed, by the average writer’s standards he had a phenomenally successful career. But he came nowhere close to fulfilling the predictions of those first reviews, let alone the prestigious nomination. I believe that he became bitter, and bitter early. I remember whispers about “lost promise” back at Berkeley. Or perhaps it’s my only explanation for such over-the-top cruelty.

One of his final literary efforts was a memoir of his first marriage. That first wife committed suicide and the title of the memoir was her real first name. Thus I have accorded him more respect than he gave a woman so unhappy that she ended her life.

Professor Kill Buzz is the reason why, when I first came to teach fiction myself, I vowed to be the anti-Kill Buzzington. I do not know but that either of the women authors I described, as silly as their novels might seem when taken out of context, or as silly as they probably genuinely were at that early stage of their development, might not have gone on to become decent works of fiction. They might also have become the initial failures of women who became good writers in years to come.

They, and I, and you, deserve a chance at that fragile stage, when we are new writers, however many candles are on the cake, to see what possibilities lie ahead. Trees may be valuable, but we writers are too.

A Blind Date Every Day

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:16:50 GMT

I keep blogging about how miserably, masochistically and unjustly hard writing is, blah blah, poor me, poor me. Well, as Lesley Gore sang, “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.”

But I had one of those miraculous moments today, one of those – dare I say? – epiphanies, one of those times when it’s all worthwhile, and darn it, I’m going to record it.

Yes, I have been in a slump of late. I play Hearts for twenty minutes before I even tryto write, and it isn’t more than a sentence before I’m back to Hearts, if only to get revenge on Nicole, which would be North (the default setting on the computer) but I changed the come-with-the-computer settings (North, South, East, and West, South being moi) to make the game more interesting. More interesting, yes, but not always in a good way, because I get very angry at Nicole as well as her friends Wynona and Emma who are all mean girls and who say things that aren’t trueabout me behind my back.

All that drama in a game of Hearts, while nothing is happening in my novel.

And then today – I was talking about today, wasn’t I? – even though Nicole and her gal pals were getting the better of me and my winning average dipped to 29%, I saw what the problems were (are) in the scene I began four days ago, and I had ideas about fixing them.

Woody Allen is famous for having said, “80% of life is showing up.” A few years ago I saw an interview with him and it turns out he didn’t say exactly that. It wasn’t just that the wording was different; the spirit of the message was slightly different. Unfortunately, I watched this interview at 1 a.m. and I can’t remember how he modified it.

But he might as well have said it, because I’ve scoured the Internet and I find that quote everywhere.

Maybe the maxim has become engraved in popular culture because it’s true. This better day, this good day – there, I’ve said it, let the evil spirits descend – wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t shown up at Starbuck’s with my vente mocha (200 degrees, whole milk, no whip). Nothing to do but write.

Or play Hearts. And I did play Hearts, more than I would in a perfect world, but I also got some writing done, writing that for now I feel good about.

Writing is like going on a blind date every day. You get stood up half the time and half of the other time the guy is a dud, or he thinks you’re a dud. But once in a while you live happily until tomorrow.

Big Mistake. Big, Big Mistake.

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:30:29 GMT

I know I’ll be sorry.

I’m going to go away for the weekend. This is, like, a hugely decadent experience in my world.

A couple of weeks ago I was in the slough of despond – a resonant description that I can’t take credit for. I first came across it in Dorothea Brande’s book, Becoming a Writer,originally published in 1934. The style is dated bu t the content remains relevant and insightful. I first read it over twenty years ago and I remember parts of it, which is high praise, since I recently forgot the curtain time of a play I’d just bought tickets for. (Didn’t get to see play; didn’t get refund.) After all, we may have laptops now, but the words are basically the same, only you put a lower-case “I” in front of a lot of them.

So, I wrested myself out of the slough, enough so that I started writing again, a little, emphasis on “little,” because I’m so slow it can take me an hour to figure out how to get a character to walk out of a room, but I didn’t mention that work was going better, because like my grandmother, I believe that saying anything positive will bring a meteor shower onto my roof. And the slough is always there, waiting. Waiting.

And now I’m about to fly to Southern California for two nights and seven days. Yes, there is a crisis in our education system, but there’s logic to my math. Three days away from the novel will translate to at least a week’s lost work.

I blame my protagonist. She’s a spoiled brat, is what she is. “Make me consistent,” she demands. “Consistent – but complex! Oh, and I need a goal. No – two goals! One I’m conscious of and another I’m not conscious of. Hop to it!”

And that’s on a goodday. Leave her alone for a weekend and she goes totally Bridezilla on me.

I can’t wait to get away.

Write Group, Right Time

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 01:03:31 GMT

I’m a veteran – or should I say survivor? – of a dozen writing groups, some facilitated, and some even facilitated by me, but mostly peer groups.

Now, for purposes of this post a “writing group” is any setting in which one’s fiction is read and critiqued by others. So my first experience with such was a writers’ conference in Berkeley 30 years ago. (Yes, thirty years ago. It gives me no pleasure to contemplate how much closer to death that puts me.)

When I went into that long-ago conference no one had ever seen my work and therefore I suspected – no, EXpected – that I was an undiscovered genius. Come to find out that the only part of that sentence that was correct was the word “undiscovered.”

For nearly a week I listened as a few aging New York intelligentsia type men eviscerated both the writing and the dreams of a few score of (mostly) aging Bay Area women. One victim in particular sticks in my memory. She’d written a family memoir. This was before the memoir became as worn-out a genre as the vampire/zombie novels of recent years, so she didn’t even have the excuse of jumping on a trend. After she read a few pages aloud, one of the conference leaders remarked, “They cut down trees to make paper.”

At another gathering a lovely young blonde read aloud. The facilitator there, a refugee from a high-status East Coast university 25 years older than she, praised the blonde’s lightness of touch and skillful word choice. He got her into bed that night.

Meanwhile, I was enough traumatized by that conference that I didn’t write for two years.

But eventually the urge to write and a few high colonics got me out there again. A class at SFSU extension got me to a woman who in turn brought me to one of the truly useful and uplifting writing groups that are out there, though there aren’t enough of them. This one was run by a quirky writer named Leonard Bishop. He combined an expansive knowledge of the craft with a brutal honesty that drove a lot of would-be’s away after thirty minutes. But he also was wont to remark, “Your novels aren’t publishable because they aren’t finished yet.” I hate being corny, and this is super-corny, but he believed in all of us.

He built up in me as much confidence as most writers have, which isn’t much, except for a few really annoying ones who usually don’t deserve to have it. They’re often narcissists, and who cares about them anyway.

Years passed. Spring came; autumn leaves fell. I published two novels and I wrote non-fiction and a newspaper column. A Democrat became President and then another Republican got himself elected.

Early in the 21 ^st Century I found myself in a new group, a “peer” group, this one formed by a successful writer friend. There were five of us of varying experience, but most of us writing at a professional level, which is not the same as being rich and famous or even published. You just have to take my word on that last.

It was my Berkeley nightmare revisited. Two of the women in the group in particular seemed intent on pummeling it into my head that as a writer I was one of “life’s dime-a-dozen mediocrities” (as the Wizard sings in Wicked).

And I took it. I took it. After all my years of seeing people driven away from their calling as soon as they heard something negative, I believed felt that I could only prove my stamina as a writer by taking it.

But most of us can only take that negative stuff for so long before we believe it. I stopped writing again. For a while.

Finally I started looking for yet another group, and I found one through another friend. It was largely luck: right place, right time, you know the drill, but then, this friend had taken a class from me at UC Berkeley Extension (and published two novels herself a few years later), so it wasn’t entirely luck, say, as it would have been if I’d rear ended her car and we’d gotten to talking while exchanging harsh words and insurance information.

This group is also of experienced writers, but theygive thorough, helpful feedback without attacking one’s self-image. They’re all women, younger, female Leonard Bishops (though far more refined), always giving the message, “It’s just not finished yet.”

It’s just not finished yet.

The Slough of Despond

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:00:22 GMT

I am in a slump. Batting in negative numbers. In front of my laptop for hours without producing a word.

What I do do at the computer is play Hearts – game after game after game. I just lost to the player I named Wilhemina. (The default setting was “West.”) I don’t know who the best player of the three fictitious enemies is, but they’re all better than I am, because there’s only so long you can blame bad luck.

Can you commit suicide with an overdose of sitcom re-runs? Maybe not, but you can certainly whittle away at your I.Q. Worse: all those one-dimensional characters who communicate solely with snappy one-liners cannotbe a good influence on one’s writing.

I hate the wasted time. I think, if I’m not going to write I should get up and do something else productive, like go through one of the many, many (many) piles of random papers that tower around me. On the rare occasion that I do excavate a pile I always something worth the effort, like real photos of Bigfoot or free trips to Hawaii that I can claim with a simple phone call. But a body at rest, even when in emotional torment, tends to stay at rest, and so… ZZZzzz…

Where was I? All I remember is that I wasn’t writing. I’m still not writing.

I remind myself that I’ve been here before: at the tail end of a week of nothing, with no sign of nothing turning into something, and then, the same way you don’t recognize the moment when you fell asleep, I look to the left and see that I’ve written something that can lead to something else.

Meanwhile. I know all the tricks; I’ve made a career, if only part-time, of telling other writers the tricks, of reminding them that it’s all about patience, persistence, courage, blah blah… blah.

I look up above now and see I’ve written over 300 words! Okay, now, now… But no, not only do I not feel inspired (because everyone knows that you’d better not wait to feel inspired to write), but I’m repulsed at the thought of opening the document that contains the last scene I was working on. The book I’ve been hammering away at for two years now floats belly up like the poor goldfish I kept murdering as a child because I didn’t clean the bowl often enough.

Maybe just one more game of Hearts. If I can even the score with Wilhemina, I’m sure I’ll feel better.

MYSTERIES OF PUBLISHING REVEALED

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:01:52 GMT

This weekend is the 10 ^th Annual San Francisco Writers’ Conference .

I’m proud of this conference. It was founded by my own agents, the famous Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada. I’m not being facetious when I say famous. The Larsen-Pomada team also founded the first literary agency in Northern California back in 1972. Extra, extra read all about them at www.LarsenPomada.com.

They are the ones who coined the term “painted ladies” to refer to the lovingly and beautifully restored Victorians here in San Francisco. (If I’m at all incorrect about any of these details I’m confident that some kind person or persons at this moment unknown will correct me.) The term has entered into the vernacular the way that “Catch-22, ” the title of the Joseph Heller novel has become standard term for a situation that presents no acceptable solution. A lot of people, especially those born before 1970, will know the source of the term, but many fewer will know who first coined the phrase “practice random acts of kindness.” That came from Anne Herbert. Her random act was coining that phrase. I aspire to coin such a phrase but I want credit. Otherwise I am a literary tree falling in an indifferent forest.

So. These writers’ conferences are really important. There are a lot of lame ones out there, but there are a lot of good ones, and the SFWC is one of the best. I’ve been to every single one and unless I get hit by a bus tomorrow I’ll be a the 10 ^th one this weekend.

Everyone wants to write a novel but no one knows how to get one published. I mean, really published, instead of self-publishing – if you want to go that route, which has become an option for Real People (my buzz words for the middle class) only in the last decade or two – then it’s easy, because businesses are always happy to take your money and operate with you on a need to know basis.

But what about all those names on the books in the window of your local bookstore +unless your cousin (the one you like) is a co-owner andyou live near one of the six that survive in the country? Or, perhaps more realistically, how to get your book to pop up as one of Amazon’s generally useless “recommendations for you”?

I adore Amazon – adore! Where else can you get a book sent to you overnight at the same time you order your favorite Guerlain moisturizer? But when are they going to figure out that the daughter I ordered a Beezus and Ramonabook for five years ago is now thirteen and reading The Carrie Diaries?

What was I saying? Oh, right. The way to get published is first, write a good book. That’s the hard part and I don’t have time to help you this minute. But once you do write a good book then what you do is go to a good writers’ conference where you’ll met a lot of published authors, literary agents, and editors who can 1) tell you how to make your good book even better and then 2) become somehow who can help you get it published.

See you there.

Branding Is for Toothpaste

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:39:01 GMT

This is so embarrassing. I’m lucky enough to get my real name as a domain name – and a dot- com,not dot-TV or DDT or FDR – and what do I do? I let the website sit for nearly two years. I don’t even look like that picture anymore. Not that I’m going to change it.

I was advised to launch this website back in 2010 by People Who Know. “Build your platform,” they told me. “A writer has to use social media to brand herself.”

As far as I can tell, this means regular posts with information that people need, Facebook friends in the thousands, and even a strategy for placing your website within the first few hundred hits that come up on Google. (I suspect in this last case that money changes hands.)

And that’s exactly where I went wrong: I tried to do what you’re supposed to do. I interviewed other writers and plugged their new books (my praise was always sincere; I do have that much integrity) and I directed my readers to more online resources. I quickly discovered two truths: first, that this work drained too much of my already-inadequate energy for writing fiction, and second, that I suck at blogging, because I neither want to share my personal life (it’s not interesting, but it’s still private), nor do I want to scour the Internet for people to interview who’ve already been interviewed, which is why they’re on the net in the first place. Are you following? No? Well, I told you that I suck at blogging.

Thus I came ashore on this cyber-Gilligan’s island where the castaways and blogging failures dwell. It’s crowded here. And yet lonely. Failure is always lonely, n’est-ce pas?

Meanwhile, the website has been sitting like an unreturned call from a high school friend. The longer I wait to post, the more ridiculous I feel, and so I wait longer and… you know how it is.

Here’s what I might have to blog about: the craft and living hell that is fiction-writing. I’ve been teaching fiction for mumble-mumble years, and I’ve published two books on the subject. So, maybe in and among these posts there will be some valuable information.

But no promises.

One Good Dog Is One Good Book

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:49:16 GMT

One Good Dog is a super novel, one that you do put down, but not because you want to: Because you can’t bear to see it end and you want to stretch it out as long as possible.

First of all, don’t read the Publisher’s Weekly review that’s reprinted on Amazon, as it gives away an emotional plot point near the end,for G-d’s sake. But never fear, no spoilers here.I’ll tell you less than you’d read on a jacket cover.

The novel has two protagonists, and the story of each is told in alternating chapters: first, there’s Adam, a Prince of Finance, who has overcome a wretched childhood in at least half a dozen foster homes to become reach his present position, in which he rules over a fiefdom of terrified underlings at the office and returns to a trophy wife at home. One day, with one impulsive act, he loses it all.(A note to all of us writers: This is a model of plotting.Take a character and turn his/her life around in the first chapter.)

Adam’s story is told in third person. But the other protagonist tells his story in the first person, directly addressing the reader. That other protagonist is a dog.

Doggie remains nameless until well into the book when he gets the name Chance. I confess I didn’t care for the name; it was a little obvious even without one character’s explanation of its meaning.But this is a small cavil indeed about the most delightful, entertaining and intelligent creation I’ve come across since Holden Caulfield broke the age barrier.

You see, Chance tells his story in the first person. This was a courageous and risky move by the author, but one that pays off brilliantly. Hasn’t every pet owner wondered what was going on inside their furry little heads?

Wilson had one advantage in taking this “Chance” (I kill myself, I really do):No one can argue with her interpretation of a dog’s thoughts.On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that a real dog has the understanding that Chance has.But I didn’t just suspend disbelief, I gave it a dose of Seconal and had a fine old time.

Part of the book is set in the world of dog-fighting. Two remarks on that: the author conveys all the horror of that “sport” (only Adolph Eichmann might call it a sport) without the blood and gore that some authors and readers seem to enjoy, and second, if anyone thinks that Michael Vick should be walking the street, I beg you to read this book.

Hey, you don’t even have to believe me, if you own a Kindle. Amazon will let you download a generous sample for free.Just read the prologue.Just the prologue.

Writing in the Wine Country

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:55:43 GMT

You don’t have to live in San Francisco, or another major urban center, to thrive as a writer. Anywhere in California will do just fine, thank you.

We all have the image of the writer working alone in the garret room with the slanting roof, maybe a window like the one in the women’s apartment in Friends. But if you are a writer you know that while the “real” work must be accomplished alone, one cannot survive long emotionally, nor make the contacts necessary for ultimate success, without a community of fellow writers for emotional support, feedback on technique, and – what everyone wants most – referrals.

As in so many areas, the Internet has arisen to fill many of the gaps created by physical isolation. In the past decade especially, I’ve seen an explosion of online writing communities and virtual classes that rival some MFA programs (though one must choose among them carefully).

But as much as I “heart” the Internet, there is not yet any substitute for three-dimensional human contact in real time.

As it happens, in the past few weeks I’ve made two trips to Santa Rosa: once to address Redwood Writers, the Santa Rosa branch of the California Writers’ Club, and once to meet ‘n’ greet at the Sonoma County Book Festival.

I put the two dates on my calendar on separate occasions, as the two invitations came independently from one another.But although I do believe in coincidences, I don’t think this was one. Little Santa Rosa, known for being part of the wine country and as the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt is also the center of a thriving literary community.

The California Writers Club was founded in 1909 (and so just celebrated its centennial) and currently has 18 branches throughout the state.Over the years I’ve visited about half a dozen.The chapters join forces for conferences and other activities but function independently for the most part.

Linda McCabe, the recent past president of Redwood Writers who extended the speaking invitation to me, says, “Interacting with other writers allows for a support network for improving my craft… as well as inspiring me to stop talking and actually perform the act of writing.… I feel fortunate to live in an area with such a vibrant and generous literary community.”

Besides its monthly meetings (which meetings play host to a speaker in the writing or publishing field), the club sponsors frequent panel discussions, contests, seminars, and even, this past June, an “Agents Day,” where both members and the public could have five minute conferences with a variety of literary agents face-to-face .(Which meetings give writers about a zillion times higher a success rate for those writers who submit query letters “over the transom.”)Redwood Writers also publishes an annual anthology of its members’ work.

Just three of many published Redwood authors are Persia Woolley, is about to be reprinted by Sourcebooks, Shelly Singer, author of thirteen mysteries, and Molly Dwyer, award-winning author of Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein.

Redwood Writers was a strong presence at the Book Festival, held in downtown Santa Rosa, where club members held readings and sold books.I attended the Festival for the second time with my friend, Lady of the Light author Donna Gillespie, so we were The Donnas in a sprawling land of music, poetry, food and books, books, books.It was hot, as in 95 degrees in the shade hot, but although I overheard someone complain that it was crowded, it sure wasn’t crowded by my San Francisco, festival-in-Golden-Gate-Park standards, as in “OMG, did they just tear down the Berlin Wall again?” Imagine this: There was inexpensive parking nearby and no lines for anything, be it lattes or Port-a-Potties.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s Book Fest but I have a feeling I’ll be back in Santa Rosa before then.