Sewanee: Day 9

I'm going to keep this brief; it's late.

We started the day with a staff reading: the poetry of Isabel Calbreth, Hastings Hensel, and Jake Ricafrente--all very good stuff.

Next was Gail Hochman, an agent from Brandt and Hochman. I've heard Gail before and she is a high-energy but approachable person. She didn't have a lot of good news for writers, but it's great to have someone who cares about books as much as she does.

Then we had Jill McCorkle speak about self-expression and self-censorship, related topics that we all deal with. As Tim O'Brien later commented, one of the great things Jill did in the talk was to use illustrations--story--that made her larger point concrete and easily understood.

We had our workshop in the afternoon and my story was among the three that were up. It went very well. The main revelation for me is that the title needs to change. I also had some other work to do on the story, so I ended up missing the Mark Jarman reading. I did go to the Erin McGraw reading in the eveining, though: she read from her new novel.

And then there were all were at the French House . . .