This weekend, I had the pleasure of being in New York City, which despite the January onslaught of snow and wind, is always a wonderful place to visit. I was speaking at The Writer’s Digest Conference, and when I tell you it was an honor to be doing so, I don’t say that just so the organizers will read this and think I’m gracious. (But I hope they do.) I say it because the speakers were amazing, and I feel I learned more than I taught. But the two paramount things I learned, the two most fantastic things, were not taken away from any one particular talk or speaker. Here they are: 20-somethings and 30-somethings are marvelous, and the salvation of the human race will come from our advances in technology.
How did I get all this from a writers’ conference? I’m so glad you ask. There are those of you reading who would be well within your rights to assume that we writers are a stuffy, insular, snobbish and introverted lot. Well, okay…maybe some of us are. But those farty literati types seemed in short supply at this particular conference. At this conference, what I noticed was that the majority of the attendees were upbeat, democratic, and brimming with passion for their craft. Though the older people were no slouches in exhibiting these characteristics, naturally it was the younger set who displayed them most. But it wasn’t because of their naive optimism. Quite the contrary — their confidence in what the future holds for them in regards to the success of their writing careers, stems from something they have on their side to help them succeed that those of us who started on the writing and publishing track in the 1970’s did not ─ the internet and the technological leaps and bounds springing from that forthwith.
Last weekend, I listened as speakers talked about e-book sales, (Amazon sold more Kindle books this past year than paperback), making books into phone apps, publishing on Scribd and Smashwords and more. It was a cross-generational meeting of the minds as the younger writers instructed the older writers on how all this stuff works (and work it does!) and older writers became excited at the realm of new possibilities to share their art. I saw one 70-year old get up and ask a 40-year-old speaker who’d written his book as a phone application how she could do that with her newspaper column.
But what I also loved was how the younger writers still crowded into rooms to hear older writers speak about what we knew, too, solely from our years and experience. Yeah, that’s right ─ the young’uns weren’t a bunch of little ‘know-it-alls’ — uninterested or unimpressed with what we older lot had to say. I heard from them many references to works by writers long dead, and you know, you can’t get any older than dead. There was respect there, coming from the young for the old; but equally important, from the old for the young. They wanted to speak to each other and learn from each other, in fact, were eager to do so.
I admit I was more than flattered to see some of the younger people ‘tweeting’ my remarks from my lecture room out into the world in real time. How ‘bout that? Hmmm... So, if there were fifty people in each room where that conference was held, how many more still who weren’t there physically still got to ‘hear’ what each speaker had to say?
So this is what I’m envisioning from all of this ─ a world where, if you can’t be at the place where the Dalai Lama is speaking, (or he’s been banned from your country) you can still just pick up your phone and get his words from your Twitter feed as he speaks them. And if a politician spews out lies during a speech, you can fact check what he says on your iPad right there and then, and fire right back at him with a rebuttal via his email address or website. (It’ll be keeping high school teachers on their toes, for sure, when their students do this during their classes.)And when they tell us that we should be bombing this country or that, none of us anywhere in the world will buy into it, because one of our online poker buddies will be from said country, and we know what a good guy he is. We know his wife, his kids, and his worries, and guess what?─ Even though he’s wearing a rather odd-looking hat, we know he’s still just one of us. Is it any wonder the Chinese are trying to suppress Google?
The part I like best is what this means for any writer, in fact, anyone who has something to say – you can still say it with flowers, or you can try saying it in e-books, online websites, and blogs. You can get your word out without it being censored or spin-doctored by the mainstream media; you can gatecrash the publishing world without one nod of condescending consent from any literary agent or traditional house. You can browse the internet for hours looking for just the right book, because it will be out there and available to you immediately in some format. Same goes for films, art, and music. There will be no reason to try to put Julian Assange in jail, because Wikileaks will be obsolete. We will become a world of no secrets and therefore, no fear of the unknown or of each other. It will be just as ordinary via Skype to have a conversation face-to-face with a beloved friend in South Africa or Toowoomba as it is to have one with your next door neighbor.
We, the little people, will finally be able to have our say without dozens of blockades put up for our ‘protection’. There will be one god for everyone, and that will be the god of kindness, respect, and caring for all, because we will all know each other, and we will all learn from each other, whether a different nationality or a different generation.
On the day of the 25th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger fall, oh, how I hope what I write here comes true. We mustn’t be leery of technology and scientific advance; we mustn’t hold it back, because despite any perceived and real risks involved in its development, it can save humankind.
Do I know what’s going to replace hardback books, or even if they will be replaced? No. But if they are replaced, will whatever replaces them be the “same”? Probably not. Just as printed books are not the same as scrolls, and when they updated Coca-Cola it no longer had cocaine in it. I’ll bet both those facts disappoint many. But I’m not one who looks in the rear view mirror while I’m trying to drive forward.
Did I tell you I’m learning to ‘tweet’?
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![First day of school foversouls on flickr[1]](http://patriciavolonakisdavis.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/6a00d4143667316a4700e398c742960002.jpg "First day of school foversouls on flickr[1]")
When I Was Eight
When I was eight, in the summertime my mother had to call me in from playing outdoors at least twice before I even acknowledged I’d heard her voice. Then I’d beg her to let me stay outside for a while longer, until she issued dire threats if I didn’t “come in right this minute.” It was only at that point that I would petulantly stomp back into the house.
Once inside, she’d grab onto me and try to hold me still as she “pre-cleaned” me before setting up my bath. She knew if she didn’t, my bathwater would turn muddy within minutes of my being placed in it. That was because when I was eight, I played in dirt ─ sat right down in it, made mud with it, dug up some very fine rocks and wiggling earthworms hiding beneath it. And so, my mother would put my hands and arms in the bathroom sink and attempt to shake off some of that dirt which had caked onto my arms, into the crevices and lines on the palms of my hands, around my cuticles and under my fingernails. After that, she’d lean down and attack the skin on my knees with a washcloth. My knees were literally black with grime, sweat, and tan. In fact, my skin was so dark from my playing out in the sun so long that she could never tell when she’d rubbed hard enough to get down past the dirt and just onto bare flesh, so I’d end up with raw skin from her efforts. I’d never even heard the word “sunscreen” back then, and when I was eight, I wouldn’t have cared if I had.
When I was eight, I wore my hair to my shoulders the same as I do now, except back then I was too busy being a kid to keep it neat. It stuck out and up in the way only coarse, thick hair can, and I was forever pushing my dirty hands through it to keep it out of my eyes. That’s why my mother also had the nightly task of pulling bits of branches out of my hair that I’d picked up from climbing trees or crawling through the woods in the “forts” we made. My hair was so wiry and tangled that once, a brush my mother was trying to force through it snapped right in half at the handle. In frustration, she had my hair cut pixie short. It did not look trendy, but it was convenient, and instead of being traumatized, I loved how my shadow now looked on the cement patio when I moved my head back and forth and wiggled my arms out to my sides ─ sort of like one of the dancing skeletons in my favorite cartoons. I looked like a shadow skeleton somewhat, because even though I ate three healthy meals a day and all the sugary candy I could buy with 25 cents a week, (which was a lot) I was downright skinny from moving so much, using my body so much for the things it was meant to do.
When I was eight, boys were just more people with whom to climb trees and have racing contests or rock-throwing contests. They were sometimes annoying because they were stronger and could beat me more often than not, and of course, I wanted to win. Some of them seemed to like bugs more than I did, too, and most certainly they often smelled bad. So, why would I care if creatures like that thought I was pretty or not? Why, with so much fun to be had, like running and climbing and sticking my hands in dirt, finding baby birds that had fallen out of trees and nursing them back to health, would I care myself, if I were pretty or not?
When I was eight and if for some reason we couldn’t play outside, my sister, cousins, and I made up games like “Spy” or sang songs out loud in the basement so we wouldn’t bother our parents who were upstairs, smoking, drinking coffee, and talking about stupid, boring stuff we had no interest in knowing about whatsoever. We held plays, and sometimes we could get our parents away from their stupid, boring stuff to come downstairs to watch them. My cousins, sister and I were all bossy, and we all argued about who was going to play what part. Our mothers would tell us to behave. We didn’t listen.
We didn’t meekly submit. Not to our mothers, not to our friends, not to anybody else’s idea of what we were worth. In that world it would have been unfathomable to know of another eight-year-old girl who would hold in her tears while her mother put needles filled with poison in her face, just so she could “be beautiful.” In that world it would be unfathomable to want “boob jobs and nose jobs”, because we felt we were perfect the way we were.
We were real. Life was real.