While I was at a writers' conference in Hamilton, New York, in June, the husband sent me an email that he couldn't open his hotmail account. Now how was I supposed to help with that? It asked me a bunch of questions for secret passwords and special questions I didn't know about, or what was the subject of his recent emails--- how am I supposed to know that? Since we didn't have a phone to share, I sent him and his brothers and sister-in-law messages over Facebook. I think they eventually informed him I was trying to contact him, and through the Facebook account of his I "messaged" when to pick me up on that Thursday.
On the third day at the writers' conference at Colgate U. I finally got to use the umbrella I had been carrying around. It was wet and the big white pine across from my window gently swayed in the wind.
Greg Ames' reading about a older professor trying to challenge his students to many things (including arm wrestling) was hilarious. He also spoke at length about magic realism and fabulism, Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the latter of whom read Kafka and thought you "weren't allowed" to write like that. We also read Aimee Bender's "Rememberer", a fabulistic tale, where you change just one thing, her boyfriend devolving from a person into an amoeba she puts into the sea.
I don't know if I can write like that, but it seems I can have a flair for humor, probably more than for the serious, except in the case of nonfiction. I'd love to get a nonfiction book deal!
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