The Write Stuff

Quote of the day, courtesy of Margaret Atwood: "A word after a word after a word is power."

About these notes: Always Monday, short, and free. About issues determining the future of civil society. At times, interesting.

This past week, I attended the five-day San Miguel Writers Conference (SMWC). Inspiring authors, practical workshops, and 2,000 people from 15 countries with shared passion for literature’s power. San Miguel de Allende is a UNESCO World Heritage site tucked in central Mexico’s mountains. Cobblestone streets, community plazas, great restaurants, and streetfront portals to homes that stun with interior beauty. Founded in 1542. Often voted the best small city by Travel + Leisure readers. Bustling with artists, social entrepreneurs, and thoughtful expats. A soul-healing community steeped in kindness and empathy – which is where this post is headed.

This year’s SMWC featured four authors whose remarkable personal histories empowered their remarkable writing.

Abraham Verghese’s parents were teachers who emigrated from Kerala, India, to Ethiopia. An indifferent student, he was called to the medical field by books — notably A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel. As a hospital orderly, he emptied bedpans, checked vital signs, and developed empathy. With no undergrad degree, he went straight to med school in India. Then to a residency at East Tennessee State University in 1980, becoming the de facto expert in treating young men who had left rural Appalachia for larger cities, contracted AIDS, and returned home to die. A decade later, he chucked medicine to enroll in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, grateful their sole admissions criterion was his written submissions, not his checkered academic record. An early short story was eviscerated by professors. But a visiting New Yorker critic stumbled upon it, loved it, and ran it unedited – launching Verghese’s writing career. First, two memoirs: My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. Then, two towering novels: Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water. Books that took him 8, 9, 11, and 12 years respectively to complete – he noted wryly, “The trend line isn’t positive.” When his publisher demanded drastic cuts to Covenant, he dumped them, taking on heaps of debt to repay the advance. Covenant has sold over two million copies with a 37-week run on the NYT Best Seller list. Along the way, author Verghese managed to find time to return to medicine as a tenured professor at Stanford.

Emily St. John Mandel grew up on tiny Denman Island off the coast of British Columbia. No traffic lights, few kids. The media reports she was homeschooled; she explains that she was no schooled — not one minute in a K12 school or college, free to run with her passions. Trained for ballet, she moved to Toronto to pursue dance, lost the zeal, but found it in writing. Working as a full-time admin, she used her off hours to write Last Night in Montreal. Rejected by 35 publishers, one stepped up in 2009. Three more novels. Then her 2014 breakthrough Station Eleven – a dystopian world decimated by a global flu pandemic. Over 1.5 million copies sold, an HBO series, and oh-so-prophetic when COVID hit. She’s since published The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility. Her next novel, Exit Party, is about the collapse of the United States. She noted, “I just hope America stays intact before the book is published in September.”

Margaret Atwood didn’t attend school full-time until age 12. With an entomologist father, she was a free-range kid roaming the Quebec wilderness. At age six, writing verse; in high school, her first novel. After studying English at the U of Toronto under Northrop Frye, off to grad school at Harvard’s Radcliffe College in 1961. When women were denied access to the library housing Harvard’s poetry collection. When women were required to serve tea and cookies to fellow students. She pulled the ripcord on academia to write full-time. Eighteen novels, 18 poetry collections, dozens of nonfiction works, the cultural touchstone The Handmaid’s Tale, and her recent moving memoir Book of Lives.

R.F. Kuang immigrated from Guangzhou to Dallas at age four. With English as her second language, she blossomed into a nationally ranked high-school debater, consuming her “entire life for four years” and kindling her love of language. At age 17, to Beijing to research family history, leading to The Poppy War. Written at 19, sold on her 20th birthday, published at 21, and launching a three-book deal. After graduating Georgetown, a stint in Cambridge and Oxford, informing her #1 NYT bestseller Babel. Then Yellowface, a satire about a white author stealing a dead Chinese writer’s manuscript. Her latest, Katabasis, sends PhD students into the underworld to rescue their dead advisor so he can write their recommendation letters—a dark comedy she describes as “Academia is hell.” At SMWC, she delivered a blistering attack on ‘the academy.’ Yet, curiously, she’s still pursuing a PhD at Yale. Six novels by age 28, but still not quite meeting Yale’s doctoral standards.

What do these writers have in common? None were schooled conventionally. Verghese ignored it. Mandel never set foot in a classroom. Atwood explored Canada’s wilderness. Kuang excoriates the academy while sailing through it. Had they been pushed to produce stellar GPAs and test scores, they’d be cut-throat investment bankers—not creative authors who make us weep, wonder, and empathize. For years, my nonprofit partner was Sir Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” remains the most-watched of all time. His answer was an emphatic yes. These against-the-grain authors are Exhibit A.

A theme throughout SMWC: literature’s power to make us human. To steep us in empathy and compassion — emotions in short supply in today’s America. This shortage isn’t accidental. For decades, we’ve made a mess of school. We pit children in dog-eat-dog competitions for higher test scores and class rank. “Teach” reading with a regimen of short anodyne passages and multiple-choice exams. No time to read books cover-to-cover. To experience joy, excitement, sadness, sorrow.

We reap what we sow. America’s data-driven 19th-century education model eats away at humanity. But in this remote town in central Mexico, you just may rediscover it.

Nervously,

Ted