The Other Side of the Table

By Amy MacKinnon

I've been attending Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace writers' conference since they began seven years ago. Seven years ago, I had only just started writing fiction while reporting and writing the occasional op-ed. It was after Jonathan Franzen said on Fresh Air that the days spent writing The Corrections were among the most fun of his life. I remember that first conference clearly, the workshops, the other writers desperate to learn the secret to getting published, and a memory I've kept close all of these years, a class taught by the author of Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden. In that workshop, he told us of his struggles to write that novel, that the most important part of this writing life is to never give up. I believed him and soldiered on.

Through the years, I've sat in the audience while on the other side of the table were the likes of author Margot Livesey, Little, Brown editor Asya Muchnick, and the great literati Julia Glass, Grace Paley, Charles Baxter. It was only a table. A six-foot by three aluminum job, made pretty by a starched tablecloth and dotted with crystal water goblets. To me, sitting on the other side, it might as well have been an ocean.

Last year, I decided I'd attended my last conference. I'd worked with my agent for over four months on my manuscript and revisions were at a standstill. My book would never be published after all. I found myself weeping through Mr. Baxter's speech appropriately titled, Losers. Was it a sign?

But it did get published and I did go this year. How could I not? Jonathan Franzen was giving the keynote, Julia Glass was teaching a workshop, the inestimable Lisa Scottoline too (she is fantastic!). Invited guests this year included the lovely Sally Kim, Asya Muchnick again, and Dorian Karchmar (we all loved her). But there was someone else sitting on the other side of the table alongside the others. Me.

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We'll give you all the good stuff that happened at the Muse in Friday's Making a Literary Life post. Promise. For now, let me say that when I arrived home from the Muse, there was a package waiting from my Orion editor, Sara O'Keeffe. It was my UK edition of TETHERED, copies of which she's handing out to every employee at the publishing house! This is what they'll see in England and my husband's home country of Australia. Unbelievable.