The Sunday Herald carried a story about Richard Florida which I read to the end, not just to learn about how the professor's idea of a "creative class" applies to Miami - his new part-time home - but to see if there was any mention of writers.
There wasn't. The closest you got was "media workers," which sounded like people going on shifts.
I love Wynwood - where Florida posed for the article in front of colorful murals - and how it's been transformed by artists. And I am grateful for the way that the visual arts have made Miami, in the eyes of the world, more than just a city of beaches and clubs.
But there are other arts being practiced here. Books & Books, a vibrant meeting place for writers and readers, is celebrating its 30th anniversary next month. The MFA program at FIU was turning out novelists and poets back when Wynwood was a no-go zone. The Florida Center for the Literary Arts runs an excellent program of courses and speakers. The Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel have both produced a number of authors, many of whom still live and work in South Florida.
Last year after Art Basel the Herald published an article about how, despite the high-energy week, many local artists were still struggling. An identical article could have been - but wasn't - written about writers after the Miami book fair. Art gets publicity because it's accessible and social; you can gallery hop with friends, and perhaps on your rounds run across someone painting a mural. You can see the creative process at work. There are no "book walks," and if there were they wouldn't include writers sitting and staring at computer screens. But just because we're tucked away, invisible, doesn't mean we're not creative - and not an important part of the community.
Writing this book has been different from writing my previous books, and not just because this one is a lot shorter. With my first two books I constantly wondered if they’d get published (I’ve always written on spec) or if they would end up in a drawer. Now I think: If nobody’s interested I’ll publish it myself. The new world of Internet publishing has caused editorial comments – “It doesn’t suit our needs at this time” or “We just don’t think there’s a big enough market for this” or “Your book is difficult to categorize” – to lose a lot of their sting. It’s also taken some of the doubt out of the writing process. I still wonder if what I’m writing is good, but not if it’s self-publishable.
I am spending this summer without trips writing essays about travel, and thinking of Evelyn Waugh who, in the austere years of post-war rationing, wrote Brideshead Revisited.
Last week I started reading Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. The writing was fine, and the force behind the story - terrorism - was very current.
I got about 20 pages in, put it down, and picked up the last issue of The New Yorker. Inside were excerpts from the diary that Mavis Gallant kept while living as a starving artist in Europe in the 1950s. A friend once said of her short stories: "I feel that she's trying to see how many times she can work in the word 'concierge.'" But I devoured her diary in a way I hadn't Patchett's novel. It was evocative, searing, pitiless, real.
Writing, I never feel transported back to the newsroom. Yesterday, reading an e-mail, I did.
It was from a man in Chicago, complaining about a trip to Montreal. "I will never visit Montreal again with my family," he began, before explaining: "I got VERY rude treatment on buses and by the attendants in the metro." Later he added, "I also got the same rude treatment in a few downtown stores."
I was surprised, not just by the rude treatment (I've been to Montreal twice, and found it to be a quite civil city), but by the man's decision to inform me of it. I'd get letters and later e-mails like this at the newspaper from time to time, and I'd always wonder what the writers wanted me to do about them. But there I had a public forum, so if I'd wanted to I could have made their cases known. Now I work at home and write, among other things, this blog. And, since the blog appears much more frequently than my column did, and I'm always looking for something to write in it, I have now used it to air one man's grievances against Montreal. So his writing to me was not as misguided as it originally seemed.
If only as many people read my blog as read my column.
Paging through one of those magazines that comes to the house even though we don't subscribe to it, I found a travel article. Out of professional interest, I took a look at the ending (the place where writers usually bring out their best stuff). It began: "Barcelona is alive, thriving, romantic - a magical metropolis that will steal your heart."
In one short sentence, the author had committed a multitude of sins: telling instead of showing, using forced alliteration, resorting to a cliche. I read it aloud to Hania, who admitted it was bad but didn't understand why I was so annoyed by it. If I got upset by all the bad writing I read ...
But I teach travel writing, mostly to people who want to get published. This sentence - appearing in a glossy magazine - suggested that I've been going about it the wrong way all these years. If I could just get over my obsession with nuance, honesty, humor, originality, I could really help my students.