The only other writers I knew were the poets I met at open mikes. We learned from each other, but we weren’t connected. We didn’t have agents or contacts in New York. We didn’t know the difference between a small press and a large press or what kind of advance we might ask for.
I sent both books to MacAdam/Cage, a new publisher that was accepting unsolicited, unagented manuscripts. At the same time I applied for the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. The program received close to 900 submissions for five spots. MacAdam/Cage bought both novels for $18,000 each. After selling my books I went traveling and forgot about the fellowship. When I checked in with my subletter she told me that Tobias Wolff, the fellowship’s director, was trying to get in touch with me. He had called over a week ago.
Suddenly I was a writer. I had never thought of myself that way before. Writing was just a hobby, this thing I did in my spare time. But now it was how I made my living. Stanford gave us $30,000 a year and we didn’t have to do anything except come in once a week and read each other’s stories. We had all the time and resources to write, and no excuses if it didn’t work out. I was amazed by the other writers. Their writing was rich, textured, and served with an economy mine lacked.
At Stanford I realized there was an entirely different kind of writer. Many of the fellows had thought of writing as a career for years. The Stegner program doesn’t require recommendations and isn’t concerned with whether you have ever studied creative writing. Applicants are accepted on the strength of a 9,000-word writing sample. Some previous fellows hadn’t even finished college. Nonetheless, my two years at Stanford were dominated by people with graduate degrees in creative writing. They studied English as undergraduates, spent two to three years in an MFA program, then won fellowships and awards and went to writers’ colonies. Most came to writing as lovers of literature. They wanted to tell stories. They were readers, shaped by the books they’d read. They saw writing as a craft, which it is. But it was a completely different starting point from mine and that of the poets I knew. We came to writing at an earlier age, from an urge to release a scream that had stuck in our throats. Then we worked on our screams until we thought they were something someone might want to hear.