Self-Restraint in the Hot Tub (and Other Notes from the Kauai Writers Conference)

If only the dreamy Kauai Sonesta were a leeeeetle bit closer…

The Kauai Writers Conference was a hoot as always— and it arrived at just the right time, so soon after the election. The week in beautiful Kauai was a chance to bury my head in the (smooth, soft) sand and focus on writers and writing. What an enormous gift.

I taught a class on writing short stories with Lauren Groff, another gift. I have known Lauren since 2006, when her second published short story was chosen for BASS. She herself remains just as purely artistic and brilliant as her work, and at times I felt a bit like the commerce to her art. As someone who works with a good amount of new writers, I have to keep my head at least partly in the “what and how will this sell” corner of the room. Lauren reminded me and our students—a mix of young and old and French and Australian and Texan and Californian—of the importance of language, of truth and subversion and experiment and even sometimes making your readers uncomfortable. In the end, I think we served as bookends to some important conversations about process and storytelling.

We had both been destroyed by the election, the positive biopsy results of our country. We agreed not to discuss it, and that served us well. It felt too soon to do much more than avoid the topic.

And then came the hot tub. One afternoon, Jean Kwok and I were enjoying a poolside hot tub (oh, what heaven) with a couple of random men who were there on vacation, not for the writing conference, and they and Jean got to talking about taxes. I felt it coming, but hoped for the best. Jean agreed with the men that taxes could be oppressive and spoke of her own difficulties, and I just listened. Sitting in a bathing suit in a hot tub with strangers is, of course, an exercise in vulnerability. Something inside me grew hard and still as they continued to talk. One man admitted sheepishly that he’d voted for Donald. Clearly the man seemed to infer that Jean and I had voted differently than he had. He immediately began issuing justifications— the economy, the economy, taxes, the economy, plus he was from California and knew the real Kamala, who was just so LEFTY. Before I could stop myself, I said sort of flatly, “I feel for you. You were wrong. This will not help you economically. You’ll see.” I briefly explained tariffs and oligarchies, that a better choice would have been to tax billionaires and Amazon and the like. The friend of the first man nodded vigorously, agreeing. They seemed eager to find common ground. The first man listened and then went on about Kamala, repeating his points, and I thought he seemed to want validation. But fuck if I was going to give them that. As he spoke, I just looked at him. I was too closed inside to do more. He kept trying to get me to understand. I just listened and didn’t do any more. He verbally squirmed. And then he got up and left the hot tub. And then so did his friends.

Was this a win compared to the results of election night? (Don’t answer that.) Did this feel like a win in my book? Yes, if only in the sense that I did not erupt from the hot tub in my skirted granny bathing suit and wrap my pruned hands around the chatty man’s neck. It was also a win in that it showed me my own potential for restraint and calm, two things I did little to cultivate during his last presidency. Will this last? Who knows, but restraint sure felt like a kind of power, and I’ll take that right now.

We all need to find our power and not just post-election. Life is hard, dammit, and if all we can do is sit quietly or eat just one and not two tubs of ice cream or find one small way to focus on—better yet, to help those we love, then something is going right. We have to steer our ships in whatever way we can in the moment.

Otherwise in Kauai, I chatted with so many attendees about the business and the process (the former less than the latter), went for a gorgeous long walk with Lauren and Allison Fairbrother of Riverhead Books followed by Japanese Shave Ice (which is fluffy as snow and made us all want to order a Japanese Shave Ice Machine); explored endangered birds with Tom Perrotta and Mary Granfield, played a rowdy game of Celebrity with a room full of writing celebrities (Jess Walter, Meg Wolitzer—the best Charades player I have ever encountered, Christina Baker Kline, Ruth Ware, and many others), stared at the palm trees, drifted in the pool, talked to more writers, and generally felt insanely lucky to be there and to still be a part of this business so many decades after I entered it.

Wishing you all peaceful Thanksgivings free of news, painful disagreements, and whatever else weighs on you these days. Be well, people.