Trisha Wooldridge's Profile

Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is benevolent, or at
least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a writer by taking expensive
classes in that subject, you want your teacher to know more about it than you
and to behave like a teacher. And so you might hear advice along the lines of "I
don't think you're ready to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years
honing your skills with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on
the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They just
tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever they please,
and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not merely arrogant, but
completely unhinged.

Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who was
responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, "Ah, yes,
you're the one who's going to bring in our males 18-32." And sure enough, when
we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place
compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the
microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the Dante
writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of
place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the
organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they
were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were
as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them