The following originally aired as a local commentary on NPR-member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio.
You can read/ listen to more of my essays here.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut died April 13th at the age of 84. Upon hearing news of his death, commentator Alison McGaughey revisits a local legend about the man who wrote Slaughterhouse 5.
The news of Kurt Vonnegut’s death earlier this month reminded me of the “rural legend” I once heard about the revered writer: that he supposedly visited Macomb and wrote an essay about the experience–and didn’t exactly give it rave reviews.
So I went online in search of this story, and was surprised when I found what I was looking for fairly easily. I was also a little annoyed—because in the essay in question, titled “Teaching the Unteachable,” Mr. Vonnegut makes fun of people like me. And not, as it turns out, just because I live in Macomb.
The essay was published in the New York Times in August of 1967, when Vonnegut was, according to the bio at the end of the article, “working on a new novel, Slaughterhouse 5.”
“You can’t teach people to write well,” he says in the opening line. “Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.”
Vonnegut takes aim at the idea of summer writing conferences, the short retreats usually held at prestigious universities, sometimes at more exotic locales, that allow amateurs to learn from, and rub elbows with, “real” writers. He pokes fun at people who attend them as being repressed housewife types–actually, he says “minister’s wives”— who basically just want to get away for a vacation. “The idea of a conference for prose writers,” Vonnegut says, “is an absurdity.”
Um, ouch.
(I was already stinging by the time I got to this point in the article, because…. guess how I’m spending my summer “vacation?” I’ve signed up for a week-long session at the Iowa City Summer Writing Festival, where I’ll work under the guidance of a published and somewhat acclaimed fiction writer. In other words—Vonnegut’s words, to be exact—I’ll be “pretending to be a writer.” I am not, however, a minister’s wife.)
So what does all this have to do with Macomb?
It turns out that at some point, apparently not too long before the essay was published, Western Illinois University hosted a West-Central Writers’ Conference, with Vonnegut as the featured writer —an experience he apparently found less than enthralling.
In the essay, he describes the student-faculty get-together that opened the event.
Held in the TraveLodge Motel “in between the Coin-A-Wash and the A&W Rootbeer stand …amidst the sounds of Muzak and drag races out on Route 136,” he writes, the party attracted only a handful of students— who, according to Vonnegut, showed up only because there was booze.
“The founder and director ….was a cigar-eating young English instructor named E. W. Johnson,” he writes, “… the only teacher at Western Illinois to have published a book. Johnson was sad …because he had sent out thousands of brochures and had advertised lavishly in Writer’s Digest and Saturday Review and so on, and yet only 19 students had come…”
The party died at midnight, with only Vonnegut and a few stragglers sitting around the swimming pool, quote, “breathing chlorine and carbon monoxide.”
The lone remaining student announced to Vonnegut and the WIU professor that she knew why more people didn’t show up: “Because,” she said, ‘Macomb, Illinois’ sounds like such a hell-hole, and because ‘Western Illinois University’ sounds like such a jerkwater school.”
Don’t expect that to end up on University brochures anytime soon.
Vonnegut did find the heart to write, “The Town isn’t all that bad, I guess, and the University is handsome and booming.” “But,” he says, “there isn’t any water there, and there aren’t any mountains there, and there is no grand hotel. If you don’t have water or mountains, and you want to found a writer’s conference, you had better have a grand hotel.”
Of course, the essay stings a bit because the truth hurts. And I do share some of Mr. Vonnegut’s cynicism. Writing retreats come with a steep price tag. And they do attract poseurs, whose primary purpose for attending is to be able to mention at parties that they’ve done so.
But for us amateurs—who dream of ever doing anything remotely close to writing as successfully as Vonnegut did— conferences are the only chance to spend an intensive period working on and learning about writing—because the other 51 weeks of the year we’re behind a desk or in front of a classroom, or doing whatever else it is we do to make a living.
This summer, as I stroll the streets of Iowa City, it will be hard to block Vonnegut’s comments from my mind.
(But at least, thanks to him, I’ll know better than to stay at a TraveLodge.)
Tags: Macomb, Rural People Read Too, writing
