I spent the weekend at a writers conference in San Francisco, where I harangued 60 writers about taking their prose to the next level. (Wanna listen? Click Play at the bottom of this post. That tumult in the beginning is when a speaker falls on someone’s head.)

The highlight of the conference was a keynote by Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedwellers. The 62-year-old author is also a poet, an iconoclast, a mother of a “turkey-baster baby” and an inveterate watcher—with that baby, her now-18-year-old son Wolf—of American Idol. (Mind you, she only watches the first few weeks. She loses interest once the contestants get people to do their hair and makeup—“I want them in a raw, unfettered state,” she says, when they are “artists held in contempt.”)

Many other conference speakers told us how to write bestsellers (hah!), and build our brands (yuck!), and sound not a wit like a twit on Twitter (good luck—I mean, 140 characters is just 140 characters). But Allison dug in and talked about what it means, really, to be part of the tribe of People Held in Contempt (i.e., penniless writers in a society that measures success in dollar signs).

She also bucked up those of us freaked out by the tumult in publishing, whether the bankruptcy of Borders, the ubiquity of ebooks, or the building of the Huffington empire on the backs of unpaid bloggers. Allison doesn’t pooh-pooh digital storytelling, confessing that her latest iPod download features Sissy Space reading To Kill a Mockingbird. (“I’m in mad love with Sissy Space. My woman dies, I’m goin’ after Sissy. I’ll get her up in the night and make her read me other books.”)

Sissy Spacek or no, Allison still believes in books, deep in her Carolina soul: “They will say to you that publishing is dead,” she told us. But “after the Black Death comes the Renaissance. After everything changes, we go back to essentials. And this is what I believe is essential: We’re lonely. We’re scared. Some of us have insomnia. We get up in the night, and we walk back and forth. You can only watch television so long. PDX 90? Damned if I’m doin’ exercises in the night. Oprah? I already saw the show. No, no, no. I get up in the night, an’ I need a story. I need a book. I need somebody to invite me into a world they have imagined whole. Or stolen. I genuinely don’t care. Just take me there. Ride me on language. Charm me. Fascinate me. Scare me or excite me, but take me out of myself. We are lonely. We are scared. We need story. That does not change.”

Allison wrapped up by quoting Vladimir Nabokov: “I don’t write to change people. I don’t write to make a difference. I write to make that still, small sob in the spine.” Then Allison riffed on the quote: “That is not about money. That is not about prices. That is about that immediate, intimate connection.” She leaned into the microphone, her stringy gray hair sweeping the top of the podium. “Let the culture, let the economics, run behind me. I know what I’m doin’. I write to make that still, small sob in the spine.”

Connie Hale's "Making Sentences Sing" workshop [ 48:37 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (42)

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