He asked me about the writers conferences I had given presentations at last year. That was something new for me.

I said that a year ago, at booksALIVE 2006!, I had given Mike Lister, Pottersville Press, a pamphlet I had written called Writing the Great American Novel on the Worldwide Web.

He had worked at the prison with Brenda, and knew I was a writer, but hadn't read anything I had written.

He was impressed with the pamphlet, and asked me to give a presentation at the Gulf Coast Writers Conference.

I spoke on The Literary Novel as an Experimental Form, Combining Genres.

I told how gradually, over the years, I had begun combining fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama in a single work, and stringing one book after another in series of related books, with an ensemble cast, a repeated setting, and one main theme: vocation and career in conflict.

How do you do the best work you are capable of in a world that doesn't want your best. Is hostile or indifferent to it.

He asked me what kind of a response I got.

I said the audience asked the wrong questions.

They wanted to know, "How do I get an agent," or, "How do I get published."

I said I told them they were asking the wrong question, or asking the wrong person.

I said what they should be asking, or what I was qualified to tell them, was how do you produce a body of work, invent a form to present it in, and find a means to get it out to the reader without having to go through a publisher, over the course of a writing life, because if you ask the right questions, and answer them honestly, no publisher will publish you, no university will hire you to teach, no mass circulation newspaper or slick magazine will review your self-published books, and no bookstore will carry your books.

But that didn't stop me. And it I could do it, they could.

He asked if anybody wanted to do that.

I said nobody goes to a writers conference to learn how to do that.

They go to a writers conference to learn how to get an agent, how to get published.

And do they learn how to find an agent, how to get published?

No.

Nor do they learn it in a college writing program.

People who are telling them how are selling them a bill of goods.

"You ought to ask them how what they see when they walk into a supermarket gets placed where it is. Somebody either bribes or forces the store to put it where it is, by threatening to withhold other merchandise the store wants."

"Yes," I said. "A store is a store."

"New York is Hollywood," I said, "books are television, the bookstore in the mall is the Gap, and the Internet is the bookstore in the mall."

"And Martha Stewart went to jail because her quality, medium-priced K Mart products make the Chinese junk sold at Wally World look bad," Larry said.

Maybe it was Hazel who said that.

"Put her in jail. Teach her a lesson. Teach everyone else a lesson. If we can do this to Martha Stewart, think what we can do to you."