Gil and Rog had brought beer and steaks and potatoes and corn for our dinner, plus other things that should have occurred to me but hadn’t, like box fans. There was a deck built out over the river landing and we sat and watched the sun go down in glory. The river, tamed enough for a swimming beach, was deep green, then opal in the last light. That was when I thought, Writers, and had a passing wish that no one else would come.

We ate our fill and policed all our food scraps and stored the garbage in the bear-proof back room of the dining hall. I fell asleep to the white noise of the fan and nothing human or animal disturbed me.

In the morning we waved good-bye to Rog as he loaded his hunting bow and other gear onto the dirt bike and took off along the fire road. A little while later Tony Presto pulled up and the conference was officially open for business.

Tony was short, with a halo of fluffy curls, and nervous, either by nature or because he was in charge of everything. He had a habit of asking questions and not waiting for the answers. Had we found everything? Were the outside lights working? The freezer? Good, good.

We helped him unload the boxes of books by the conference authors, available for sale in the main assembly building. Here was Viridian’s one book in print, and a number of anthologies in which she had poems. Here were Oscar’s and Sacha’s books, and those by the younger poets. Like the younger fiction writers, they were all from places like Africa or Cuba or Mongolia. They were Native American, Asian American, Hispanic American, all manner of complicated identities, with genders and sexual preferences likewise all over the map.  By now I had been educated as to the importance of diversity and including under-represented voices and avoiding microaggressions, and how all the Dead White Men had held literature hostage for too long. I had been made aware of the pushback from people who sneered at this as political correctness. It was all too much for me to sort through, and I was glad that my job was simply to make everyone welcome and hand out quarters for the laundry machines. Although it reminded me of that time in high school where everybody started wearing T-shirts that said “Different.”

It did sort of tip the scales that we had Ken Spinner representing the Not Yet Dead White Men. Several of his large, overstuffed books were for sale. He wrote lengthy, successful novels about men facing elemental challenges in various natural settings. The actual nature writers looked interesting. They took photographs of native plants, they wrote essays about wild and scenic rivers or the Amazon rain forest. One of them had lived for a year on an abandoned oil drilling platform.