Different writers, staff members, arrived as well, although nobody I knew. The three younger poets, Bettina Cruz, M’beke Ogbo, and Gary Rain Hsu, had all crossed paths before and were happy to see each other again. As were the younger members of the fiction contingent. It was brought home to me how much of a generational divide there was between them and the poets I knew best. These were writers with podcasts, with Instagram accounts, with YouTube videos. They tweeted back and forth, they had graphically compelling web pages. They organized poetry jams and slams, salons, spa weekends where one might also get editorial pointers on manuscripts. They were geniuses at self-promotion.

Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. A little too market-oriented, perhaps, but not bad. Why not put yourself and your writing out there, scream for attention along with the rest of the noisy world? I’d seen some of their poems; they were interesting, confounding, show-offy, accomplished, sometimes all of these at once. I worried about Viridian and her friends, how they might be left behind. And where were they anyway? Was Viridian even coming?

“. . . . so tired of persona poems . . .”

“You had me at autodidact.”

“A kind of syntactical vertigo.”

“sustainable viticulture . . .”

“Memoir, memoir, memoir.”

Ken Spinner, at least, was old school, but in ways that were not especially fortunate. The main room of the lodge was crowded when he came in, and he moved through it by draping his arms on and around the different females in his path, then propelling himself forward, like a kid on the monkey bars. He stopped to talk to everybody, and everybody to him. A guy with long practice at being a celebrity. He was a big man with his silver hair combed forward, Caesar style. And a strange, mottled complexion, like a piece of unfresh lunchmeat.

“Hello young lady” was his greeting to me. “I’m Ken.” He leaned over the table to shake hands and look down my shirt. “Who might you be?”

“Princess Leia.” The room was loud enough that I thought I could get away with it. “Carla.”

“Carla. Carla Carla Carla. You’re new this year, aren’t you?”

“Getting older by the minute.”

Again, he hadn’t quite heard me. “I need to find my cabin. How about you help me.”

I pointed it out on the map. He kept saying he didn’t see it. I moved the map to the edge of the table so I could get his nose out of my boobs. Really, the guy was not smooth. Or young. But there was some weird, confounding vanity that must have worked for him, at least often enough for him to keep making the same moves.

“Tony,” I called out, seeing him on the front porch. “Ken needs you to help him get settled.”