There was so much genius floating around at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference that, even after I’d limbered up and gotten into a handwriting-workout routine, I still couldn’t write things down fast enough. (Seriously, the Alice McDermott craft lecture blew away the whole conference — several people remarked that it felt like getting a whole MFA in one hour.) But I did capture a notebookful of gems, fantastic quotes and a few paraphrased comments, and I’ve arranged and shared a selection of them here.
* * *
On the writing life:
“Smitten by make-believe, I never quite returned to real life.”
“The call to write does not respect background or experience.”
“Mostly you write to find out what you have to say.”
*
On the reluctance to write and the rush to publish:
“Authors rush to publish because they’ve been working so long.” But it’s better to remember that these things take time, and it’s better to put your best work out there.
— Kathy Pories, senior editor at Algonquin Books
“The thing you’re doing [writing] is incredibly hard,” so give up any idea that the work will suddenly all make sense. It won’t — it keeps getting harder, and so you have to keep working harder. And this is a good thing, because “it gets harder because you know more.”
*
On what makes great writing:
“There are only two stories: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. Voice is what makes a work memorable.”
— Kathy Pories, senior editor at Algonquin Books
“The moment you try to institutionalize art, it ceases to be art.”
“Literary theories will not make a writer write.”
“Memory is dramatic present tense. You create it as you remember it.”
— a workshop comment from Allen Wier
“There’s flint and stone, but I don’t quite have a spark here.”
— a workshop comment from Allen Wier
“Language is the writer’s only tool — we really don’t have anything else — but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.”
“A good story needs only a good storyteller.”
Fiction deals in truth, but it’s not the truth of philosophy but the truth of experience — “the kind of truth that stays true.”
*
On poetry:
“In poetry, you can stop the line and still say something.”
“Not every poem has to be dire and filled with tragedy.”
*
Best line of the whole conference:
“Quit freezing it in the amber of your confounded intelligence.”
— Richard Bausch on getting hung up overthinking one’s writing
Samuel Snoek-Brown 
We writers are insufferable smart-arses. It would be so refreshing to find one of us who answers with a shrug of the shoulders and a spread of the hands. Just once in a while!
😀
There are certainly plenty of those, though I find the smartasses and the qippers and the compulsive storytellers FAR more entertaining. 🙂