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8/28/2008 [ interview ]
Behind the Scenes: Building the Sanibel Writers Conference
Interview with Tom DeMarchi by Tom DeMarchi
Question: How did the Sanibel Island Writers Conference come about?
Answer: I’d been teaching at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers for a year when the poet Jim Brock, my colleague, asked if I was interested in directing the school’s yet-to-be-established writers conference. He said, “We’ve been kicking the idea around for the last few years, but it’s never gone beyond talk. You interested?”
For two stressful weeks in the mid-90s, I was the assistant manager of a small pizza restaurant; that was the extent of my supervisory experience. I couldn’t understand why Jim was offering me this position, unless he was purposely looking for the least qualified candidate. I was about to say thanks but no thanks when he said, “It’ll probably mean a course release in the fall.”
I shook his hand and said, “I’m your man.”
Q: When was this?
A: Fall 2005.
Q: And the first conference wasn’t until October 2006.
A: Right. So the conference committee and I had a full year to recruit a stable of authors, agents, publishers, and editors, choose specific conference dates, enlist student volunteers, promote it, draft a preliminary budget, and, most important, choose a location. A year was plenty of time to create something from scratch, I told myself, what with all that disposable time thanks to the course release.
Q: Why was location the most important aspect?
A: There are hundreds of writers conferences held all over the world each year. For a new conference to get any traction it has to offer something unique and seductive. Jim suggested Sanibel at our first committee meeting, and the vote was unanimously in favor.
Q: What’s unique and seductive about Sanibel Island?
A: Everything about Sanibel Island is unique and seductive. I’m originally from the North Shore of Massachusetts, where the best beaches are covered in gritty sand and rocks, and the worst are covered in broken bottles and hypodermic needles. Florida's Gulf Coast is open for business 365 days a year, with sand so fine and white that you’re tempted to bake a cake out of it. Sanibel sits just off the coast of Fort Myers, is serendipitously shrimp-shaped, and is connected to its sister island, Captiva, via Blind Pass Bridge. What a map doesn’t convey—can’t possibly convey—is Sanibel’s ground-level beauty. It is, quite simply, one of those places people label “an island paradise.” Swaying palm trees? Check. Fifteen miles of strollable beaches strewn with over 400 varieties of seashells? Check. Ocean the temperature of bath water? Twenty-six miles of winding bike paths? Awe-inspiring sunsets? Check, check, and check. When I went there just last week, as I drove over the causeway, I spotted a half dozen dolphins frolicking just off-shore. The shore was lined with swimmers, fishermen, campers, boogie boarders, and a touch football team. No one looked bored. Plus, it’s forty-five minutes from FGCU’s campus, which makes our commute a breeze.
Q: Is it true that more than 2/3 of the island is protected land?
A: True. The Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge is the most famous tract of protected land. And nearly everything's independently owned. You can count the number of "chains" on one hand—CVS, 7-11, a Dairy Queen that looks as if it was built in the '60s. FGCU’s mission has at its core Environmental Awareness, and Ecological Sustainability. By establishing our writers conference on Sanibel, we’re making a direct link between FGCU’s cultural life and environmental commitment.
Q: Where exactly on Sanibel do you hold the conference?
A: A cultural center/performance/classroom space called Big Arts. It’s located off Sanibel’s main street, Periwinkle Way. Attendees can walk or bike to nearby restaurants or hotels, but it’s also somewhat secluded, so we get the best of both worlds. They have classroom space, an auditorium, an exhibition hall, a pond out back, and a courtyard full of white Adirondack chairs. Between sessions, people sit in rocking chairs on the back deck and watch alligators swim by. I don't use the word "quaint" very often, but every time I drive down Big Arts’ street, when I see the "Caution—Gopher Tortoise Crossing" road sign, I think "How quaint."
Q: If there are already so many other conferences out there, why create one on Sanibel at all? What niche does it fill in SW Florida?
A: Two of our main goals were to 1) provide a forum for local writers to meet and mingle with like-minded people, and 2) to attract writers from outside the immediate area and thereby put Southwest Florida on the map as a cultural Mecca. FGCU is only ten years old. Its identity is still being formed. So I guess a couple of additional goals include strengthening FGCU's community ties and increasing its national reputation. All of this is very lofty and ambitious, but the feedback indicates we're getting there.
Q: What’s been the hardest thing about directing the conference?
A: Getting the word out. The first year, especially, we had no clue how to promote ourselves. We had—and continue to have—a very limited operating budget, most of which goes to paying the presenters’ travel expenses, so placing ads in national magazines was out. It was totally learn-as-we-go, very grassroots. I handed a stack of flyers to each of the volunteers and asked them to tape them up at eye level in every bathroom stall in Lee and Collier County. We created a homepage through FGCU, and Facebook and Myspace pages. Dan Wakefield and Jesse Millner, two other presenters that first year, were interviewed on NPR. I even appeared on a couple of local television shows, holding up copies of the presenters’ books and saying things like, “You know what’s cool? Reading and writing. So if you want to be cool, you’ll come to our conference out on Sanibel Island.” Neither of the viewers registered.
Q: Florida is full of active writing and reading groups. Did you network with any of them?
A: Absolutely. I contacted lots of Florida writers groups, like the Gulf Coast Writers Association here in Fort Myers, the gang at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a romance writers group in Orlando, and the Florida Writers Association. Marylou Hess, a dedicated member of the FWA’s St. Petersburg chapter, made sure everyone in the Tampa Bay area knew about us. Julianna Baggott, John Dufresne, Steve Almond, and Jonathan Ames, all presenters at the first conference, were kind enough to spread the word to their friends and writers groups, and post announcements on their web sites. We also attend the Miami Book Fair International every fall to network and recruit.
Q: How many people attended the first year?
A: We have 150 slots open for participants. The first year, forty-eight people registered.
Q: Only forty-eight people the first year? Sounds…intimate.
A: It was, and, actually, as a result the group really bonded in ways that far outlasted the weekend. I’ve heard from many of the attendees that they’ve remained in contact with some of the presenters. One attendee, Dick Miller, pitched his book proposal to Robert Gelinas [CEO of Naples-based Arche Books] and has since published his first novel, The Boxcar Kid. Jonathan Ames, Steve Almond, and William Giraldi met and established an immediate rapport. They were like the Three Musketeers and have remained friends. Lynne Barrett’s class was so popular that a group of attendees invited her back to Sanibel a few months later to run a private workshop.
Q: Has attendance increased?
A: It’s almost doubled. We went from forty-eight the first year to ninety-two last year. We were all shocked and pleased, and a bit overwhelmed. For this year, as of today, there are fifty-nine people registered, which is about fifty more than we had at the same time last year, and we haven’t even begun advertising yet. I attribute the increase to our presenters' reputations.
Q: How do you choose your presenters?
A: The three main criteria are artistry, accessibility, and availability. We strive to bring in talented, accomplished professionals. It'd be good for business to recruit nothing but rock stars, but commercial success, while impressive and important to a degree, is secondary to artistic merit. We’ve had some very popular authors—Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer, Heidi Julavits edits The Believer and her novels have all been named Notable Books by The New York Times—but to us that's just gravy. We'd never have invited them or anyone else if we didn't first admire their writing. Equally important is the writers' talent in the classroom: They have to know how to teach and relate to student writers of all levels. That old Woody Allen line about those who can’t do, teach, is wrong.
Q: You bring in a lot of Florida writers.
A: Of course we want to feature some local talent. There are so many amazing Florida authors that we’ve recruited, including Robert Olen Butler, John Dufresne, Julianna Baggott, Lynne Barrett, Lyn & Jesse Millner, Sue Henshon, Michael Hettich, Dan Wakefield, Denise Duhamel, Nick Carbo, and Jim Brock. This year we’re carrying on the tradition by bringing in Ian Vasquez, Leonard Nash, Jeanne Leiby, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Mary Beth Lundgren, as well as Camille Cline, an editor from Sarasota. We get authors from all over the country—this year Neal Pollack, Ron Carlson, John McNally, Eve Bridburg, and Michael Steinberg are on the roster—but it’d be crazy not to tap the local talent.
Q: OK, that’s your criteria. But how do you choose?
A: Initially, the committee listed all the categories that needed filling—fiction, poetry, memoir, screenwriting, etc.—and then all the authors we either knew or had connections to, or just plain wanted to lure because of their work and reputations as teachers. Luckily, a lot of the people we invited were available, and I think this goes back to the seduction of Sanibel. Our core faculty is comprised of Steve Almond, Lynne Barrett, John Dufresne, and William Giraldi, though Steve's on sabbatical this year. We don't have to hustle as much to recruit authors. We’ve gone from having a wish list to having a waiting list of over 100 authors, agents, editors, and publishers…all wanting to run workshops and collect seashells in the fall.
Q: Who from your wish list were you able to nab?
A: This year we’re bringing in John K. Samson, leader of the Canadian band The Weakerthans, to teach a songwriting workshop. I always thought that if we expanded the curriculum to include songwriting, I’d want to bring in Samson. That’s one wish come true. Now if we could get Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello to come in for the weekend. While we’re at it, might as well bring in Salinger and Pynchon.
Q: What’s your favorite aspect of directing the conference?
A: It’s going to sound hokey, but I love it all. I love meeting the authors, people I’ve read and admired over the years. On the final night of last year’s conference, I was on stage introducing one of the readers. I’m prone to sentimentality, and said something like, “One of the best things about this weekend has been getting to know the...the authors…” I began to choke up. My voice quavered and my eyes watered. Later, a woman who’d flown in from Manhattan said how touched everyone was that I got so emotional. I downplayed it and said that I was stifling a yawn.
Q: How involved are the folks at FGCU?
A: Nearly all the volunteers are either colleagues in the English Department or FGCU students. As with all volunteers, they are incredibly dedicated and do all the grunt work with a smile. It's like Catholics doing cheerful penance. Win Everham, an Environmental Biology professor, leads a canoe tour of Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge, and his wife Karyn wears many hats, including taxi driver, sommelier, and trash collector. There are too many people to list who've helped us, but for starters, Joe Wisdom has been a tremendous advocate. Lori Cornelius, Joe Higgins, Conan Griffin, and Julianna Gerow basically camp out at Big Arts and do whatever needs to be done. FGCU funds us, so they own this conference. And, luckily, the higher ups have been unbelievably supportive, especially our dean, Donna Price Henry. They realize that the conference generates lots of good press and brings national prestige to the university. Again, this goes back to the quality of our presenters. Having names like Sena Jeter Naslund, Dan Wakefield, Judith Viorst and Ron Carlson—I could name any of our presenters, but you get the idea—attached to our university really classes up the joint.
Q: What about FGCU students? Do a lot of them attend? Or is it mostly non-students?
A: We're getting more and more FGCU students each year. I think that forty-two of last year's attendees were from FGCU. This year we expect even more. What's interesting to me is the way a lot of people decry this generation of students as “screenagers” with absolutely no interest in the written word. But my classes are full of students who have stories to tell, who want to express themselves through poems and stories and essays and, yes, increasingly, screenplays. One student—a blind graduate student—had such a positive experience in William Giraldi’s memoir class that she wrote the following in her evaluation:
"I am beginning to view my life through new eyes. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I feel like I have been given my sight back—in a manner of speaking. I suppose I should end before I start crying all over my keyboard, but I just wanted to let you know what a privilege it has been taking part in this conference, and I look forward to participating in future conferences."
Q: That’s pretty amazing. Is all the feedback that positive?
A: Not quite. We’ve received numerous complaints about not serving beer during the cocktail hour, and apparently our gift bags are a little light. The best complaint I’ve received was when one attendee wrote, “"The big problem with your conference is all the people you bring in are REALLY GOOD WRITERS. Could you bring in some hacks for us mere mortals? Can't you invite someone who will tell me it’s okay to write shit?" I still don’t know how to respond to that one, so if anybody out there has any ideas…
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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