Singer at Renaissance Festival | Pic from mingle.kansascity.com

1. The man standing before me wore shabby Renaissance period clothing. His beard, his fingernails, his feet, encased in worn leather sandals, were all dirty. He carried in one hand a knobby wooden walking stick, and in the other, a broken blue crystal ball. He had summoned me to the hostess counter of the small semi-outdoor tea room where I worked as a waitress at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. It was a Saturday, early afternoon, and we were in the middle of our lunch rush. I was merely told that a man was there to see me. When I asked who, I was met with a shrug, so I made my way, with no small level of annoyance, to where this man, a stranger stood. He told me my friend, Liz, had sent him; Liz worked about twenty miles down the road in an air-conditioned music supply store where this man had told her that he was on his way to the festival. She told him to go to the tea room and ask for me.

I wasn’t sure what he wanted, so I said hello. Smiled. Waited. He recited a poem for me – I can’t remember now what the words were. When he finished speaking, he bowed, and I curtsied and said thank you. He walked away, and the show was over. Nearby customers went back to eating. I went back to my tables.

It wasn’t until a lull in service a couple of hours later that I wondered whether I should have paid him something. He sought me out and recited a poem from memory, possibly one he made up. I hadn’t thought about it in the moment, but as I considered later, I felt, yes, I should have given him something for giving me that moment.

2. I think there’s a dominant mythic image we have of writers, particularly old ones. Emily Dickinson in her white dress, reclusive in her attic, penning poems and letters. Thoreau in his spartan cottage on Walden Pond, writing and holding forth about the things he was passionate about. Hemingway cloaking himself in a velvety robe of alcohol to write. In the film Finding Neverland, the playwright J.M. Barrie has a fight with his wife. She says she foolishly thought writers went away to magical worlds where ideas grew on trees, that he could show her that world, and when he corrects her that there is no such place, she says yes, there is:  Neverland. That secret place an artist goes to create, to set him or herself apart.

I know, however, that many writers are present, accessible, and are very savvy with social media – Tayari Jones, Margaret Atwood, etc. – and it is becoming more commonplace. In fact, at the AWP conference in a few days, Tweet-Ups have already been organized, and a hashtag has been created so that our big community of scribes can plant our thoughts and ideas and communications like a field full of poppies to skip through on our way to a mythic writers’ Emerald City.

3. By now, Amanda Palmer’s TED talk called “The Art of Asking” has made its rounds on the Interwebs. My friend Leslie sent it to me and I finally watched it this morning. It’s brilliant. You should do yourself a favor and watch it.

The way that she talks about her community made me think:  her story is a testimony to the breakdown of that mythology of an artist living apart. When an artist is encountered as part of the community, as a person sleeping on your couch or in need of a Neti Pot in a strange city; when he or she is available on Twitter or Facebook; when the artist is willing to ask for help, then the myth breaks down. The gates to the Emerald City open and everything converges. There are no more legends in ivory towers penning masterpieces worlds away.

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