I first attended the Conference twenty years ago, in the summer of 1999. I had just quit my glossy magazine job in New York because I wanted to go be a novelist. That I did this without ever having published a single word of fiction will give you an idea how young I was. I moved to Baltimore, where rents were still so cheap that I could eke out a living teaching yoga while I worked on a terrible novel that has mercifully never seen the light of day.
I brought the first chapter of that novel to Sewanee, where Amy Hempel and Barry Hannah were put in the unenviable position of having to comment o...