That's how I landed in Fog City, sipping coffee and noshing bagels with hundreds of other wannabe authors. We sat at tables of eight in a large hotel meeting room wondering what we'll learn; who we'll meet; is this worth our time and money?
Coincidence seated me next to a former Victoria University professor and introduced me to a Wellingtonian who had won a scholarship to the conference. We filled our heads during sessions about publishing, finding an agent to get you to a publishing house (preferably one of the big New York firms) or using a hybrid model - paying a company to design, distribute and market your book.
Dozens of us signed up for speed-dating sessions with agents. We'd have three minutes per agent to pitch ideas.
Several of those agents asked me to email a synopsis and sample chapter. The homework still sits on my desk, unfinished. A gremlin tapping my shoulder. It's easy to ignore your passion project when paid work deadlines, uncertainty and inertia fuse into a single, sticky blob.
Still, strands from that conference have enmeshed with the neurons of daily life. One keynote speaker, Dana Gioia, has been quoted saying he's the only person who ever went to Stanford Business School to become a poet.
His inner gremlin apparently wouldn't shut up. Lucky for us. What I know about poetry would fill half a thimble. But what I felt about the words Gioia read filled my heart. His poem, Marriage of Many Years reveals a lexicon of companionship, communication beyond speech.
"This intimate patois will vanish with us, its only native speakers... Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us."
Let that sink in. Google the poem - it immortalises a world in 124 words.
Wonder extended to sessions about memoir. One presenter (a former newspaper columnist and author), clicked her magnetic reading glasses on and off, off and on (they parted in the middle, at the bridge of her nose), while explaining true tales about children are really stories about parents. Teenage angst is parental angst when told from the grown-up's perspective.
Another teacher recounted how, while writing an essay about shame, she excavated a long-buried childhood memory. By retelling the story of hitting a dog with a car, she recalled another incident where, as a 4-year-old, she witnessed a puppy being lured to its death.
Acclaimed New Zealand author Witi Ihimaera told participants at the Tauranga Arts Festival last October he, too, disclosed a traumatic event for the first time through writing. He couldn't speak of the evil to friends and family, but he could tell strangers about it in his memoir.
Surveys have shown 80 per cent of American adults feel they have a book in them. If Kiwi literary dreams reach anywhere near that mark, many of you harbour a book fantasy, too. We all have competition - one agent told our group at the conference 18,000 books are published in the US alone, each week.
Why write? Gioia said by putting thoughts into words, we claim citizenship in an invisible world. The sacred task of anyone who writes, he said, is articulating the unseen world inside our heads. It requires an alertness to our own existence and a recognition everyone we encounter has an existence as complicated as ours.
Your history, activities and thoughts have extraordinary worth when you write them down. A journal that helps cultivate knowledge of who you are and where you've been holds value - not necessarily in the marketplace, but in the space you guard for yourself or share with people you love.
I hope you're making magic – crafting something visible from what we can't see. Write now. Decide later if those stories need a home in the wider world, or if they'll only cast their spell on you.
