4. Tucson Writers' Conference Tales

This is an eight-part memoir series detailing my adventures with the Tucson Festival of Books and the associated Master Writers’ Conference.

Leaving Bookmans and its memories, Tim and I must wait to for our hotel room to be ready. After devouring piles of delicious freshly roasted vegetables with salsa from El Charros, we sit in our rental car and Tim calls the hotel to see if we can change the check-in time to get in earlier. He gets placed on hold. He rolls his eyes at me.

“Oh, hold music!” I bounce in my seat. “We can sing!”

Tim is familiar with this. This is why he calls me Sparkles. I’m always trying to make the best of things.

I demonstrate. “Doop doopy doop doop doopity doo!”

Tim joins in. Soon, we are bopping our heads and singing and laughing to the terrible synth clap-punctuated electric organ music in our rental car.

I capture some of our improvisations with my phone. Reviewing the footage, Tim’s eyes seem to be telling the camera, I can’t believe my wife is making me do this. I think we sound pretty good.

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Vamping Sidenote:

Singing to hold music began with my caring for my mom. Medicaid, hospitals, banks. Lots of calls, lots of hold music. To this day, certain hold music (Opus No. 1 I am talking to you) triggers me. Bad bad bad.

I am shot straight back in time on a knife’s edge. I’m clenching a phone, waiting for some faceless voice to detail my mom’s many prognoses, each new downtick on her chart slicing me raw, again and again.

Singing keeps me in the moment.

It’s also fun. Any time you are stuck on hold, try singing or dancing to the music. If you have an instrument, play it.

If the music is terrible, as it so often is, you can compensate by acting very serious about your performance. Not only will this lift your spirits, it is a creative challenge. I even get this little twinge of irritation when a live person comes on the line and I am forced to quit. Record yourself. This will compel you to give your performance your best effort.

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We learn our hotel room is still not ready. We drive around some more. Our cold-weary, snow-drowned psyches strain to absorb warmth and colors. Blooming palo verdes, towering saguaros, fragrant sage bless our journey.

As you would expect, being a major city, Tucson has a lot of traffic and noise. In general, with my sensory sensitivity syndrome, traffic and noise make cities painful for me. I doubt I could live in any major city, including Tucson.

But here’s what I like about Tucson:

1. But one thing Tucson gets a blue ribbon for is fighting light pollution.

Tucson keeps strict light ordinances to protect its observatories, like those on Kitt Peak. If you are in downtown Tucson at night, look up. You will see faint constellations. This simple achievement—viewing constellations over a major city— is impossible in other cities because of light pollution.

Tucson has somehow figured out what other cities have failed to grasp: throwing light upwards is pointless, because there is nothing up there that you need illuminate. Throwing energy upwards wastes energy and wastes money. Birds and other wildlife also appreciate not having their sleep disrupted by pointless photons.

2. I love that Tucson is a university town, home to ground-breaking research.

3. I love that Tucson is hot. I like being hot. I have a steep activation energy. (That’s a chemistry joke.)

4. I also love Tucson’s mountains. Here is one problem I have with where I live. While Door County is The Cape Cod of the Midwest and an adored tourist destination with the longest coastline of any county in the United States, Door County has no mountains. I am not sure how to fix this. I don’t care if we are The Miami of Lake Michigan. I want mountains.

5. My grandmother had two favorite places to give her writing workshops: Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona. Neva’s spirit is close to me in these places.

At last, our hotel room is free. Keying open the room, we dive for the thermostat. What is it about hotel rooms wanting to freeze people to death? Picture millions of vacant hotel rooms blanketing our nation, dutifully freezing empty space, wasting our energy. Wasting our money.

At least the Antarctic’s ICE CUBE neutrino observatory is doing something useful, with all of its coldness and emptiness. I wonder if we could employ all of America’s frozen empty hotel rooms to detect subatomic particles, too. I am always trying to think of a bright side.

Throughout my Tucson writer’s conference that week, the theme of killer iceboxes masquerading as hotel rooms would persist. I don’t know how I would have survived Tucson if I had not had the foresight to pack my battery heated vest.

As we prepare for bed, I look over the schedule of events tomorrow’s Book Festival. I see a problem.

“There are too many good things happening all at once,” I conclude.

Hundreds of authors were giving talks, many that I have heard of and would like to meet. Talks were broken up into time slots during the day at different locations on the college campus. For the first hour of talks, at the larger venues, we needed to choose between Anne Hillerman, Martha Wells, John Scalzi, Carl Zimmer, William Kent Kruger, or Salman Rushdie. At the same time, in tents, were hundreds of lesser-known authors, as well.

Difficult choices lay ahead.

[Next: Part 5: Morning Rituals and the Tucson Festival of Books]