Constant Reader

Last week, as a prelude to an event called 72 Hours, the Hugo House
checked three authors—T. M. McNally, Sherman Alexie, and Pam
Houston—into the W Hotel for three days with unlimited room
service and no other obligations except to write. In a swanky
party before the sequestering (the miniature burgers on tiny pieces of
toast were sloppy but delicious; the desiccated apple slices with
cheese were just plain weird), the writers were given guidelines for
their stories:

The Theme: Do Not Disturb
The Ingredients:
1. A character trait: giggles when angry
2. A location: a flooded basement
3. A plot point: a phone call from an
ex-lover
4. A line of dialogue: “Are we there yet?”
5. A rhetorical element: metaphor con-
taining “cafeteria”

The event was unofficially dubbed an Iron Chef for Writers. Alexie,
who is quite possibly the most openly competitive writer on
earth, announced that the ingredients were “too easy.” Houston
stood alone in a corner and kept staring at the piece of paper with the
ingredients, as though her story was somehow already written there in
very light pen strokes. McNally disappeared.

Three days later, the authors emerged at Hugo House to read their
new works. Houston folded the ingredients seamlessly into her
in-progress road-trip novel about a woman named Pam. The audience
laughed mightily (Pam starts dating a rocket scientist and wearily
concedes, “At least this one will be good for some metaphors”).

Alexie read four poems. Frankly, this kind of felt like
cheating—inserting five disparate elements into a suite of
poems is much easier than weaving them into one coherent
narrative—but they were really good poems, about accidents and
ex-lovers and death. Before one poem, Alexie admitted, “When I get
competitive, I write about my dad’s death.” After the room was done
cracking up at the unvarnished horror of his honesty, he blew everyone
away with a poem about heartbreak and loss and clitorises.

But the winner of the unofficial competition had to be McNally, who
read a precise, imaginative, endlessly surprising account of an
alcoholic ex-priest discovering his own father’s extramarital affair.
(“Even in 1972, or especially, it was possible for a love affair to
change a man’s life.”) He equated Pluto, both the planet and the god,
with the distant black keys on a piano, and he successfully
compared a hospital to an aircraft carrier. It was a devastating, fully
formed story that still had the heart to make everyone laugh with
offhanded observations of a “penis-headed 747.” This time, the underdog
took it in a walk.