I held my hands in front of me as if in prayer, waiting for the speaker’s next words, on my first morning at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. I wasn’t alone; the others in the conference room sat in the same reverent position.
In front of us, the poet Allan Wolf told us to imagine that our closed palms were the book that we would write or would eventually occur to us. “Now open it with me and gasp in wonder,” Wolf said. All of us opened our hands in unison and gasped. The moment was punctuated by embarrassed laughter and nervous smiles to the people around us. But nonetheless, the 2012 James River Writers Conference began with a writer’s affirmation of faith in the act of creation. More