Damnation
The brilliancy in this list of writers' bio depressed me with awful sense of failure.
To illustrate that, the following conversation looped in my head under every unpronounceable writer's name:
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE: "Shall this depression evolve through the stages of grief? Will the writer of this blog finally indulge in envy, anger, rebellion and then actively seek fame and glory?"
EX-BOYFRIEND'S VOICE: Aye...and about time too. Don't say I didn't tell you so.
DYING CONCIENCE'S VOICE: "AWAY, YE EVIL EGOMANIACAL VANITIES. YOU'VE NEVER EVEN HEARD OF A JUNOT DIAZ BEFORE!"
Disenchantment
It's a job hazard. Hearing voices and getting depressed while reading about unfamiliar and alive writers, is a daily risk for everyone who dares to try anchor their thoughts in writing.
You know it, I know it. There is no such thing as a jubilantly happy writer no matter how successful. And we know how lack of jubilation fuels creativity, because there is nothing like occasional shots of bitter envy sadness to keep us writing.
No marketable writer's bio in the world would mention -- that in order to become half-as-good a writer -- they breathed in irony, risked hernia and sanity (as each has to entertain as many saints as demons for as long as they write) and hoped that by the end of the day even loyalists like Colson would not quit reading by the second paragraph.
Nobody writes well, or delves too deeply in the unknown lands of creativity, for sheer fame and glory. Enduring the brutality of writing as a practice was the lesser evil for those who mean it.
Denotation
Problem is, nobody would want to attend a gathering of depressed people who like to distract themselves by reading and writing about what made them so depressed in the first place, either.
So they airbrushed the muses, glazed the bios and called it a festival.
