Nonfiction

Tom Grimes is the author of five novels, including Season’s End, Redemption Song (available in our Archive and in a French translation), and City of God (Narrative Press, 2010). Grimes edited The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and traced his long friendship with Frank Conroy, Iowa’s legendary director, in Mentor: A Memoir, which won a Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers Award. Grimes directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at Texas State University.


—Read Our Interview
with Frank Conroy
—

Mentor

A Memoir

by Tom Grimes

I was living in Key West and working as a waiter the first time I saw Frank Conroy. Each January a literary seminar brought two dozen famous writers to the island. Panels featuring them took place in a large auditorium at the community college. On opening day at nine o’clock in the morning, the year’s keynote speaker addressed everyone in attendance. Given that my restaurant shift ended sometime after midnight and I invariably closed the After Deck bar, nine o’clock had a middle-of-the-night feel to me. The bar’s wooden planks, white tables, and white chairs were suspended several feet above the Atlantic’s shallow inlet and overlooked what I, as a young writer, knew to be Sam Lawrence’s house. As an editor, he’d published Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien, and Thomas McGuane, idols to me at the time. Occasionally I’d spot a cocktail party under way on his deck and wonder who was there sipping a scotch and if, someday, I might be one of them.

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