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BJ PHILLIPS: I kind of wonder in my own heart of hearts, whether any of this we call journalism should be tolerated by a really thinking society. Any craft that limits truth in the way that this craft limits it with the requirement that it be old or new, factual, fair, well investigated, proven, and all the rest of it.

Despite all the games that we play, I'm not sure that we ought to exist as long as all our games do is limit us in the most basic kinds of ways because they keep us out of each other's lives.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: BJ Phillips, contributing editor to Ms. Magazine, one of six participants at the University of North Dakota writers conference. I'm Stephanie Johnson. And with me is Dennis Hamilton. We attended the conference held March 15th through the 19th. And this program will summarize that week's activities.

DENNIS HAMILTON: The conference participants were Tom Wolfe, author of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and frequent contributor in Esquire magazine.

Alix Kates Shulman, author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, as well as a Biography of Emma Goldman. Ed McClanahan, a frequent contributor to Playboy magazine, Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood. And Larry Woiwode, North Dakota poet and author of Beyond the Bedroom Wall, as well as BJ Phillips, who you heard at the top of this program.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: New journalism in the novel was the theme for the 7th Annual UND Writers Conference. The daily session began with an early afternoon panel discussion, where generally three of the participants focused on the conference concerns and fielded questions from audience members.

Afternoons featured individual presentations, and the evening sessions were generally readings or talks given by the conference participants already mentioned.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Three of the themes running throughout the conference were new journalism, what is it, and how does it contrast with traditional writing styles. Media and the politics of literature. What effects do outside forces such as publishers, deadlines, and so forth have on the writer and the audience? And how to get published. What are some of the inside niceties for a potential writer to know to get his or her work into print?

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: First, the new journalism. Here conference participants Alix Kates Shulman, BJ Phillips, Tom Wolfe, Ed McClanahan, and Truman Capote attack the question, why does one write new journalism? And what distinct perspective does it demand? First, Alix Kates Shulman, then Tom Wolfe.

ALIX KATES SHULMAN: Perhaps one of the big motives for writing is to give some kind of permanent meaning, anyway, more than fleeting meaning to things that have happened to you. And people are very glad to have their experiences given, or rather to have the meanings of their experiences made accessible to others.

I think it's almost an impulse that everybody has. It's part of that desire to talk. People are social animals. It's part of the reason that we tell stories at all to each other. It's not always to get somebody to do something.

I think you want to share experience. And so I am happy to use anything I can lay my hands on. Naturally, when you start writing, you have more material to draw on than later because it hasn't been used.

But somebody else asked me yesterday if I didn't feel that I'd used up all my material in my first novel, if I didn't shoot my wad. And then what was I going to do after that? And I told him, and we'll tell you that when you write a piece of fiction, no matter how long-- it could be eight volumes long, it's still a very tiny distillation of experience.

There are only a certain number of ideas that can cohere together in a work that will fit between several covers. And a life is endlessly longer than that of not only the life you've lived, but the life of all your friends and all the things you can make up and all of the glossies.

And then there are many writers. I happen to think most of the great writers who have one subject that they write endlessly over and over and over again. I think there's something really obsessional about novelists, fiction writers. You get your subject or as it's frequently called, voice.

There's something of a difference, but they do overlap. You have a voice that's appropriate to a subject. You get your subject or your shtick or your obsession, and you try to work it out. You do it over and over and over again. And you can, you just again, you take authentic feelings, authentic passions, obsessions, concerns, and you use anything you can to illustrate it.

There was one other thing I wanted to say, but I've forgotten what it is. So instead, I'll read you a very short quotation from Susan Sontag. She says artists are memory specialists, professional curators of consciousness, which strikes me as exactly right. That's what I try to do.

I'm a memory-- I think of myself as a memory specialist, so I don't go out in the world. I do go into my own mind and try and remember what somebody said 20 years ago and why what it meant and why it had such a long reverberation in my head.

TOM WOLFE: When Alix mentioned the idea of being a curator of consciousness, it just-- I suddenly said to myself, have I ever preserved my own consciousness at all? I wonder if I have. I've mostly tried to project myself into the central nervous systems of other people.

The individual, the self can become a kind of trap too, because I think a lot of people, when they start getting in a lot of journalists, when they start getting into this area, will immediately rush into the belief that all you need to do is reach down your gullet and pull up your innards and spread them out on the table for everybody.

And that's going to be something refreshing and honest and new and everything. And because it comes-- at first, it's very seductive to use the first person in journalism, because you've solved a lot of technical problems.

You've got point of view established. You have a main character already and created yourself. And a lot of things that give a focus to the story are implanted in it immediately. But it can also get in the way.

And I think the work in non-fiction of Norman Mailer is a very good example. The first person is going to work best if you yourself were in fact a central character in the event.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Tom Wolfe, he added that the elements of new journalism are scene by scene construction, status detail, realistic dialogue, and presenting the point of view through the eyes of the subject.

Wolfe told us of his own entry into new journalism. During his writing of the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby piece for Esquire magazine, a work that studied the phenomenon of drag car building and racing.

He found that he couldn't relate the story in traditional print form. So he wrote notes on what he'd experienced to the editor of Esquire using the techniques of new journalism just outlined. He was told that a writer would organize his thoughts and print the story.

Instead, the material was printed in the form that Wolfe submitted, essentially a chronological memo of what he'd experienced while researching the story. Thus, the beginning of what we now call new journalism.

TOM WOLFE: This taught me a number of valuable things, one of which is that I had, in effect, written a letter to one person. And I think all of us know people who are terrific letter writers, particularly when they're writing to someone they feel they can trust, someone about their own age.

And when they do not think that other people are looking over their shoulders, when they don't think that the teachers whom they respect, the critics whom they fear, and other people in the literary world whom they are afraid of are going to be watching.

And the same person who can write a wonderful letter will end up writing the worst term paper, the worst article for the newspaper, the worst magazine article you can possibly imagine, because they are performing the worst and most repressive act known in literature, which is self-censorship.

That really is the worst discipline. More harm is done through self-censorship than the action of all the collective governments of the world and in many ways.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: Another conference participant, BJ Phillips, contributing editor for Ms. Magazine, spoke about her experience with first person writing.

BJ PHILLIPS: That constant use of the I by people without either enough to say or enough talent to say it well, whatever, really kind of gave new journalism a bad name to a certain extent.

And for my own purposes, scared me about the use of the first person pronoun so terribly that it was like it was 1974 before I really ever used it in any way at all.

I mean, you cannot-- you can go back and look and count the eyes on the fingers of one hand. And it's that kind of stuff that sort of I didn't want to know about this guy's guts. He didn't have much in it, you know. There wasn't much there. He hadn't seen much.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: On the other hand, Philip spoke of new journalism as an intimate experience, despite the risk of first person subjectivity.

BJ PHILLIPS: Now what I believe is that it has to go beyond that. I think there comes a point where the difference between fiction and nonfiction completely breaks down in the sense that it's meaningless.

And that what we as writers need to be willing to do is to push across it ourselves and to bring readers with us and publishers with us to a sort of an understanding of the real separate reality between what can be captured journalistically, whether it's by a camera, or just somebody with a notebook.

That separate reality and the other inner reality, which has always been-- that's always been the bailiwick of fiction, so we've been told. I think it's the proper place for journalism too or at least some kinds of journalism.

I mean, I would hate to try and apply that to a Gerald Ford press conference simply because it would be so boring. But I think that if anybody else is feeling, if any other journalists are feeling what I'm feeling and I've talked to some recently who seem to be sharing it, that's where we're headed.

We're going to write neo novels and people are-- readers are going to have to learn-- are going to have to learn that expectation in us. And they're going to have to suspend some disbelief about certain things and take some belief in other things. And we're going to have to quit talking about the fine line between the non-libelous and the thing that you bloody well know is the truth.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: BJ Phillips, contributing editor for Ms. Magazine, speaking about new journalism at the UND Writers conference. Another participant, Ed McClanahan, frequent contributor to Playboy and Esquire magazines, spoke about his new journalism perspective in the context of a book he and his wife, Cia, are writing, a book about country music entitled Saturday Night-- Honkytonking in Hard Times.

ED MCCLANAHAN: The purposes of the book we have even gone so far. We were made uncomfortable by the prospect of writing about two people named Ed and Cia, quote, "Ed" and quote, "Cia."

And just because of the way that that's an exercise in ego. And so as an antidote to that, we've even gone so far as to adopt fictional persona for ourselves, alter egos.

Our names in the book are-- my name is Shorty Sizemore, and Cia's name is Billie Sizemore. We got the names from an old souvenir ashtray we bought one time from homer, Alaska, and said, Billy and Shorty, Homer, Alaska on it.

And I asked a friend of mine, I said, what do you think Billy and Shorty's last name is? And he said, Sizemore. So he must know something we don't know. So that's us. Well, OK, off of that, the thing that I'm interested in, in what Tom said and what Alix said and for that matter and what B.J's doing is the autobiographical presence of the writer in his work.

And in pursuit of Saturday Night, we've now traveled 15,000 miles or so back and forth across the country. And what we do is go to a lot of bars. It's a hazardous pursuit, I'll tell you. You muddy your mind and liquefy your gizzard and then go home and try to write about it. There's a lot of built-in hazards in the trade.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Ed McClanahan currently writing a book entitled Saturday Night-- Honkytonking in Hard Times. Truman Capote was also on hand for this year's UND Writers Conference.

He's considered, along with Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and others as being one of the forerunners of the new journalism. During a panel discussion, he gave his rationale for writing what he's labeled the nonfiction novel. And Cold Blood is an example of that type of work.

TRUMAN CAPOTE: It was not meant to be subjective in any way. In fact, that was the whole point, was that I wanted to take a journalistic subject or factual piece of information and apply to it all the techniques that a fiction writer would be able to use, which journalists don't often use or never have, to my particular knowledge.

And I wanted to write a narrative that read a prose narrative that was absolutely true, but that read like a novel. Now, while I was doing this, when I began writing that book, which was in the autumn of 1959, Norman Mailer came to see me one day.

And I was trying to describe to him what it was I was doing that I was gathering all of this information, that I was following this case, and that I was going to write a book that would read exactly like a novel, but in fact, every word of it would be true. Well, he couldn't get this through his head.

He just kept looking at me in total astonishment. And he said, well, he said, what I think this represents is the failure of imagination on your part. He said, I think the only reason you're doing this is because you just don't at the moment feel sufficient creativity to write a real novel.

And I said, well, Norman, that's absolutely nonsense, because the whole point of this is that it is an extension of one's imagination. It's applying a whole new dimension to writing a novel. No, no, no, says he disappears.

Three years later, the book comes out, a huge success. One year later, Norman Mailer writes a book exactly using the full technique that I did, and is now made a complete career out of stealing the whole thing from me. And never gave me any credit either.

DENNIS HAMILTON: During Capote's evening address, he expanded on what he meant by the nonfiction novel. He had said that it was the writer's duty to stay out of the story. But there is one qualification.

TRUMAN CAPOTE: The greatest single technical difficulty I had in writing that book was to keep myself out of it, never to appear in any way, never to give you my opinion of anything. It's a pure process of selectivity of detail.

One of the great problems, if I was going to do that, is to give credibility to conversations that people are having. Well, where was he? I mean, ordinarily a writer gets around that by saying, I was there and they said such and such to me and so forth.

I decided I was not going to be there, because that to me was destroying the whole point of the experiment I was making of trying to write a novel, which was real, but in which you were not in any way subjectively involved.

So what I did was perfectly obvious is that all of these things that these people are thinking in and you're inside of their head is because they told me so. And I didn't reconstitute it. I just reproduced it exactly as it was told to me.

Of course. I mean, it's all in selectivity. So naturally, there's a lot of distortion there. I mean, it isn't literally true because nothing can be literally true when you have to select detail to make-- but that makes it all the more truer, of course, that's the whole process of poetry.

I think anything can be used as a subject. It's a method. But the one thing that's wrong about it and the thing that most people don't understand either about what I mean by the nonfiction novel or, in fact, what indeed is the new journalism, is that these things, these experiences have to be lived through by you for them to be truly effective.

I don't think you can simply go and collect a lot of data and a lot of newspaper clippings and a lot of information and recreate something because all you're doing then is an historical novel. It's not at all-- I mean, if I hadn't lived through every single day of In Cold Blood for 5 and 1/2 years, I could never have written that book.

It just wouldn't have been any good. That's what made it different. When people like Norman Mailer decided to do their version of the thing, armies of the night, which he called a novel is history, well, it's a good book, but also he had to live through it.

It wasn't something that he was reporting at second hand because that's the real difference between the new journalism and the old journalism. It's not the only difference, but it's one of the main ones.

DENNIS HAMILTON: But how does an author remain detached from material he's been collecting for over five years, as was the case in Capote's In Cold Blood? He was asked if he hadn't had some personal reaction to the executions at the end of the book.

TRUMAN CAPOTE: I was extremely upset. I mean, in the book, of course, I just described the execution itself. But because in the book I don't ever appear as a person. I never express any opinion about anything.

As for myself personally, I was very, very, very upset. And even actually had a minor nervous breakdown over the whole thing. I couldn't write or work for about three or four months. Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: What do you think about who is the father of new journalism?

TRUMAN CAPOTE: Who is the father of the new journalism? You're looking at him, Daddy.

[LAUGHTER]

And on that very happy and egotistical note.

[APPLAUSE]

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: Truman Capote, one of the participants at the seventh annual University of North Dakota Writers Conference. In a moment, Denis and I will be back with more.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DENNIS HAMILTON: Now that you have a firm grasp of new journalism, we're going to talk about media and the politics of literature. Another topic of discussion at the UND Writers Conference. We begin by listening to BJ Phillips, Ms. contributing editor and Tom Wolfe, whose best described at this point as a new journalist and a very stylish dresser.

He never appeared at the conference in anything short of a vested, tailored suit and was what you might call a contrast to the rest of us downhome folk. At any rate, we now hear Phillips and Wolfe enter into a discussion on how publishing politics has affected their writing careers.

BJ PHILLIPS: The politics of people who do the decision making in journalism and literature or whatever can make life very difficult for those ideas and people and happenings who don't comprise the common knowledge or the vast given about which we write, and particularly in journalism as opposed to fiction forms.

Everybody covers the same thing. I mean, all the time over and over again, there is no difference really in the front pages of newspapers from one end of this country to another. There's no difference in the news on television.

And this sort of vast idea of vision of the world that is-- and which is to say, among other things, politics that is shared by the people in power. And it can shift. It can change. I don't know how much it has clearly improved somewhat for the traditional elites of this society-- Blacks, Chicanos, women, Indians, all the rest of it.

But my own personal experience is really interesting and watching things change. When I worked for Time Magazine, the last issue of Time Magazine I worked on was in April-- I think it was dated April the 2nd, 1972. And it was an entire issue given over to women.

And every department of the entire book from front to back, dealt with women's issues. And I was writing a story on the women's movement. And it was the longest, hardest political struggle I had in two years at Time Magazine, as well as the longest, hardest personal struggle with the editors of the magazine.

The story went through four different revisions, which was three more than I had ever written on anything before, and which is a little hard to understand considering that I had written about things like salt talks. You would think that, I mean, that's complicated too.

Anyhow, the last revision, the fifth revision, which I refused to make, came after an argument with my editor over the inclusion of some material from an interview with Susan Brownmiller. Everybody knows Susan's book, Rape,

And it was about rape. She at that point was just beginning work on this book. And I wanted this quote in. And the editor wanted it out. And we argued back and forth and back and forth. And he finally said to me, well, you're too tough minded a lady journalist to believe what she said.

And I began to scream at him something about, you don't know and you can't know. And for God's sake, do not assume about me that I agree with you because I don't. It got a little nasty. But anyhow, nobody was-- I didn't cry. I would like to report I didn't cry.

And I would like to report that he didn't hit me, which therefore proves that if nothing else Time Magazine is somewhat civilized place. Well, two years later, three years later, Susan Brownmiller with-- how many other women? 10, is on the cover of Time Magazine, Woman of the Year, for precisely the thing that I could not bludgeon into that magazine two years earlier, three years earlier.

TOM WOLFE: I'd like just for a second to come to the defense of Time Magazine. It seems to me that what really happens at time is that there is a lag, but there's a very short one.

In other words, and it's true all throughout the literary world and throughout journalism, I think. There is something I think of as an intellectual sphere, which is its own world. And people in journalism, even in television, are in it now. And people in the literary world.

And it has its own-- its own values. And there is an almost obsessive desire to be hip. So as soon as time finds out that it is hip to be for the women's movement or to get in on it, they will do it.

And I imagine that editors, as soon-- if editors just heard what you just said then starting this afternoon, they'll reverse it. And it'll only happen to the boys in the books. And this was what was ironic when Agnew attacked television news.

Two things were true when Agnew made his famous speech about television. First was it was the height of gall for him to insinuate that television commentators like Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley and the rest of them had been exercising independent judgment.

As everyone, I mean, they had been faithfully reading AP wire copy for 20 years and to be accused of exercising their minds at this point I think was something for which Agnew should not be forgiven.

But his having done this, nevertheless, upped the status of television news by a tremendous leap because he, Agnew, was the bad guy within the intellectual sphere of the media.

So suddenly television news were the good guys, no matter how bad. And it's still to this day, it is so abysmal. There are about three reporters and they always play up one of them, Daniel Schorr. He's one of the three people in television who does any legwork. It's dreadful.

But now it's on a marvelous pedestal. So by the time that Edward Epstein, a very gifted journalist, in my opinion, wrote his book called News From Nowhere about the television-- the way television news is put together, he was caught in the lag switching, the lag switch.

He was for The New Yorker magazine. This was really, in effect, a denunciation of television news. Well, by this time, television were the good guys. So The New Yorker tore this book to shreds before they finally published a part of it so that television news would not look so bad.

This kind of sphere also operates in this way. It's very easy to appear brave in public as a literary figure if you simply repeat the catch phrases of this sphere. So you have someone like Gore Vidal, who loves to appear outrageous on television by saying that we have all been-- we're now subject to the idiot syndrome and that only idiots are allowed in the White House. And he'll point to Nixon. He points to Ford.

And this is-- when he says this on the Johnny Carson show, which is usually where it's being said. This seems like God, this outrageous. Devil may care politically brave Gore Vidal. But if he said the opposite, that would be a brave statement within the sphere that he actually lives.

If he said Gerald Ford, despite what has been said recently, is the greatest intellectual leader since Confucius. Now that would be brave within the literary world. In fact, it wouldn't be tolerated very long.

I used to go around-- I used to get tired of hearing Eisenhower in the '50s described as this lobotomy case who was being trundled through the corridors of the White House. So I used to go around saying, well, you know, Eisenhower reads seven newspapers every morning, one from Germany-- he reads Le Monde, one from Barcelona.

And just to-- of course, I don't know what-- I don't know what he read in the morning because he probably just read the New York Review of Books. I don't know, somehow within this sphere, I get tired of hearing the right things all the time.

But what I'm trying to make is that this-- not only within the, say, the larger society, but within the little society that is called literature and journalism, there's also these sets of givens that you're just expected to follow.

And it clouds men's minds. They don't look beyond. When NBC made a documentary recently called What's Revisited. And they went back to the Watts section of Los Angeles to see what had happened. And 10 years later, after the great burning of the Watts area, to see whether all the public programs that helped the folks.

And they found that the place was still a shambles. And there was this sort of heart rending thing called Watts revisited with a lot of the locals on the front stoop with hypodermic needles falling out of their brachial veins.

And they thought they had done a great thing for the folks by doing-- we're going to show America that nothing has been done for the people of Watts. And they were really proud of what they'd done.

The people of that area were furious because they said, don't you realize that everybody who could has moved out of there. And now there's a whole section of South Central Los Angeles, which is full of what is rather proudly known as the Black Archie Bunker's.

These are law and order folks who are Black, who have their own homes. They have a job they go to every day. They come home at night. They turn on the television set, they drink a beer and they play with a baby like everybody else.

And they hate the idea that they are being presented as Watts revisited. You go a little further west, you get up to an area called Baldwin hills, which I had never heard of. You get up there and you find that you can tell right away it's a terrific Los Angeles neighborhood because there are no people, except Japanese gardeners.

A man from Mars would think it's a Japanese area. The Japanese gardeners with high powered hoses washing off the palm leaves one by one. And you never do see the inhabitants. It's just like Beverly Hills in that respect, or Bel Air or Holmby Hills in Los Angeles.

You never see the inhabitants because they're inside the house. The garage is attached to the house. When they leave the house, they go into the garage, they get in the car, they press the genie button, the door goes up automatically. They back out of the garage.

The windows of the car are tinted. So you still don't see them. So you still think it's a Japanese neighborhood. But this is a Black-- an extremely well-to-do Black neighborhood. And I think that a lot of us within the world of [INAUDIBLE] or whatever don't see the folks because of our own assumptions.

And even people like the Hardhats become as a tremendous surprise. The Hardhats burst into the language one day in April of 1970. Nobody had ever heard of them before. These guys, they work for a living, doing construction work.

Suddenly there they were. And then a bunch of terms will then come into the language all of a sudden as a kind of catch up operation takes place n to give labels to all the things you should have seen five years before. Everybody, but me is guilty of what I've just said.

BJ PHILLIPS: When you say sphere of, it's a polite word for incestuousness, really. The fact is that, to a large extent, we only talk to each other. And the people who will talk to us, which is almost no one whom you would want to know. Who will talk to journalists? Politicians, press agents, people who've got an ax to grind and view you as a wheel?

The whole-- the whole celebrity thing. Basically, we talk to ourselves and those who will put up with talking to us and a scurvy, a bunch of people, in many respects you would never want to meet.

And you get into this sort of intellectual incest, on the one hand, it can be funny. It's sort of humorous that we didn't know that there was such a thing as hard hats until the day they went and beat up some kids in New York City.

But it's insidious. The thing about it is that until Tet of 1968, if you were to read Time, Newsweek, Life, the New York Times, the Washington Post, read those editorial pages, everybody was in favor of the war.

Now immediately after Tet, the doves just came cracking out of their shells everywhere. It was really incredible. And then for the next four years, the American media did no longer believe in Vietnam. This is in the broad sense, painting this very broadly.

But during this period after Tet, what happened was the same bunch of people who had now essentially shifted their attitude toward the war went along for a period of four years with Richard Nixon accepting that he was winding the war down.

And that for many, many months was our incestuous given. Nobody ever said, at least again, in the major ones. Nobody ever said it on the Nightly News and stuff. If he's winding it down, how come 1/3 of all the fatalities have occurred since he's been in office.

And this figure was solid as of like November of 1971. A third of the people killed were killed under Nixon's administration. And yet at Time Magazine, we were writing about how the war was winding down.

And in the Washington Post and the New York Times, it would be as sort of laughable and simply sociological as the sex practices of obscure tribes somewhere, except for the fact that it's a lot more serious than that.

And things go on in this country or don't go on or allowed to continue or however you want to put it based on what we decide as we talk to one another is the truth. I kind of wonder in my own heart of hearts whether any of this that we call journalism should be tolerated by a really thinking society.

Any craft that limits the lines, that limits truth in the way that this craft limits it with the requirement that it be old or new, factual, fair, well-investigated, proven, and all the rest of it.

Despite all the games that we play, I'm not sure that we ought to exist as all our games do is limit us in the most basic kinds of ways because they keep us out of each other's lives.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: BJ Phillips and Tom Wolfe discussing the media and the politics of literature. At this point in the panel, Alix Kates Shulman, feminist author, entered the discussion.

She claims feminist-oriented writings have been preempted in the publishing world by such subjects as ecology and other concerns attractive to the mass media. It is within that sort of publishing attitude that she says she experiences political interference.

ALIX KATES SHULMAN: Right now I think the establishment has decided that, for example, women's novels or women's book is out. It's reached its peak, it's sold all its copies, and now we're onto something else.

I think it was succeeded by environment. I'm not sure. But what happens is that they-- even though they don't reflect reality, these publishing decisions, because in fact, the spread of feminist ideas is only increasing, as you can tell by any number of independent facts.

Still, these people do have a feedback effect into the culture. If they decide that a certain subject is no longer to be dealt with, then indeed that word gets spread and it has a political consequence.

So it always goes both ways. This reflecting reality, and then influencing reality, which brings me to always the heart of the question of what you're supposed to write about. I mean, there's always that question, are you trying to write about reality as you see it, as you know it, or are you trying to change reality?

And in this country, again, this mystique of the artist makes it almost a sin for an artist, a novelist, to have any aspirations to change things. For some reason in this country, though, certainly not in the literary traditions in Europe, you're supposed to be apolitical.

You're not supposed to have a politics. And if you're an artist, you're supposed to be above politics and your work is ruined if you are concerned with politics. This is such a crazy thing when the whole publishing industry is so political, and certainly what gets published changes consciousness.

And I can see that in journalism, it must be even more schizophrenic for you. There are things that are crying to be written about. You want to write about them, but you're told by your editors that, that isn't the line you can pursue this year.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: Alix Kates Shulman, one of the participants at the seventh annual UND Writers conference. Now that we've aired for you the insights of the literary world concerning new journalism and the pitfalls of publishing, Tom Wolfe and BJ Phillips are going to offer some suggestions on how you can get published. First, Wolfe gives you a short course he's titled, "How to Get Published in 2 and 1/2 Months."

TOM WOLFE: I have a formula, which I mean, which is a serious one. If there's anyone in this audience who wants to get literary stardom fast within, say, 2 months or 2 and 1/2 months, or at least a book contract, there is literally a way to do it, which tells you a little bit about the way people in the publishing world and literary world think.

What you should do is write two hot articles for The Village Voice. Accept whatever they offer you. In about a year ago, it was a $35 for an article. It's probably more than that now.

You lose money on the deal. But here's the psychology of this. To this day, editors and publishers like to discover waifs. And they like if you write-- to this day, they also seem to think that if you're writing for The Village Voice, you're kind of a waif who can be reached down to and helped, even though The Village Voice has the largest circulation of any weekly newspaper in America, and of the fattest advertising lineage of any newspaper in America. But to this, for some reason, editors and publishers still look to that as an underground sheet in their psychologically.

And they do not like to discover people who have just gotten $3,500 from the Ladies' Home Journal or $4,500 from Playboy or 7,000 or up to 17,000 from The New Yorker because it's no fun discovering somebody who's making that much money.

Your munificence is not shining if you do that. Literally-- because I know of many cases where this has happened, people like Richard Goldstein, Barbara Long, and others who have been discovered on the basis of two articles in The Village Voice.

The first, if you-- they have to be good, but we're assuming that there's nothing but talent in the room here. So we don't have to worry about what is actually written. Once this is done, then starts the courtship, which involves-- which if you write these two pieces, I assure you that you will be invited to at least 12 of the greatest lunches you've ever had in your life.

There's a belt of restaurants in the East and West '50s in Manhattan, in New York, that is supported totally by the publishing industry. In these places, there are these marvelous three-and-a-half, four-hour Lucullan lunches. And you'll get one after another at places like the Italian Pavilion, the Cote Basque, and on and on and on.

And these things will start off with two or three tequila sunrises or whatever is in fashion at that particular moment in the way of drinks before. The Cream Senegalese, the Lobster Cardinale, the Veal Valdostana with that bone sticking up into mid air like this.

Some pear halves. Harry and David, you'll have a little Zabaglione at the end and you'll have some Courvoisier VSOP and a couple of Montecruz cigars, if you like cigars. And this will go on and on and on until you finally sign with one of these publishers.

And at this point, if you sign a book contract, you get no more-- the courtship is over. You get no more lunches. But you've gotten the contract, which was one of the things you wanted to get in the first place.

It's really a very simple thing, if you will play upon the need of those in authority to reach down and help you. And it's actually a pretty wide open thing in this country. You already have the biggest political thing licked right away, which is if you want to be a successful writer, you should be born in a political powerful country.

But most of you have probably managed to do that. So that's taken care of. You try to think of all, what is the most famous Romanian writer you know, or the most famous Lithuanian writer? Whereas if you are a fifth rate poet like Yevtushenko, you can be famous. So you've got to pick your country too. With those two lofty remarks, I will let others pick up from there.

BJ PHILLIPS: I would like to recommend another way-- I mean, may as well get something useful out of this, right? Like work. There's another way-- this is sort of flanking The Village Voice, and eating in lousy restaurants.

But this is how to become rich and famous via the newspaper route. And since there are only three newspapers left now in New York, there's not-- you've got to go somewhere else.

And the best place to start is in college. Become a buckaroo. And after you become a buckaroo, then you can become an investigative reporter. And that's the hot ticket right now. The sort of Woodward Bernstein thing.

Put somebody in jail. That is so easy to do. And you can start here with that. You just think like Henry Kissinger. The Americans love the cowboy riding into the town alone. Remember that, the Oriana Fallaci interview.

And just think of yourself as a kind of a journalistic buckaroo. Pick yourself a target and start checking it out. As soon as you get a politician in jail, that's an enterprise that should not take more than six weeks.

Then you become American journalism's currently fair-haired, baby boy or girl, as the case may be. Mostly boy, I might add. It helps if you're a fair-haired baby boy. And then after you've gotten this person in jail, see what you do is wherever it is that you're living, and it doesn't matter where, then you get an extra added advantage over the do it through New York Village Voice gambit.

They'll pay for your plane ticket sometimes so that you'll come and eat with them. And after-- you get to fly around a little bit and you eat a lot. You have to watch one thing, though, and that is that publishers think that newspaper people are essentially low brow.

But do not allow them to feed you from one of the little Sabrett hot dog carts-- hot dog carts on the corners, you know, because that shows that you don't have a real sense of your own value. Insist upon Nedick's, which is found in most subway concourses.

And in fact, it's really better if you insist upon something like Nedick's because that gives it the Howard Hughes touch-- the sort of business in the bathroom thing. An investigative reporter should have a little bit of mystique about him, kind of like I can look at you and know about your 69 tax return or something similar.

So you should move around in subways and bathrooms. And if you don't get arrested, then you can become very famous. And Robert Redford is waiting for another role. What can I tell you?

DENNIS HAMILTON: BJ Phillips and Tom Wolfe with some suggestions as to how you can become a literary star.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: One other UND Writers Conference participant was North Dakota poet Larry Woiwode, now living in Manhattan. He is the author of What I'm Going to Do, I Think and Beyond the Bedroom Wall, a book up for the National Book Award. Why would he took part in two panel discussions? But we thought for the purpose of this capsule, look at the Writers Conference, we'd give you a sample of his poetry.

LARRY WOIWODE: Every night when I'm not able to sleep and scrolls of words and formulas unfurl in my mind and faces of those I love, both living and dead rise from the dark, accusing me of apathy, ambition, self-indulgence, neglect.

All of their accusations just. And there's no hope of rest. I try again to retrace the street. It's an unpaved street and it's the color of my hand. It's made up mostly of the clay gumbo from the flat and tilting farmlands all around this village so small it can be seen through from all sides.

And it's on graded surfaces, generally overrun with ruts that are slippery and water-filled and spring, iron like and summer, verdant fall with frost as phosphorescent and as mountain ridges and the moon's crust.

And in winter buried beyond all thought, except for any thought that clay or gravel or the booted feet of people crossing ice covered snow above might have. It's the main street of Heil, North Dakota, and it's one block long.

[APPLAUSE]

STEPHANIE JOHNSON: Larry Woiwode reading the beginning piece in his novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall.

DENNIS HAMILTON: With that reading, we end this report on the seventh annual University of North Dakota Writers Conference. The conference was held the third week of March with most events held on the UND Campus in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I'm Dennis Hamilton with Stephanie Johnson. Thanks for joining us.