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September 1993, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s a shimmering Indian summer Sunday afternoon and I’m walking alone across the Schenley Park Bridge, above what readers of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh will recognize as the Cloud Factory. I’ve just left a writers’ conference at the University of Pittsburgh where literary lions like Tobias Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oates have held forth, and I’m headed for WRCT at Carnegie Mellon University to talk about it on a friend’s radio magazine. I’m one year out of Pitt, taking tickets for minimum wage at a science museum, scribbling book and record reviews for a soon-to-be-defunct weekly, and wondering just what I thought I was going to do with a creative writing degree. I’m also wondering what I’m going to say about the conference that won’t sound bitter and self-denying when I become aware of a human presence walking behind me, a little too close for comfort on the empty skywalk. I turn with a practiced defensive scowl and it melts from my face.
