David Riedel, a recent graduate in English, received acceptance into the Lit Camp Juried Writer’s Conference, a respected camp that unifies authors, agents and publishers, to help writers circulate their works.
“Just like any undergraduate, I had no idea what to do,” Riedel said. “I graduated and I was like, ‘Guess I’m gonna be a janitor somewhere.’”
“Then I emailed Arielle [Zibrak] and I said, ‘I need help.’ I had some vague idea of what I had to do, but I had no idea the steps to take in between to get there.”
Riedel began working on his personal story manuscript in English Professor Arielle Zibrak’s first-person narrative course. He later refined the manuscript as part of his honor’s thesis with the help of former UW English Professor Caskey Russell and Management and Marketing assistant lecturer Eric Krszjzaniek.
“She gave me a ton of advice and then a day later she sent me two or three things,” Riedel recalled. “She said ‘You should apply to these, I think you could get it.’ So then I just applied without really knowing much about the camp before this.”
“Once I read into it, I was like, ‘I’m from Wyoming. That’s not for me.’ But you gotta do it for her, right, she’s giving you the advice. So I applied and then they sent me an email that I got in and I was shocked.”
The conference only permits 40 of the most talented and promising writers of fiction, memoir and narrative nonfiction to participate in the literature camp at the Bell Valley Retreat Center in Mendocino County, CA.
Riedel’s work revolves around the journey of unraveling his father, Pat Mcguire’s, past, growing up in a small Wyoming community, and people that were important to him.
“It’s obviously like a crazy personal story. Ever since I can remember there’s been this piece missing from my life. I grew up and I didn’t know who my dad was when I was younger. I find out that it’s weird, it’s really nebulous. Nobody wants to talk about it. And then I’m finally told, at like 10 or 12 years old, that my dad’s Pat McGuire, who at the time was off and on homeless in Laramie.”
“I don’t know if he was ever diagnosed with schizophrenia, but he was mentally ill. It became this thing to know who he is. But it was impossible every time we interacted with him. And it was really difficult for me and my brothers.”
“So, he passed away in 2009. You get to a point where you’re focused on work and all this stuff doesn’t matter. But once I became a father, it became this thing where ‘I have a son and he inevitably is gonna want to know who his grandfather is and I don’t know that I can adequately explain who his grandfather is because there’s this mountain of madness that you have to climb and sift through to even get a picture of who he was. So that sort of started the drive where it was ‘I have to just for my own sake, lay this out on the table and flatten it out.’
“Then maybe I could give it to my brothers and they can read it and it helps them do the same thing. Then the people who’ve never even heard of Pat can feel that out and do the same thing. It’s like drawing a map of that for myself and then for anybody who’s remotely interested.”
“To be honest, I’ve always known that this has been one of those things that I have to write,” Riedel said. “Ever since I was young, people would ask me about the story. And everybody wanted to know, anybody who had any sort of inkling about this local Laramie story was like, ‘Tell me about that story.’”
