I RECEIVED AN EMAIL today from writer Nancy Edwards talking about me getting mentioned in a newspaper article.

She’s a student at my Random Writers Workshop. The irony is she was my college English professor in the early 1990s. I always point this out. At a recent memoir event I blamed my last twenty years of typos on her. She never gets embarrassed.

Along with a sweet Happy New Year’s message, she said we were both mentioned in a December newspaper article about the closing of Russo’s Books. “It was a short list of  6 or 7, so I was very appreciative,” she wrote.

The article was written by Gerald Haslam. He also mentioned Lee McCarthy, Ann Williams, Chris Brewer, Larry J. Martin, Don Thompson and Frank Bidart. He said Russo’s “made it easier for newcomers to establish their own audiences, so a new generation of Bakersfield authors emerged.”

He’s right about what Russo’s has done for area writers. I first fumbled my way through their doors as a young writer ten years ago.

I would add the names of my Invisible Memoirs students, some who never read at Russo’s, or sold books there, but I think were connected to the store through the selling of the first volume. Kimberly Navarro, Lizz Tonoco, Jane Hawley, Melinda Carroll, and Ann Cook come to mind. And other aspiring writers like Patty Wonderly. She was a student of mine at Russo’s when it hosted Random Writers Workshop in 2009. I’m leaving out probably half a dozen names (someone will remind me).

I was surprised Haslam wrote an article about the bookstore. Don’t recall ever having read a news article by him. Always knew he had a special relationship with Russo’s. An author can tell what kind of relationship another author has by how books are placed in a store. Haslam’s books were always prominently displayed.

I’ve read some of Haslam’s work. In college I had to read short stories from Coming of Age in California. Years later I perused his Workin’ Man Blues and Straight White Male. I have a copy of Many Californias on my shelf.

I talked to him twice (which is why I’m surprised I was mentioned). He said to keep up the writing, that he didn’t have any success until he was thirty-eight. I was in my late twenties when I tracked him down at a library. I was a young writer, desperate to connect with writers. Desperate for answers. Desperate for the “game plan.” Desperate to get noticed. I essentially was what many writers still are: stumbling, bumbling, poor at the craft of writing, and egotistical.

I had come out of a graduate school department in U.S. historical studies with one professor telling me I was the brightest graduate student in ten years. Another professor told me my memoir was a work of genius (It wasn’t).

None of that helped me when it came to my meeting with Haslam. I gave him a copy of my terribly written memoir. It’s the same book I stupidly gave to Bakersfield Californian columnist Herb Benham, (I think he later told me it made for a good coffee coaster). It’s the same memoir I plan on rewriting this year, a story of cross-country adventure and counterculture in the mid-1990s. It’s a book nearly fifteen years in the making.

Haslam wasn’t overly friendly. He wasn’t unreceptive. In fact, he was probably more receptive than I’ve been with many young writers.

When I didn’t hear back I got frustrated. I contacted him. He said he couldn’t open the file. I told friends it was an RTF (rich text file). “No way Haslam couldn’t open it. Was a universal file,” I said.

I didn’t consider it going in the trash at first. That notion came a few months later.

When Straight White Male came out I got paranoid. I wondered if he’d farmed my memoir for any material. I went to a professor and had a conversation about it. I was being really stupid.

I learned from that time and realize I was acting paranoid like many creative people get. We think our ideas are so good, so original, that we want to share and sell them. We then get pissed off and turn into big babies when we don’t get the responses we’re looking for.

I see myself in students all the time. Usually I want to say, “I acted like you once or twice.”

Now, here I am, recognized by an accomplished writer, a professor emeritus who I thought tossed my terrible writing in the trash (I would have. Maybe he did), or worse, stole a line or two.

Strange, this writing business. There’s no turf war for me outside of Bakersfield (okay, there was that one guy who said he wrote a Twitter novel before me. He was full of it. But other than that . . .) And there shouldn’t be a turf war for me within this region.

Yet there was a hidden turf war between me and Haslam (or is it me and this area?). I’ve been trying to put a different spin on literature for years. I’ve been trying to escape the “white” side of myself (I’m dual ethnic). Trying to escape writing about Okies and country music. Trying to escape oil fields, cotton and the Kern River.

I failed. The only two novels I have to sell right now are set mostly here in California’s Great Central Valley.

Big Spoon, Little Spoon is set almost completely in Bakersfield, much of it on an island in the Kern River, much of it in the Oildale of Haslam’s stories. Parts of Anhinga roams through farmland.

I ask myself this time and again: Did I finally grow up and accept many of my roots, or did Haslam get the best of me?

Haslam has helped fuel my fires. He really has. When I ask myself what success is (we all define success in one way or another) on a local level I have always thought, “Haslam.”

When The Grapes of Wrath celebrations roll into town each year (this year marking the 75th anniversary) I usually think, “Haslam. He’s going to be there. Him. That guy.”

Only, now I can smile. I can say, “That writer gave me props. He really did!”

It wasn’t deserved, but he did.