dalin
02-20-2008, 06:18 PM
SANTA MONICA LITERATURE CONFERENCE
The Memphis Conference went on for months following the closing ceremonies on February 8, 1981. The group assembled charged the WLC and the host community in Memphis with much undone work. For this reason, several members moved to Memphis for the rest of the month! One even commuted between Ohio and Memphis to help get the work done, editing pieces on the plane. The energy Fellowship-wide was tremendous. After attempts to retype the material completely proved to be beyond the skeleton crew of volunteers, a typing service was hired to do the job. They found a printer and selected the cover stock and binding style.
In Marietta, a man who had showed up for the 'Third World Literature Conference' thinking it involved third world countries, worked day and night to locate every group address in the world. His name was Roger T.
With a typing speed of two hundred words a minute, a near photographic memory and an exceptional ability to do anything the Committee needed done, Roger moved to Marietta so he could help with the work. Although his prior involvement had been primarily with A.A., he moved into N.A. lot, stock and barrel. Hardly anyone else could have taken on the task of locating all the groups in the world and followed it through to completion. Brainstorming with other members, he would call the next nearest listed meeting starting in the big cities and working his way out to the countryside. If there was a gap between major cities, or a major city with no N.A. listing, he would call A.A. helplines or hospitals seeking N.A.'s to send the review form of the Book.
Roger lived with Bo for the months following the Memphis Lit Conference and they had many talks as the work progressed. One night a man showed up on Bo's couch who had been unable to stay clean going to several other Twelve Step Fellowships. They talked about N.A. and recovery until late in the night. Before going to bed, Bo put thirty dollars of committee funds that had come in that day into the bank bag he kept in his desk. The next morning, the man was gone and so was the money. He thought honestly about all the money he was putting into the effort and took thirty dollars out of his own money and put in into the bag. He resolved to be more careful in the future.
Roger saw this and it seemed to be a funny moment. While Bo thought no more about it, subsequent events made it possible that Roger thought Bo was taking, not giving, since they looked so much alike.
Joseph had established a policy of sending Memphis Review Forms only to existing N.A. groups. Several of the members wanted copies sent to friends or doctors who had been supportive of N.A. This wasn't enough for Joseph. If they believed in N.A. so much, why hadn't they started groups or encouraged others to do so? The WLC agreed.
There was no great intent to push for approval of the review form that came to be known as the 'Gray Form.' Their was the desire for approval. Each line of the text was numbered to simplify input and subsequent processing. The GBC binding method with a plastic gripper spine which allowed the pages to lay flat. This was chosen with review in mind, not approval.
With help from all twelve local literature committees, the addresses of every locatable group in the world including Europe, India, Canada and Australia was assembled. Amazingly, the fin- ished books were sent out on time. The phone bill in Marietta only ran about five hundred dollars - a hefty sum in those days.
Money had poured in from all over the Fellowship and far exceeded the initial expenses. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, all sent money. Groups, areas and members all sent money to get the review forms sent out. It cost more to do than the projections had allowed for. No one had known about the hundreds of extra meetings that had been found. A copy of the mail list was routinely sent to WSO for their uses.
The trouble over who was supposed to mail the IP's at the last Conference gave the WLC the duty of printing and mailing review materials. This allowed the WLC to send out the unforeseen 'Gray Form.' The WSO was developing a rather cool attitude to the WLC.
The first copy of the 'Gray Form' was sent to Jimmy K. in sincere gratitude for all his years of help and selfless devotion to N.A. It was the greatest honor those working on the Book could give a man who had devoted his life to N.A. and helped get it all started.
Almost before the 'Gray Forms' went out, rumors began that the WLC was going to push for approval in May at the WSC. This was put into some newsletters by some members of World Lit but was never policy for the Committee with the support of it's members. The exuberant phrase 'Hardback in June' had been typed at the bottom of the first page of the Review Form. It may be that some members felt this way but it was not the position of the committee as a whole. No one had even had a chance to review the finished work. The 'Hardback in June' comment didn't help dispel the growing tension between the WLC and the WSO.
Orders for personal copies (as opposed to the free group copies paid for with contributions from the entire Fellowship through the WLC) flooded into Memphis and Marietta.
With the review form out, the Committee rested until the annual World Service Conference in late April. The phone calls and correspondence came in at an increased rate but this was normal for the Committee.
The Treasurer of the Committee was unable to deal with the figures and never turned in a financial report. Bo made an increasing number of calls to get the report as the WSC approached. The Treasurer had been elected to serve a small service Committee and the size of the project seemed to overwhelm him. This turned out to be quite an embarrassment for the WLC at the World Confer- ence. Any report from the Treasurer would have been better than no report.
The next Conference site was Santa Monica with Nolan who had attended the Memphis Conference chairing the host Committee. The Conference would be held in the Retail Clerks Union Hall one block inland from the Pacific Palisades. This was near the Santa Monica Pier and just down the coast from Malibu.
Bo had come home to an empty house. The utilities had been cut off and his wife had moved into her parents with the children. There was nothing he could do but pick up his lettering brush and try to make a little money. The marriage was irretrievably broken. One too many pretty girls had run up to him for hugs that went a little beyond Fellowship affection. He had remained devoted to her but acted out the role of ringmaster. The Committee had taken on a carnival air. The work was consistently intact but nothing could avoid the crowd effect once the crowd began to gather.
The files had grown to fill two full foot lockers. The time flew by until time came to leave for California.
The monthly mailings to lit committee members had grown into a huge project. After Memphis, the list had grown to over a thousand. The WLC used a printing press that belonged to the Rainbow Connection Newsletter. A crowd gathered each time there was a monthly mailing to get out.
The last letter cited the one problem facing the Committee to get the Basic Text done: any review form attracts input that is factored in and is published as another review form. Another form was needed for the Book to go before the Fellowship for approval. This basic idea had to be throughway understood by the Fellowship before finalization could become possible. Sending in input to change specific words would hold up the work forever. Approval required sensibility. Not sending in input on major items, the member ran the risk that no one else would catch that particular thing.
So, with everything done that could be done, the Fellowship representatives and the literature workers, began the migration to California. One man hitch-hiked from Atlanta and fresh from being stranded in the desert, showed up with a horrible sun burn. It wasn't his red hair that earned him the nick name 'Tom the Red'.
The WLC Conference in Santa Monica started one week before the World Service Conference that was again being held at Valley College in a larger room.
Early arrivals were housed in the home of a member who worked on the set of the "M.A.S.H." television series in Venice, California, a few miles south of Santa Monica. They planned and talked. When Gina showed up from Nashville, she played a tape of a song written by a member named Steve M. He and Gina had been the founders of N.A. in Nashville along with a guy named Winston. The song was called 'Step Right In' and was written one night after a meeting. Gina sang it and a rare magic filled the room.
Nolan did a wonderful job setting up the Conference. The equipment was excellent and there was plenty of room for members to sit at tables and conduct workshops.
Roger was stuck in Marietta because he couldn't afford a plane ticket. Bo took up a collection to fly him in to help with the Conference. He had done so much to help get the 'Gray Form' out to the Fellowship, it didn't seem fair to leave him out of the Conference.
Around a hundred and fifty members showed up. This was the biggest yet. Bo had some concerns about security at this one. Out of the whole world, resistance to the work was centered in one place: San Fernando Valley where the WSO was quartered. There was tension along with the spiritual energy in the air. In a recovery meeting at the Union Hall, one member shared that he had come there prepared to burn the place down. He had heard that there wasn't going to be any mention of God in the Book!
*** *** *** ***
The Basic Text did not spring ready made from thin air! Personal sacrifices by those who believed they had something to offer paved every step of the way for the Book.
Many of us had grown up with the Viet Nam War. Some had actively opposed the war and participated in the great Civil Rights Movement. At any rate, we were thinkers and the capacity to feel emotions based on reality was gradually restored by recovery. The energy unleashed by the spiritual growth offered in the Twelve Steps grew and spilled over in to the effort for the Basic Text.
Bo had to discipline himself to keep his full attention focused on the project. Others had to do the same. Had they not, we would have no Book! They were judged fairly or unfairly by those who observed.
Few have known this story of the Basic Text. Many lost jobs, families and suffered financial disaster. There was no way to pay people for the work. It had to be done by those whose motivation was for the wellbeing and future. It was a matter that fit into the category of what can we do today. They did the work before them and let God take care of the outcomes.
Few had any doubts that there would be those who judged them in terms of externals and what it would take to get them to do the work they saw others doing. Many viewers were from Los An- geles where to write is to be paid. Without the years of development there would have been an insufficient foundation to hold the work together through completion.
Bo and many of the lit workers talked from time to time about the cuts the work was making into their personal lives. They were pledged to the work and nothing would sway them. If they slowed the work to suit the understanding of all the onlookers, how could they ever hope to complete the work. They had known there would be great hardship, criticism and all the mental devils the disease of addiction could raise to stop them.
Devotion and spiritual non-attachment were their watchwords. This meant they might do all they could to insure the work would go on. They would not do anything to insure a line of text was forced on the groups of members doing edit work or that someone's friend had their story included in the Text. All who submitted stories with release forms had their stories in the review form. There could be no favorites.
Their commitment was that the work would go on. How it went was up to the members who came and contributed their part by doing the work. The literature workers tried to be servants in the best sense of the word providing for the needs of the literature workers without interfering or hindering the directions the material took as it was processed. This allowed them to serve without feeling that they were dominating or controlling the work or it's content.
While in retrospect it might seem that this was a contrived method, put together by Bo or other committee officers, it was more an evolution of approaches which suited attending members. It felt right. Members involved all felt welcome and were adored by the lit workers. Nothing else was ever considered.
The Committee depended on momentum and hard work to screen out those who sought personal glory in the work. That kind is too lazy to work hard, especially for an ideal. Again, this is visible only in retrospect and wasn't done with this effect in mind. Unfortunately, the WLC was sometimes judged by statements made by members who couldn't keep up with the pace or had strong personal attachment to ideas the WLC wouldn't support. It could have been worse. At least, they went forward to completion.
This method had its shortcomings but it was clearly a case where the members involved had to go with whatever solution God placed near at hand. There would be time later, once the Book was done, to work on refinements.
Bo and the others set it up so that there would be no royal- ties of any kind paid to the workers. This was important to keep the work selfless. There was a great desire that the Book would stand as a monument to the loving and caring nature of Narcotics Anonymous. Only this message was strong enough to attract a newcomer to our meetings and it was made the same with our Basic Text. Jimmy K. called N.A. the self-adjusting program. He went further to explain that this meant that as we changed ourselves, we changed the world. Also, as a Fellowship, when we needed something else, we would gradually accept it and adjust to the reality.
Proceeds from the sale of the Basic Text would pour down on the Fellowship in the form of services forever. This is what the Fellowship supported.
*** *** *** ***
The Santa Monica Literature Conference opened with the Serenity Prayer and the words from Bo, "Here we are again! What are we going to do this time?"
They went around to hear from all attending members and when that was done hammered out a plan to factor in the Fellowship's input into the 'Gray' review form.
To begin with, they had a style of editing that had been derived from the original cut and paste method. They decided to sort the input and break up into workshops, each to work on one chapter with input directed at that chapter. Each piece of input eventually would be gone over by a table of no less than ten members.
Once the input was factored in, the piece would be marked as 'Santa Monica Draft # __' and sent to typing. Secretaries were trusted to make non-substantive changes in the material and ask for help if any parts were unclear or problematic. It was understood that the material would be workshoped again and there was little fear that anything of value would be lost in the process.
Again, from a cold start without preconception, the Committee had worked out a logical, practical solution to the problem of factoring input into the review form material that satisfied both the requirement to take the Fellowships input seriously and to keep the process simple enough to be feasible.
About the third day, many members saw a need to go over the entire ten chapters as a group. The feasibility of a large group doing this was too complicated. The idea that two or three would be sufficient to insure continuity without a human selectivity was not seen as feasible. They might bias the material toward some viewpoints and away from others that might be important enough to a significant number of members to warrant inclusion. The committee had developed almost a statistical analysis attitude toward multiple pieces of similar input. If a thought was expressed in more than two items of input, it was taken very seriously and included even with difficulty.
An experimental approach to this problem was tried wherein Bo as WLC Chair, Greg as resident Trustee and a lady from Ohio named Pam as recording secretary plus a rotating additional member would go through all the material, chapter by chapter. The final would hopefully include all sides to every issue and yet have the flow and continuity to be readable. Greg, Bo, Pam and a series of members went through the entire body of the Basic Text from start to finish in this manner.
The material was to go immediately to typists and then back to the editing teams for evaluation. This small workshop took place in the main room open to all members present to come and listen in on and everyone who wanted to sat in on the edit at least once. The material was left with the typists at the end of the night's work.
Not one chapter of this material was ever found the next day. Lost or stolen, it is the only part of the Committees files ever lost throughout the entire effort. No accusations were ever lodged against any of the attending members. It would have done no good. The work simply disappeared and was never found. Everybody who had sat in on the edit felt good about the material. It is a shame that the editors the next day were denied their voice in the quality as well as the effectiveness of the technique.
Each evening, the Conference would break up and walk out to the Palisades and watch the sun go down over Malibu. As they watched the Pacific sunset, they would talk quietly about the progress of the work and personal matters.
During the Santa Monica Literature Conference, Bo went out with Nolan looking for more typewriters. They stopped by a local recovery house, trying to get one more machine. A beautiful lady with blond hair and a Manhattan accent came up and asked if there were meetings in New York City yet.
They told her no - but that they had a saying, "First the Book, then New York!" She thought about this for a moment and got time off from work to spend the rest of the week helping get the work done at the Lit Conference.
At the end of the Santa Monica Lit Conference, there was a new set of drafts for each of the Book chapters. The next conference site was set for Ohio where many of the steady support for the writing had been strong for some time.
Roger was elected to Chair the WLC when Bo stepped down.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to Story of the Basic Text - Home Page
Go to Chapter Fifteen - The Literature Process Deepens
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:42:
The Memphis Conference went on for months following the closing ceremonies on February 8, 1981. The group assembled charged the WLC and the host community in Memphis with much undone work. For this reason, several members moved to Memphis for the rest of the month! One even commuted between Ohio and Memphis to help get the work done, editing pieces on the plane. The energy Fellowship-wide was tremendous. After attempts to retype the material completely proved to be beyond the skeleton crew of volunteers, a typing service was hired to do the job. They found a printer and selected the cover stock and binding style.
In Marietta, a man who had showed up for the 'Third World Literature Conference' thinking it involved third world countries, worked day and night to locate every group address in the world. His name was Roger T.
With a typing speed of two hundred words a minute, a near photographic memory and an exceptional ability to do anything the Committee needed done, Roger moved to Marietta so he could help with the work. Although his prior involvement had been primarily with A.A., he moved into N.A. lot, stock and barrel. Hardly anyone else could have taken on the task of locating all the groups in the world and followed it through to completion. Brainstorming with other members, he would call the next nearest listed meeting starting in the big cities and working his way out to the countryside. If there was a gap between major cities, or a major city with no N.A. listing, he would call A.A. helplines or hospitals seeking N.A.'s to send the review form of the Book.
Roger lived with Bo for the months following the Memphis Lit Conference and they had many talks as the work progressed. One night a man showed up on Bo's couch who had been unable to stay clean going to several other Twelve Step Fellowships. They talked about N.A. and recovery until late in the night. Before going to bed, Bo put thirty dollars of committee funds that had come in that day into the bank bag he kept in his desk. The next morning, the man was gone and so was the money. He thought honestly about all the money he was putting into the effort and took thirty dollars out of his own money and put in into the bag. He resolved to be more careful in the future.
Roger saw this and it seemed to be a funny moment. While Bo thought no more about it, subsequent events made it possible that Roger thought Bo was taking, not giving, since they looked so much alike.
Joseph had established a policy of sending Memphis Review Forms only to existing N.A. groups. Several of the members wanted copies sent to friends or doctors who had been supportive of N.A. This wasn't enough for Joseph. If they believed in N.A. so much, why hadn't they started groups or encouraged others to do so? The WLC agreed.
There was no great intent to push for approval of the review form that came to be known as the 'Gray Form.' Their was the desire for approval. Each line of the text was numbered to simplify input and subsequent processing. The GBC binding method with a plastic gripper spine which allowed the pages to lay flat. This was chosen with review in mind, not approval.
With help from all twelve local literature committees, the addresses of every locatable group in the world including Europe, India, Canada and Australia was assembled. Amazingly, the fin- ished books were sent out on time. The phone bill in Marietta only ran about five hundred dollars - a hefty sum in those days.
Money had poured in from all over the Fellowship and far exceeded the initial expenses. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, all sent money. Groups, areas and members all sent money to get the review forms sent out. It cost more to do than the projections had allowed for. No one had known about the hundreds of extra meetings that had been found. A copy of the mail list was routinely sent to WSO for their uses.
The trouble over who was supposed to mail the IP's at the last Conference gave the WLC the duty of printing and mailing review materials. This allowed the WLC to send out the unforeseen 'Gray Form.' The WSO was developing a rather cool attitude to the WLC.
The first copy of the 'Gray Form' was sent to Jimmy K. in sincere gratitude for all his years of help and selfless devotion to N.A. It was the greatest honor those working on the Book could give a man who had devoted his life to N.A. and helped get it all started.
Almost before the 'Gray Forms' went out, rumors began that the WLC was going to push for approval in May at the WSC. This was put into some newsletters by some members of World Lit but was never policy for the Committee with the support of it's members. The exuberant phrase 'Hardback in June' had been typed at the bottom of the first page of the Review Form. It may be that some members felt this way but it was not the position of the committee as a whole. No one had even had a chance to review the finished work. The 'Hardback in June' comment didn't help dispel the growing tension between the WLC and the WSO.
Orders for personal copies (as opposed to the free group copies paid for with contributions from the entire Fellowship through the WLC) flooded into Memphis and Marietta.
With the review form out, the Committee rested until the annual World Service Conference in late April. The phone calls and correspondence came in at an increased rate but this was normal for the Committee.
The Treasurer of the Committee was unable to deal with the figures and never turned in a financial report. Bo made an increasing number of calls to get the report as the WSC approached. The Treasurer had been elected to serve a small service Committee and the size of the project seemed to overwhelm him. This turned out to be quite an embarrassment for the WLC at the World Confer- ence. Any report from the Treasurer would have been better than no report.
The next Conference site was Santa Monica with Nolan who had attended the Memphis Conference chairing the host Committee. The Conference would be held in the Retail Clerks Union Hall one block inland from the Pacific Palisades. This was near the Santa Monica Pier and just down the coast from Malibu.
Bo had come home to an empty house. The utilities had been cut off and his wife had moved into her parents with the children. There was nothing he could do but pick up his lettering brush and try to make a little money. The marriage was irretrievably broken. One too many pretty girls had run up to him for hugs that went a little beyond Fellowship affection. He had remained devoted to her but acted out the role of ringmaster. The Committee had taken on a carnival air. The work was consistently intact but nothing could avoid the crowd effect once the crowd began to gather.
The files had grown to fill two full foot lockers. The time flew by until time came to leave for California.
The monthly mailings to lit committee members had grown into a huge project. After Memphis, the list had grown to over a thousand. The WLC used a printing press that belonged to the Rainbow Connection Newsletter. A crowd gathered each time there was a monthly mailing to get out.
The last letter cited the one problem facing the Committee to get the Basic Text done: any review form attracts input that is factored in and is published as another review form. Another form was needed for the Book to go before the Fellowship for approval. This basic idea had to be throughway understood by the Fellowship before finalization could become possible. Sending in input to change specific words would hold up the work forever. Approval required sensibility. Not sending in input on major items, the member ran the risk that no one else would catch that particular thing.
So, with everything done that could be done, the Fellowship representatives and the literature workers, began the migration to California. One man hitch-hiked from Atlanta and fresh from being stranded in the desert, showed up with a horrible sun burn. It wasn't his red hair that earned him the nick name 'Tom the Red'.
The WLC Conference in Santa Monica started one week before the World Service Conference that was again being held at Valley College in a larger room.
Early arrivals were housed in the home of a member who worked on the set of the "M.A.S.H." television series in Venice, California, a few miles south of Santa Monica. They planned and talked. When Gina showed up from Nashville, she played a tape of a song written by a member named Steve M. He and Gina had been the founders of N.A. in Nashville along with a guy named Winston. The song was called 'Step Right In' and was written one night after a meeting. Gina sang it and a rare magic filled the room.
Nolan did a wonderful job setting up the Conference. The equipment was excellent and there was plenty of room for members to sit at tables and conduct workshops.
Roger was stuck in Marietta because he couldn't afford a plane ticket. Bo took up a collection to fly him in to help with the Conference. He had done so much to help get the 'Gray Form' out to the Fellowship, it didn't seem fair to leave him out of the Conference.
Around a hundred and fifty members showed up. This was the biggest yet. Bo had some concerns about security at this one. Out of the whole world, resistance to the work was centered in one place: San Fernando Valley where the WSO was quartered. There was tension along with the spiritual energy in the air. In a recovery meeting at the Union Hall, one member shared that he had come there prepared to burn the place down. He had heard that there wasn't going to be any mention of God in the Book!
*** *** *** ***
The Basic Text did not spring ready made from thin air! Personal sacrifices by those who believed they had something to offer paved every step of the way for the Book.
Many of us had grown up with the Viet Nam War. Some had actively opposed the war and participated in the great Civil Rights Movement. At any rate, we were thinkers and the capacity to feel emotions based on reality was gradually restored by recovery. The energy unleashed by the spiritual growth offered in the Twelve Steps grew and spilled over in to the effort for the Basic Text.
Bo had to discipline himself to keep his full attention focused on the project. Others had to do the same. Had they not, we would have no Book! They were judged fairly or unfairly by those who observed.
Few have known this story of the Basic Text. Many lost jobs, families and suffered financial disaster. There was no way to pay people for the work. It had to be done by those whose motivation was for the wellbeing and future. It was a matter that fit into the category of what can we do today. They did the work before them and let God take care of the outcomes.
Few had any doubts that there would be those who judged them in terms of externals and what it would take to get them to do the work they saw others doing. Many viewers were from Los An- geles where to write is to be paid. Without the years of development there would have been an insufficient foundation to hold the work together through completion.
Bo and many of the lit workers talked from time to time about the cuts the work was making into their personal lives. They were pledged to the work and nothing would sway them. If they slowed the work to suit the understanding of all the onlookers, how could they ever hope to complete the work. They had known there would be great hardship, criticism and all the mental devils the disease of addiction could raise to stop them.
Devotion and spiritual non-attachment were their watchwords. This meant they might do all they could to insure the work would go on. They would not do anything to insure a line of text was forced on the groups of members doing edit work or that someone's friend had their story included in the Text. All who submitted stories with release forms had their stories in the review form. There could be no favorites.
Their commitment was that the work would go on. How it went was up to the members who came and contributed their part by doing the work. The literature workers tried to be servants in the best sense of the word providing for the needs of the literature workers without interfering or hindering the directions the material took as it was processed. This allowed them to serve without feeling that they were dominating or controlling the work or it's content.
While in retrospect it might seem that this was a contrived method, put together by Bo or other committee officers, it was more an evolution of approaches which suited attending members. It felt right. Members involved all felt welcome and were adored by the lit workers. Nothing else was ever considered.
The Committee depended on momentum and hard work to screen out those who sought personal glory in the work. That kind is too lazy to work hard, especially for an ideal. Again, this is visible only in retrospect and wasn't done with this effect in mind. Unfortunately, the WLC was sometimes judged by statements made by members who couldn't keep up with the pace or had strong personal attachment to ideas the WLC wouldn't support. It could have been worse. At least, they went forward to completion.
This method had its shortcomings but it was clearly a case where the members involved had to go with whatever solution God placed near at hand. There would be time later, once the Book was done, to work on refinements.
Bo and the others set it up so that there would be no royal- ties of any kind paid to the workers. This was important to keep the work selfless. There was a great desire that the Book would stand as a monument to the loving and caring nature of Narcotics Anonymous. Only this message was strong enough to attract a newcomer to our meetings and it was made the same with our Basic Text. Jimmy K. called N.A. the self-adjusting program. He went further to explain that this meant that as we changed ourselves, we changed the world. Also, as a Fellowship, when we needed something else, we would gradually accept it and adjust to the reality.
Proceeds from the sale of the Basic Text would pour down on the Fellowship in the form of services forever. This is what the Fellowship supported.
*** *** *** ***
The Santa Monica Literature Conference opened with the Serenity Prayer and the words from Bo, "Here we are again! What are we going to do this time?"
They went around to hear from all attending members and when that was done hammered out a plan to factor in the Fellowship's input into the 'Gray' review form.
To begin with, they had a style of editing that had been derived from the original cut and paste method. They decided to sort the input and break up into workshops, each to work on one chapter with input directed at that chapter. Each piece of input eventually would be gone over by a table of no less than ten members.
Once the input was factored in, the piece would be marked as 'Santa Monica Draft # __' and sent to typing. Secretaries were trusted to make non-substantive changes in the material and ask for help if any parts were unclear or problematic. It was understood that the material would be workshoped again and there was little fear that anything of value would be lost in the process.
Again, from a cold start without preconception, the Committee had worked out a logical, practical solution to the problem of factoring input into the review form material that satisfied both the requirement to take the Fellowships input seriously and to keep the process simple enough to be feasible.
About the third day, many members saw a need to go over the entire ten chapters as a group. The feasibility of a large group doing this was too complicated. The idea that two or three would be sufficient to insure continuity without a human selectivity was not seen as feasible. They might bias the material toward some viewpoints and away from others that might be important enough to a significant number of members to warrant inclusion. The committee had developed almost a statistical analysis attitude toward multiple pieces of similar input. If a thought was expressed in more than two items of input, it was taken very seriously and included even with difficulty.
An experimental approach to this problem was tried wherein Bo as WLC Chair, Greg as resident Trustee and a lady from Ohio named Pam as recording secretary plus a rotating additional member would go through all the material, chapter by chapter. The final would hopefully include all sides to every issue and yet have the flow and continuity to be readable. Greg, Bo, Pam and a series of members went through the entire body of the Basic Text from start to finish in this manner.
The material was to go immediately to typists and then back to the editing teams for evaluation. This small workshop took place in the main room open to all members present to come and listen in on and everyone who wanted to sat in on the edit at least once. The material was left with the typists at the end of the night's work.
Not one chapter of this material was ever found the next day. Lost or stolen, it is the only part of the Committees files ever lost throughout the entire effort. No accusations were ever lodged against any of the attending members. It would have done no good. The work simply disappeared and was never found. Everybody who had sat in on the edit felt good about the material. It is a shame that the editors the next day were denied their voice in the quality as well as the effectiveness of the technique.
Each evening, the Conference would break up and walk out to the Palisades and watch the sun go down over Malibu. As they watched the Pacific sunset, they would talk quietly about the progress of the work and personal matters.
During the Santa Monica Literature Conference, Bo went out with Nolan looking for more typewriters. They stopped by a local recovery house, trying to get one more machine. A beautiful lady with blond hair and a Manhattan accent came up and asked if there were meetings in New York City yet.
They told her no - but that they had a saying, "First the Book, then New York!" She thought about this for a moment and got time off from work to spend the rest of the week helping get the work done at the Lit Conference.
At the end of the Santa Monica Lit Conference, there was a new set of drafts for each of the Book chapters. The next conference site was set for Ohio where many of the steady support for the writing had been strong for some time.
Roger was elected to Chair the WLC when Bo stepped down.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to Story of the Basic Text - Home Page
Go to Chapter Fifteen - The Literature Process Deepens
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:42: