If you could meet a historical writer, who would it be and why?

I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood the “if you could meet any historical figure, who would it be?” question.

I didn’t take it literally. When someone asked I never imagined hanging out with a writer. I just answered with someone I admired or who had influenced me. That’s what people really care about, right? But getting older, I’m starting to think other people answered based on who they actually thought would be fun to spend time with. Mind blown.

My go-to answer to this question has almost always been Hemingway. If I ever went beyond interpreting the question into “who are you most influenced by”, I would say there was a vague image in my mind of sitting in a hot, dark bar, quietly drinking whiskey. Not much talking going on. So much of my writing identity over the years has been built on alcohol in dark places. The pool hall in San Francisco. The dive in Tucson. The kruchma in Bulgaria. Somehow, my teenage wires got crossed and reading was done with a beer and fried chicken in the sunshine, and writing was done with whiskey in the dark. Thanks for a lifetime of alcoholism, Hemingway. (Yeah, yeah, I know he didn’t write while drinking. It was my internalizations of his CHARACTERS and STORIES — this is important for later).

I gave up drinking more than a year ago, so imagining a whiskey-laden night evening in a bar with Hemingway no longer works. My easy answer is gone, and I have to give space to imagination: which writer would I want to meet? Really meet. Spend time with. And the answer is… with my social anxiety, most likely none of them.

Does that sound callous or self-important? It’s not meant to. I am sure so many of them were really cool people. But I also know I keep trying to force myself to go to conferences to meet other writers in real life, and every time I’m either miserable or I chicken out due to panic attacks leading up to the event. I’m obviously not the “hang out with a large group of authors” type of person. But what if it was a smaller, more intimate setting? Maybe. The thing is… I’m afraid I wouldn’t have anything in common with my favorite authors.

I love their books. I love their characters. I want to live in their worlds. Maybe I want to meet the people they dream up. But I’m well aware that the people and things we write do not reflect ourselves. I sometimes get along with people (online) who write stuff I don’t care for. And I often clash with people writing in my genre. So to know if I want to hang out with a writer, I have to research their actual life. Honestly, the only writers whose lives I’ve read about have been Hemingway and Shelley. Perhaps I should read more biographies? Maybe then I would know who I would want to hang out with? But for right now, I’d much rather spend an evening with one of their books than figuring out how to split bills and whether or not I take my shoes off in their house.