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January 2006

A Room Filled with Ideas, Not Smoke

By Jack El-Hai

ASJA's Board of Directors meets several times a year to discuss the organization's finances, programs, problems and future. Because our representatives live in all corners of the country, many of the meetings are telephone conference calls in which board members manage to conduct business amidst the background sounds of our homes, where dogs whine, doorbells ring, and children scream.

Twice each year, however, the members of the board convene in person. This happens on Saturdays in New York City, in the middle of November and just before our annual writers conference in the spring. The site is usually the penthouse suite of the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue, an old and renovation-resistant lodging house whose chief claim to fame is a decidedly odd bronze sculpture perched at its front door. I have been on the board for five years, and I've lost track of the number of times I have taken the hotel's tiny, swaying elevator all the way up to the top floor.

Before I joined the board, I often wondered what these meetings were like. I imagined a day that ASJA's officers and representatives—surely a group with unsurpassed literary knowledge and sophistication—passed by sharing deep journalistic insights and bons mots. I believed that a fly on the wall would have its senses overwhelmed by the smell of cigar smoke and perfume, undulating patterns of tweed, the rustle of silk, sparkles of light reflected by crystal chandeliers and the clink of icy glasses of bourbon. Occasionally, of course, the conversation would have to touch upon ASJA affairs, but this would occur only between extended discussions of the technique of In Cold Blood or the eccentricities of a particular editor at The New Yorker or Scribner's.

If you share in this fantasy, it is now my duty to disillusion you. The penthouse at the Roger Smith, for starters, is more like Granny's living room than anything in which Angelina Jolie or Jack Nicholson would feel at home. An ancient baby grand piano, growing more out of tune with each passing year, occupies one corner. Totally forgotten personages glare from canvases on the wall, and the gauzy curtains have diminished to mere microns of thickness. Board members consume no alcohol and smoke no tobacco (or anything else) at the meeting. During our lunch break, we go to a deli across the street for take-out food; the management of this establishment watches our group suspiciously, and ASJA does not pay for everyone's lunch. I don't remember ever hearing Truman Capote's name mentioned once in conversation.

Instead, the members of the board sit for six hours at a long table and focus on ASJA concerns. As president, I have a place at the head of the table (a compensation, I suppose, for not being allowed to take part in board votes) with Brett Harvey, our executive director. My main responsibility at this meeting is to somehow contain the torrent of ideas and observations about our organization's activities to the day's plan very optimistically outlined in our agenda. My role, then, is something like a lion tamer's. Although our board members don't seem interested in filling this meeting time with expostulations about literary theory or the big movie sale of some celebrity author, they do arrive with tons of passion about ASJA. They are all volunteers who absorb their own hotel costs and many other expenses.

At the board meeting in November, for example, we had a lengthy discussion of ASJA's budget and finances—which I am pleased to say are in good shape—and we went over reports submitted by the chairs of most of the organization's committees. Brett Harvey gave us a detailed accounting of membership and administrative issues. After more debate on a number of topics, ranging from our reviews of the performance of some ASJA employees to a proposal to increase our organization's visibility by regularly producing op-ed articles on topics of concern to writers, we adjourned in time for dinner.

Members can find an archive of our board minutes at www.asja.org/members/admin/bylaws/minutes.php. The rest of you will have to imagine what happens, but in the interests of accuracy, be sure to leave cigar smoke and rustling silk out of your mental picture.

Jack El-Hai of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is president of ASJA. E-mail the president through www.asja.org/contact.php.