At noon on Saturday, May 22, I will be moderating AIW’s panel, The Writer’s Life: A Report from the Field, at the LitArtlantic Festival, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. The panelists are film maker David Taylor, novelist C.M. Mayo, journalist Alan Elsner, and biographer/memoirist Kevin Quirk.

Each of these authors is well established, but no one starts out that way. So, in part, we will, in our short hour, address how they got their starts and how their careers evolved.

Each of these impressive authors has worked and published across genres, not always an easy feat in these days of “specialization” and writers being boxed into a niche. We will talk about how they managed to accomplish that. Was there a plan? Did it evolve in an organic fashion?

And if there is time, it would be nice to hear a bit about their creative processes.

I will not, here, get into these authors’ accomplishments and awards, which are many and impressive (you can check our website or an e-mail that was sent to the list-serve for that). But I do want to tell you a little about some of their extraordinary work.

David Taylor has created both a film and a book on the WPA Writer’s project, entitled A Soul of a People. Though I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing the film, I have read the book and found fascinating the story of writers (Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Studs Terkel among them) collecting the stories of Americans of every cultural heritage, in every walk of life, and in every nook and cranny of our country. Also fascinating are the strong parallels between the New Deal political battles and those we face today.

While many historical novels use an historical period as the backdrop for fictional protagonists, C.M. Mayo’s novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, tells the stories of actual historic personages—the Mexican Emperor Maximilian; the Iturbide family; the American, Alice Green, who married into Mexican aristocracy and was half-bribed/half-strong armed into giving her infant son to Maximilian to raise as the heir to his “Mexican Empire.” Mayo has used extensive research combined with the imaginative leap to try to reconstruct the motivations—political, emotional, and psychological—behind their actions.

In my view, Alan Elsner’s Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons is straightforward, hard-hitting journalism at its very finest. Elsner is not telling sob stories, not playing on your sympathy, but hitting you with cold, hard facts—right between the eyes. I found this book painful to read, found myself getting angry, feeling that many of those running our prisons should themselves be in them.

Finally, Kevin Quirk’s book, Brace for Impact: Miracle on the Hudson Survivors Share Their Stories of Near Death and Hope for New Life, presents 25 first-person accounts of passengers and first responders from the January 2009 plane crash into New York’s Hudson River. Quirk’s focus is not the crash itself but on the ways in which coming so close to dying affects people’s faith and/or lack of it and their approach to their daily lives. Having worked as a ghost writer and with people who want to set down their own stories, Quirk is well-positioned to draw these stories out.

I hope this taste of these authors whets your appetite as their works have whet mine, and that you’ll join us on the 22nd to hear their stories!

Details: The panel will be held from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., Saturday, May 22, at The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, Maryland (just off Wisconsin Ave., a few blocks south of the Bethesda Metro station, Red line).

Further information: For information about the entire LitArtlantic Festival, of which AIW’s panel is a part, go to www.writer.org. The entire festival, including Story/Stereo: Hybrid Literature/Music Event (Thursday, May 20); Creativity Crossing Borders and Works in Progress Film Screening (Friday, May 21); Young Songwriter’s Showcase, Workshop for Children, and Hive@LitArtlantic(a resource fair) (Saturday, May 22), should make for an entertaining time.

For the past few years I’ve been writing fiction almost exclusively, but most of my 40-some-odd years as a professional writer were spent writing nonfiction. And mostly, it was journalistic writing.

I wrote for newspapers, radio, television, I edited magazines, and I wrote for various web sites. Nearly all of this writing was journalistic in nature. I still follow developments in the field, with an eye toward maybe returning to it at some point.

Lately, I’ve been wondering: Will there be anything to return to? (To which to return?)

Last year my alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism, celebrated its centennial. Since it was the first school of journalism in the world, the celebration was a Big Deal. I attended.

During the nearly week-long festivities, the school held a seminar on future technology. A number of entrepreneurs described, and demonstrated, a number of new approaches to delivering information to consumers in a digital age. Some, I thought, were half-baked. Some held genuine promise. But they all lacked what seemed to me an essential ingredient: Money.

Oh, there was money, or at least the promise of money. Entrepreneurs don’t get involved in a project that doesn’t show potential profits somewhere down the line. But the economic potential of all these projects was based on the widespread belief that their raw materials – their content – were free.

You can see how they reach that conclusion. On the internet, content looks free. I can read The Washington Post online without spending a dime. Same for The New York Times and for dozens – probably hundreds – of other newspapers. Television stations and broadcast networks have all established web sites, which carry news stories. Magazines routinely place much of their content online.  All the web portals have links to news stories. All of it free.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The news has to come from somewhere. Right now, it comes mostly from newspapers and news services – such as the Associated Press – created to serve newspapers. If newspapers die out, as they seem to be, where will that content come from?

This could be a tremendous opportunity for freelancers, or it could be a catastrophe. Right now, I’m inclined to bet on the latter.

These techno-geek guys have grown accustomed to the idea that content is, if not free, at least a negligible expense, like the cost of acquiring a domain or a new piece of software. If we’re lucky, they’re in for a rude awakening. If they’re not, well . . .

Newspapers understand that they have to spend money to produce their product, but the internet has made most of those production costs irrelevant.

And the cost of producing content could become irrelevant, too. When I started in journalism, many smaller newspapers (and even a few big ones) relied heavily on unpaid “correspondents,” who rarely left home. They would write weekly or monthly columns that reported on which of their neighbors took a cruise to Bermuda, when the first robins of spring were spotted in the trees, or when the first crocuses appeared. The more adventurous souls among them might report that two members of the town council had resorted to fisticuffs in a dispute over a zoning matter, or publish the municipal leaf-collection schedule.

Some of this stuff was interesting. Most of it was crap. The publishers didn’t care. It was content, and it was free. I call this indifference to quality the “warm body” disease, and it is more widespread than H1N1. And it spreads faster.

Let’s face it: Nearly everybody thinks he can write. After all, it’s the first thing they teach us in school. And, of course, everybody could  write, if they were prepared to spend the time and effort required to do so. Not many are willing to do that, especially if they can get by with less.

Bad money, they say, drives out good. I’m afraid we’re about to find out if no money will even drive out bad.

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Clyde T. Linsley has been a full-time freelance writer since 1986. He served two terms as president of WIW during the nineties. He is the author of four published mystery novels.