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Writers’ conferences can be a mixed bag of how-to workshops, self-help lectures, networking and–in today’s world—woke politics. The political creeps in when you least expect it but it is often there from the very beginning.

Keynote speeches, for instance, can lay claim to a particular ideological bent without mentioning political parties or names. Vague references to “America’s current troubled political waters” or “threats to democracy” are often code words for anti-Republican messaging that tap into the assumption that everybody in the room is on the same political page.

My participation in the annual Philadelphia Writers’ Conference (PWC) several years ago included a three-day workshop on writing newspaper columns. While I avoided politics in my talk, politics often reared its head from class participants.

Despite the obvious benefit of a writers’ conference — networking, for example— there are some downsides. From my perspective, that might include a thematic emphasis on writing a bestseller and getting your memoir or how-to book on The New York Times bestseller list. Statically speaking, writing a bestseller only happens to a very small number of people. While writers’ conferences such as the PWC offer amazing practical advice and wisdom, they can also tap into the Great Myth that anyone can write a bestseller if you follow certain guidelines, the most important being getting a literary agent and then following that agent’s advice to the letter.

As one of the most popular events at PWC, the literary agent panel was comprised of all women, the majority of them in their late twenties.

The panel capped several hours of individual writer-agent sessions which took place earlier in the day. These were 5-minute exchanges in which the writer was supposed to make his or her pitch to the agent in question. You signed up in advance to have your 5 minutes with this or that agent and then, like speed dating, your time was up and you went to the next one. It’s much like a job interview in which you promoted your resume—“I am the best candidate,” etc.—and then did your best to convince the agent that you had the manuscript of the century.

The opportunity of meeting with New York literary agents struck me as a little depressing, much like watching lines of the desperately unemployed competing for a small number of job openings. After all, the vast majority of writers at PWC had never published a book.

During the Agent Q&A, it was never specifically mentioned that writing a bestseller is a fluke and the result of chance. Few writers set out to write a bestseller, since there is no way anyone can gauge what the public will want or even find desirable. The reading public is a terrifically fickle mistress. Jack Kerouac wrote because he was an artist and because he had something to say, not because he wanted to get on a bestseller list. Dostoevsky wrote because he had a message to impart, not because he wanted to be the 19th-century Russian equivalent to romance writers like Jackie Collins

This is not to say that most writers wouldn’t like to have a bestseller, but when your whole goal as a writer is to write one, something is lost. The literary agents at PWC were repeatedly asked: What do you want? How will you pay attention to my manuscript? How can I get your praise? I will write anything you tell me to write.

During the Q and A, somebody asked why there weren’t any male literary agents on the panel. “Men don’t read,” one of the women said. Then it was surmised that men don’t like the comparatively low salaries that agents receive, but is this true? How can these women survive in Manhattan and pay rent if agent salaries are so low?

Is it because they have Hedge Fund husbands? And if men don’t read, is it because the educational culture in this country—the reading assignments in middle school and high schools, for instance-—have literally stopped assigning books to students that are about men? As a fellow newspaper columnist told me at the conference: “I have three kids. They are all in middle school and all the books they are assigned all have women central characters. There are no male central characters at all.”

In an essay entitled, “Fatherly,” Joshua David Stein writes, “The first time it occurred to me we might be in the midst of a dad drought was a few years ago, while reading Hug, Jez Alboroughs’ 2000 story of a lost chimpanzee, Bobo. In the book, Bobo tools around the jungle, watching others animals embrace. He is lost, sad and wants a hug. Eventually he finds his hugger. It’s his mother; he’s a mother hugger. There are three words in this book: Hug, Mommy and Bobo. After a few nights reading the book to my kids, I took a Sharpie, crossed out the word Mommy and wrote Daddy instead. Dads give hugs too. “

Woke ideology has infected writers conferences. At one workshop a woman presenter/author came down hard on Ernest Hemingway, inferring that because he was sexist and a big game hunter he was no longer relevant. The not-so-subliminal suggestion was that Hemingway (pictured above, being sexist) should be booted from the literary canon. Some people in the workshop agreed—“Yes, he’s an awful sexist pig!”—just like Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac are sexist pigs.

As I heard these questions I imagined Tolstoy in the room taking notes — “She wants some inclusion of popular culture.” “She doesn’t want any mention of the paranormal.” “She wants a commercially viable topic.” “Not too much religion (especially Russian Orthodoxy) but having a lot of characters, especially women, who bash Trump and praise Stormy Daniels.” Et cetera.

I also imagined a question from the young unpublished Thomas Merton: “Do you think a book about my conversion from atheism to Catholicism, entitled The Seven Story Mountain, could ever be a bestseller?” (Answer: “Not on my watch, Tom. The public isn’t interested in counting the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin.”)

Put Mark Twain into the room and have him ask: “Ms. Agent, how can I be even more of a Mark Twain?”

Chances are the agent would say, “Become a soy boy feminist and stay away from the books of J. K. Rowling.