Minigolf with pipefitters

For some reason, they tend to wrap up interviews with writers with a question about which three writers, living or dead, you would invite for dinner. First off, I think live ones. Okay, okay. You know what would be awful? Octavia Butler, Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson. Excruciating. Anthony Burgess, Anne Tyler, Charles Portis? That might be congenial, but really you’d want to invite incompetent writers because the best ones have put everything they have to say down on paper. It’s actually a profoundly silly question; why not ask for the names of three dentists with whom you’d like to bowl?