Literary Community: Who are my mentors?

This may be more random than usual -- I almost didn't get to blogging today at all. (I was good and spent the pre-work coffee actually working on the novel, and then my lunch hour was spent in the inspection "war room", which is not conducive to working on creative writing.)

Several times recently, when reading the author's notes in a book, or reading an author interview online, I've gotten a weird feeling when seeing long lists of people that the author considered their mentors for writing: the people who gave them wise advice, other more experienced writers who helped bounce their story ideas around, the editors whose feedback shaped their writing. When I try to think of who my mentors would be, I have a hard time thinking of any. And I'm not sure whether that's really because I have none or whether it's a blindness in myself that discounts other people's input. (The same blindness that tends to lead me into depression on occasion, when I forget the positive interactions that I really have had with other people.)

It isn't that I haven't interacted with other people in the context of my writing. The beta readers who give me detailed feedback are truly wonderful people. A couple of my skin-singer stories were brainstormed by talking them out with scotica. And having abd07 as my "alpha-reader", waiting on each chapter as the first draft is completed, is a strong motivation to keep on track with my writing schedule. But I wouldn't call any of those situations "mentoring" in the sense of having someone who is more experienced and more knowledgeable in the field offering me a hand up.

It's something of a circle (not necessarily vicious, but not entirely benign). I don't expect to get mentoring because I haven't received it in the past. (Sometime ply me with drinks and ask me about my dissertation.) And having learned so many things (and not just with regard to writing) from scratch on my own, I suspect I give off a vibe of not needing or wanting help. That same history--combined with a few non-standard learning styles--has tended to make me wary of teaching styles that assume there's one right way to learn.

So have I had attempted mentors whose assistance wasn't useful? Or who decided I was incapable of learning what they had to teach? Or who concluded I simply didn't need them? Or is this just one more of those experiences that other people have that--for some combination of reasons--never happened for me? Hard to say. I'm not even willing to swear that my memory isn't playing tricks on me. All I know is I read those passages in which other writers talk about their mentors and I wonder what that would feel like.