After arriving in Denver by car from Lawrence, Kansas, at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, it’s been a rush of events. Getting up early this morning (because I can’t sleep when I know I can see mountains outside my hotel room) is the only chance I’ve had to sit down and reflect on this AWP so far. But, even now, it would take me hours to tell you what I’ve learned, what I’ve done, and what I hope for today.

So, I’ll tell you first about panel #1 on Wednesday.

R108. The Long and Short of it: The Evolving Shapes of Creative Nonfiction. (Jessica Pitchford, Susan Finch, Hattie Fletcher, Stephen David Grover, B.J. Hollars) Join the editors of Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Black Warrior, and The Southeast Review as they consider the evolving shapes of nonfiction—from the personal essay to micro-memoir to more experimental forms. Editors discuss the recent trends in the genre with special emphasis on the merits of experimentation in form and the future of more traditional narrative nonfiction. They also provide an insider look at the selection process and offer recommendations for getting published.

The fabulous thing about AWP is that it’s a three-day hyper-semester in which you learn a semester’s worth or more of your craft or what you want to know. It’s the perfect university where there are professors that teach nearly every class imaginable and where you can be both a professor and a student (as I was this year since I served on a panel). I take pages of notes and walk away from a panel, because it’s a presentation and conversation, with a better grasp on the subject of interest–and, if not, I can find the panelist afterward and ask more questions.

With “The Long and Short of It: The Evolving Shapes of Creative Nonfiction,” I was hoping to come away with a better grasp of what I think I’m doing with my long and short essays. I also hoped to gain some more vocabulary with which to use with my nonfiction students at the University of Kansas, as I am having them write two long (minimum 8 pgs) and two short (under 1000 words) essays this semester. The short does this, I want to tell them with confidence. What I did get reminded of was something I tell all of my students and try to remind myself as I’m struggling over another braided essay (because that seems to be how I naturally write): form complements and amplifies good content.

Yes, Stephen David Groven, former editor of the beautiful Brevity, it is. (And I’m sorry that the audio was somehow switched for your talk and that BJ Hollars turned out the lights on all of us when he tried to fix it. But it was a lighthearted way to start AWP.) And no matter how long your essay is or what form it’s in, we have to serve the reader. We are performers, the panel reminded us. We have to give them an essay that has all of the right edges, an essay that has specificity and concreteness, an essay that is layered. An essay is incomplete without turning it back on one’s self.

B.J. Hollars reminded us that the truth in an essay will always be obscured by outside factors. That truth involves three parts: the writer’s trajectory, the reader’s interpretation, and the intersection of those two elements. Yes. And in order to maintain those truths, we must acknowledge limitations of memory and admit the gaps in our memory.

As someone who is in love with the essay, this panel did just what it should do. It made me want to go back to my hotel room and pull up all the pieces of my thesis and reevaluate them. Is it just as long as it needs to be? Does it need more layers? Can I give more concreteness? I want to go through and read my essays with this refreshed information in mind and work. But, the one drawback to AWP is that it never ends in the three days of its life each year. There is always more learning to be had. So I packed up and worked the University of Kansas Bookfair table (A-12) before spending the rest of the day in four back-to-back panels that I hope to return to here soon when I have time for reflection. Go forth and AWP!