With only a couple of months left until the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago, IL, I figured it was about time to get this humble blog looking the part. I’ve given the site a facelift, reorganized a few things (check out the new contributors page), and have tidied up a few broken links. Though this blog will have been around for 3 conferences (first started for the conference in Denver in 2010), dead links have a way of creeping by the filters. But all is good now. We are full steam ahead for 2012.

The conference is looking good. The keynote speaker is Margaret Atwood (never a disappointment), with featured presenters out the anus, so all those attending should get ready for something amazing.

As always, I am opening this blog up to anyone who wants to participate. All you have to do is follow the instructions at the Join Us page here. You’ll be granted access to write as many posts as you want, have your tweets appear in the twitter stream to the right, and have your videos added to the AWP 2012 YouTube playlist, also in the sidebar at the right.

In 2012, more so than in years past, I will probably be relying on contributors, minus myself, to keep this blog alive. I will be in Chicago during the conference, but actually I won’t be attending the conference proper. I’ll be all over the off-site events, and may even try to hit the bookfair on Saturday, but in general I will be meeting up with writer friends outside the conference for beers and book talk. So, jump on board now. Sign up to contribute to this blog. As far as I know, it’s the longest continuously running AWP blog ever. Be part of the legacy.

1. Caleb Ross
2. A girl named Jen over the moon for Jhumpa
3. My graduate school’s esprit de corps — both Goddard & Mizzou
4. Learning stuff even after all these years
5. Writing while at AWP (probably my favorite thing of all)
6. This blog
7. Running with this most interesting herd marked by the carriage of bulging tote bags and a little wildness in the eyes
8. Coming to the complete understanding that while this is no living, it’s the life
9. Getting a cigar from internationally-renown poet Scott Cairns
10. Being bobble-headed and dizzy-dumb from lanyard spying

Safe travels my preeties. Always yours in spilt purple ink,

Dr. WAC.

Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz are rock stars of the literary world and it was incredible to see them live.

Thursday night, Jhumpa was the keynote speaker. She even had her own opening act, which was hard to listen to as I was anxious to hear her.

She spoke about how to answer the question “Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?”

Admittedly, I was hoping to hear her read fiction – thinking it was a “reading” not a “keynote speech.” But once I realized she wouldn’t be reading, I sat back and was entranced with her personal story about moving from a childhood without possessing many books to, having just won the Pulitzer Prize, listening to her father worry that this writing thing might not be able to support her.

When she was finished, the crowd applauded thunderously and with sincere appreciation. Many stood for a standing ovation but most quickly bolted to their feet to get in line for her to sign their book. I couldn’t bear to wait in line behind  two hundred people so I opted for the bar with some friends.

Last night Junot Diaz read two stories and he brought the house down.

If I can’t BE Junot, I wish I could have a speck of his talent – how he brings together riotous humor, pain, and honesty in a way that has me catch my breath between laughing and crying.

The line for his signing was even longer than for Jhumpa. At this point in the conference I could not stand in line nor hit the bar.

I will write more later about Junot’s reading but now off to another panel this morning!

A Tweet

@ joylandfiction

Day 1 of #AWP11 = much like the rest of my life: Standing by self quietly peoplewatching; stealing candy; reading; watching others drink.

This tweet pretty well summed up my first day at AWP, which so happened to be the second day of the conference; a monster storm thwarted my every attempt to get here Wednesday night.

My first foray into AWP 11 was to attend the Poetry Foundation soiree sans registration. I wore a dummy lanyard that I always carry with me to conferences because you never know. I was to hook up with three grad school classmates to have a drink, catch up and catch the Jhumpa.

Of course my worst fear, as an introvert, was to arrive and find a room full of boisterous strangers. I circled the room and I had to admit it had been years since I’d seen the faces of my grad school friends — Jen. C., Chris M. and Kevin R. And I have what you might call reverse face-blindness. Unlike the malady where one cannot recognize even their close family and friends’ faces, I recognize faces of strangers I met on a train in 1991 in the Netherlands. Oliver Sacks is no so lucky; he suffers from this face blindness as does my favorite Heidegger expert Dr Dreyfus. I recognize people I’ve met once a decade ago through their face; their name to me utterly unreachable. I liked my odds of finding my grad school friends.

They weren’t there.

I grabbed a soda and lime circled the room again and parked myself against the wall at the front of the hall to survey the entire menagerie. Here I could do what I do when alone and unable to engage. I could find no way into any of the conversations around without sounding like a crazy person. “Hi, I really like your teeth.” I fingered my cell phone’s reptilian keys and brought it out to look at its tiny and simple face only to think, oh sure, this is what people do now when alone in a crowd, check the device to confirm you are loved or at the very least “liked” in that Facebook kind of way. The gesture: Oh, I’m justing waiting to hook up with the 24-hour party people. And following this meagre attempt, I dissect the cocktail crowd seeing the Jonathan Franzen-look-a-like; seriously; the roaming gang of ethnically beautiful and drunk Gap models mugging for, wait for it, the digital camera; all of these, none of the we of me, as Frankie says in Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding.

I dialed up Jen and got her dining with my grad school friends at local India restaurant. “Our food is late, I’m sorry,” she said genuinely. “I thought I couldn’t see you here,” I said into the phone indicating my reverse face-blindness. They, the trio of grad students, had been my monster storm focal point, the point in the future I would enjoy should I make it through flight delays and precipitation of biblical proportions. Pregnant women breathing through contractions hold focal points. This future thing was mine, my way of breathing through this interminable now. Jen said something several times. I — what? I couldn’t hear her at all, it sounded like she was saying “Sunday tickets.”

I exited the hall and finally came to understand what she was saying, “Can you get text messages at this number?” I looked at my orange phone as if it had a rotary dial. She could have texted me. Right, seriously why didn’t I think of that.

Fifteen minutes later, sitting alone in one of those lobby chairs that tended to swallow, envelope, you upon sitting down like a snapping dragon chomping down on a bug, my phone chimes.

“In the lobby…where r u?” A text.

“A Poe Party,” I texted back… at pity party? I rose and met them at the Jhumpa Lahiri address and instantly all that had proceeded evaporate the fizz of a soda and lime. I sat with Allison, a dear friend I have known for years, and Jen, and Chris and Kevin and we all faced forward to hear from Jhumpa why she became a writer.

She began to write, Jhumpa says, to reach out to others.

Indeed.

We are the we of me and you the community of writers.

For the perplexed, for the introverts, there are always these monster storms to endure, flights to nervously await perhaps unnecessarily so, until arriving finally at the gate to be received.

By now you’ve noticed a few reoccurring things about AWP panels:

• There’s never enough water or coffee or candy nearby
• There are never enough handouts
• The presenters mostly seemed surprised to be speaking
• Someone on the panel is missing
• Someone on the panel is a “late addition”
• You sit in rows like a student
• The chairs are almost unbearably close
• At some point you say to yourself, “I could be up there.”
• There are more women than men
• Someone is always sniffling behind you
• Words like “gesture” or “discombobulation” are used a smidgin too often

Why not:

• Place chairs in a circle — facing each other is so much more civil and less physically straining
• Have a web site where presentation handouts could be placed prior to the conference, and attendees could go there and pick up what they need
• Roaming coffee carts are a must
• At AWP at the very least it would be better if presenters did not read their presentations, like they do at MLA, but rather held a conversation.
• We all know you can write well, there’s no need to read it to us
• Vet presentation hype
• Have back channel Twitter stream with comments and questions projected — this would require access to free WiFi, which remains — apparently — an apparatus of some socialist future
• Mark presentations like ski-runs: bunny hill pink runs, beginner brown, intermediate red, and black diamond runs for experts.
• AWP needs more diamond runs
• And a more relaxed dress code never hurt anybody

Storms and airports is the big enchilada of prompts. You can’t go anywhere, so you might as well do something. Sadly, I began my book The Eight Leaves a memoir about my brother’s death while awaiting a delayed flight in London, Ontario, Canada.  I heard The Proclaimers sing, “I’m on my way from misery to happiness today, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.” It made it into the book. But also gladly the nexus of Mother Nature and Virgin, Southwest, Continental angst at flying through the maelstrom has yielded me a night in a Vermont HoJo smoking dope out of a core Granny Smith apple and an empty Bic pen barrel with a Jesus Christ-look-a-like, a former nun who worked with Mother Teresa and a National Book Award nominee. We watched soft porn.

There was a time I used to love to travel and so I tended to glide through airports without much of a glance. Nowadays, however, I love to go places, but detest travel for myriad reasons. So I tend to go through airports as if treading through tapioca. It enables me to pause and take in what’s around me. Of course the cynic in me has a ball, as does the misanthrope; but then mostly my untarnished soul takes over and sees that love is actually all around us (fairly sneaky movie nod).

I take notes in a journal, primarily, about what my perceptions allow, and then permit my imagination to go the rest of the way. I take down private conversations. I write character sketches. But mostly, I write philosophy, sort of the bane of my existential existence. I listen to music as I do this, so often I find in my notes belles-lettres to Einstein and KISS or Florence + The Machine and Sartre.

Always rich, the airport gives me enough fodder for a thousand or more flights of fancy once home again safe ensconced in front of my keyboard.

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” Marshall McLuhan

1. Hometown?

Well, now, I live in Norman, Oklahoma, but that’s not really home. My hometowns are Durham, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia.

2.    How many AWP conferences have you attended?

My first AWP was in 1997, a year after I finished graduate school. I didn’t have any publications then, although three poems were forthcoming. So, I was just there to hang out. I attended maybe three panels, and one of those was a reading. The next time I came to AWP was after the publication of my first book, in 2001, and I was on a panel then. Then, I attended 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009.

So, it’s been seven AWPs so far. I try not to attend every single year, because it takes me at least two years to recover from all the fun and excitement, but next year is in Chicago, so I don’t want to miss that.

3.    Tell me a little about your session. Who should attend?

My panel is at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. It’s called “Changing Chords: The African American Poet as Critic,” and it features Herman Beavers as panel chair, and Tim Seibles, Anthony Walton, Carolyn Beard Whitlow, and me as respondents. We will be talking about the role of the African American poet as critic, which is actually pretty interesting to me because I’ve noticed this sort of divide between scholars and poets when it comes to criticism. Many scholars I’ve encountered don’t believe that poets can write anything except poetry, and the occasional nonfiction or fiction prose piece. But what fascinates me is that without the primary text that poets have created, scholars wouldn’t have anything to create literary criticism from. I’ve started dipping my toe into scholarly writing, and so this panel gives me a great chance to talk about some of these issues.

4.    What do you enjoy most about attending the conference?

I should say the intellectual stimulation, but really the best thing for me is seeing everyone. It’s like a big old family reunion, even though AWP is much bigger now than when I first attended back in 1997. I try to take my vitamin C ahead of time, because I know I’m going to be kissing and hugging at least a hundred people, and germs will be transferred!

But of course, I just love a conference with nothing but creative writers. It’s our place. It’s our time to talk about what matters to us, and for those of us who have worked hard for years and years, it’s nice to meet more than five people who have read our books. I love the readings, surely, but I really enjoy the scholarly panels at AWP just as much as the readings, too, because I like to know what writers are thinking of, critically. It’s just the best time, ever. I love AWP, even if Sunday morning, I am going to be so tired it will feel like someone beat me over every inch of my body. I just try to squeeze as much as I can out of AWP with the readings, the scholarly panels, the dances, fellowshipping with friends—but this year, I’m hoping not to gain any weight like I did last time, from all the overeating.

5.    What’s the question I should have asked you?

I wished you had asked me if I love to dance, because I do! (Everyone who knows me, knows that.) I am a dancing fool and I hope to “shut the party down” on Saturday night of the conference. There’s nothing like dancing with a bunch of wordsmiths; I’ve never missed a Saturday night party at AWP whenever I’ve attended, and I don’t mean to start now.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State, 2000), Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan, 2003), and Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois University, 2007). She received a 2011 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

1.    Hometown?

I grew up between Stone Mountain, GA and Baltimore, MD. I’m no stranger to Washington D.C.—we were neighbors during my college years; I used to drive down to dance and see shows now and then.

2.    How many AWP conferences have you attended?

I believe I’ve attended four or five now.

3.    Tell me a little about your session. Who should attend?

My session is the Women’s Caucus, organized by Lois Roma-Deeley. I hope attendees don’t fall into the usual trap of assuming a “Women’s Caucus” is for women only. Anyone interested in how these conferences are put together, how they function and change over time—which includes considerations of who the organizers court and how they do so—should come.  

Moreover, this is a first meeting of the women’s caucus, and we have a lot of ground to cover, as outlined below. For that very reason, we welcome participants who will help us shape the debate and understand what we must focus on first.

Description:

Where is the place for the women writers within AWP and within the greater literary community? The women’s caucus discusses this as well as continuing inequities in creative writing publication and literature. In addition, issues centering on cultural obstacles in the form of active oppression, stereotypes, lack of access to literary power structures, historical marginalization of women’s writing, issues and perspectives and the diverse voices of women will be explored.

4.    I know you’re heavily involved with VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. How is VIDA having an effect on the literary community?

Because we’re still so young, it’s difficult to gauge exactly what impact we’ve had so far.  We’ve certainly been hearing from many, ranging from educators to lay readers to publishers and editors alike; people are voicing concerns aloud now, suspicions easier dismissed in the past, and are anxious to join the discussion. The disparities in the literary world, based on gender alone (only one facet we’ve begun to examine), are no longer something we’ve imagined; they’re publicly recognized now. This recognition is a good point from which the conversation must progress if any changes are to take place.  We no longer have to insist that we “feel” something’s off; we can point to the numbers and interrogate how the literary landscape has come to reflect what many feel are unintentional-yet-problematic biases.

Conversations are also picking up steam in more major media outlets as well as in smaller online venues, editorial offices and, soon enough, this AWP conference. Publishers are sitting up and noticing their own historical publishing practices. It’s my hope that educators will also think about how they came to choose the texts they teach and try to broaden their curriculum palettes, so to speak.

5.    What do you enjoy most about attending the conference?

I love meeting people I’ve only known online. I enjoy catching up with others, and the poet-me likes to hit some of the more tasty panels and readings.  The energy is palpable when you find that really good panel / presentation and makes the trip memorable.

I find the book fair problematic for the obvious reasons—it’s like passing through a really tasty restaurant; you can only consume so much and your doggy bag can’t hold more than you can afford. So I pass through, loving and hating the feast that’s offered. Like it or not, the book fair forces one to become quite selective with one’s wallet and suitcase.

6.    Last, but not least, what’s the question I should have asked you?

Where am I reading! Unfortunately, I’ll be missing the reading with my new publisher, Litmus Press. I was originally going to be there but am unable. Sorry, Litmus! But I will be reading on Saturday afternoon for Poets for Living Waters—

Gulf Tolls – A Poetry Reading in Tribute to the Gulf of Mexico and Surrounding Regions

5-7 pm, Busboys & Poets 14th and V Streets NW. $5 suggested donation. None turned away.

Split This Rock and Poets for Living Waters are partnering to offer a poetry tribute to the Gulf of Mexico and the surrounding regions. Readers will include: Naomi Ayala, Ana Bozicevic, Nicole Cooley, Peter Cooley, Amy King, Brenda Hillman, Katherine Howell, Brenda Iijima, Jan Heller Levi, Gregory Pardlo, Lisa Pegram, Martha Serpas, Kevin Simmonds, Sandra Simmonds, Jonathan Skinner, Patricia Smith, Heidi Lynn Staples, Melissa Tuckey, Anne Waldman, and more. Please join us for a night of provocation and witness.

Amy King is the author of four collections of poetry: Slaves to Do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, and Antidotes for an Alibi (a Lambda Book Award finalist), all from Blazevox Books, and the forthcoming I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). King moderates the Poetics List (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group. She also teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet, Ron Padgett. King co-edits Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples and Esque Magazine with Ana Bozicevic.

Well, I had to cancel my plans at the last minute, and can’t attend AWP in DC this year. I’m really bummed, but sometimes life gets in the way – work, family, my MFA thesis, my next novel, time, money, you name it. Sometimes you have to take a pass. When I’m sitting with my son at his first Pinewood Derby I doubt I’ll be thinking about AWP. SO, I’m passing on to you, talented author, dreamer of vision, painter of lives, my list of panels that I was thinking of attending.

My picks have a lot to do with where I am as an author, what I’m looking to do, and who I know. So, I often drop by panels to see friends speak, or maybe it’s a panel on pedagogy or teaching, since I’m finishing up my MFA this year. There are a lot of panels on the future of writing, or publishing, those are always compelling. Sometimes I just want to hear somebody read. So, my picks may not match up with yours, but maybe it’ll give you some ideas.

Obviously you can only pick one panel per time period, so I’ll leave that up to you. I’ll asterisk (*) something if it really jumps out as a MUST SEE.

WEDNESDAY:

Not much going on, mostly people getting into town. I’m sure there are parties Wednesday night.

THURSDAY:

9:00 – 10:15

R110. Hired!: Landing the Elusive Tenure-Track Job.
This looked interesting, as I’m looking for work in 2011.

R113. Hands On: A Conversation about DIY and Craft Culture in a Digital World.
I thought this also had a lot of appeal as I’ve published in some crafty, handmade rags (such as Vain) and wanted to see what they had to say about this whole DIY culture.

10:30 – 11:45

R131. What They Didn’t Tell Us, We Will Tell You: Four First-Time Authors Discuss the Nitty Gritty of Publishing.
Siobhan Fallon is a friend of mine, so I wanted to hear her story about her first novel, and since my first novel came out last year as well (Transubstantiate) I thought it might be of value to me.

R132. Things That Go Bump When You Write: Monsters, Myths, and the Supernatural in Literary Fiction.*
This one looked really good to me, and I’m a fan of Laura van den Berg. I liked to work with fantasy, the supernatural, a bit of magical realism now and then, so this plus the literary angle appealed to me.

Noon – 1:15

R160. The Future of the Book Review: How to Break In.
I write book reviews for The Nervous Breakdown so I thought this might be interesting. And Roxane Gay is on this panel, and I like her work and attitude.

1:30 – 2:45

R174. Representing the Erotic in Literary Fiction.
Sex always gets people to show up. I put a bit of sex, and the erotic, in my work, so this looked like a fun one.

R179. CLMP Keynote—Size Matters: Big Houses, Small Presses, and the Literary Ecology of American Publishing.
I don’t hit TOO many keynotes, but this one covers a lot of things that interest me, small vs. large presses, for example.

3:00 – 4:15

R197. A 45th-Anniversary Fiction Reading by the Faculty of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Basically I just wanted to hear Holly Goddard Jones read and speak. She’s a friend of mine, taught at MSU where I’m getting my MFA, and an author I really love.

R198. Honoring Robert Coover.
Worth it to hear Coover as well as Brian Evenson.

4:30 – 5:15

R213. Understanding Comics as Creative Writing.*
This looked really good. I’m trying to break into comics, working on some samples right now, and this should be a fascinating panel.

R221. Fiction’s Future.
I try not to attend TOO many of these kinds of panels, but Lance Olsen and Roy Kesey make it worth attending, IMO. Lance is at FC2 and I’m a fan of Roy’s work. Both good guys, very giving and supportive as well.

NIGHT:

I was supposed to attend a reading at The Velvet Lounge with a bunch of friends, so go do that. It should be a great show. Caleb J. Ross, Brandon Tietz, Jesus Angel Garcia, Nik Korpon, Joe McGinniss Jr., Michael Sonbert, and Jillian Weise. 7-9 pm. 915 U St NW.

FRIDAY:

9:00 – 10:15

F114. Arktoi Books Celebrates Five Years of Lesbian Publishing!
Basically I wanted to see Nickole Brown read, she’s a friend and mentor of mine down at MSU. Very talented poet and author.

10:30 – 11:15

F132. How to start a literary center and thrive through the decades.
I’ve wanted to start a co-op for years, and this seemed like a very informative an useful panel.

F134. To Tell You the Truth: Strategies in the New Nonfiction.
I don’t write much NF, but I wanted to hear Nick Flynn and Stephen Elliott speak, those two are always entertaining and very smart, two talented authors.

F136. Jets vs. Sharks?
Richard Bausch and Jill McCorkle, nuff said.

NOON – 1:15

F146. A Reading by Joyce Carol Oates.
I’ve heard mixed things about her readings, but I’m a fan of her work, so this could be fun.

1:30 – 2:45
Nothing looked great. Have a long lunch instead.

3:00 – 4:45

F191. Hollins Graduate Program 50th Anniversary Reading.
Karen McElmurray is a friend and teacher down at MSU. Another chance to hear Jill McCorkle read too.

4:30 – 5:45

F212. A Reading by Mary Gaitskill and Sapphire, Sponsored by Wilkes University Low Residency MA/MFA Program in Association with Blue Flower Arts.*
I’m a huge fan of Mary Gaitskill, and I’m really bummed that I’ll miss this. Was going to have her sign my copy of Bad Behavior.

NIGHT:

Vermin on the Mount is the place to be. http://vermin.blogs.com/vermin_on_the_mount/2011/01/votm-awp-dc.html

WHO: Kim Chinquee, Roy Kesey, Amber Sparks, Lindsay Hunter, Nicolette Kittinger, Tom Williams, Al Heathcock & Scott McClanahan

WHEN: Friday, Feb 4 at 8pm

WHERE: Mie N Yu 3125 M Street in Georgetown

SATURDAY:

9:00 – 10:15

S111. Small Ships, Deep Ocean: Independent Presses Keep Short Story Collections Afloat.
Love short stories and this seemed cool. Laura van den Berg.

10:30 – 11:45

Nothing jumped out at me.

NOON – 1:15

S149. America Reimagined: Four Contemporary Voices, Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts.*
A great list of really talented authors: Ben Percy, Jennifer Egan, Rick Moody, Joshua Ferris. This should be a great event. It’s in a ballroom, don’t know how big it is, but this should be a really hot ticket. Get there early.

1:30 – 2:45

S171. What We Love; What Editors Are After.
These things are always a crapshoot, just write what you want, what moves you, but sometimes you get a nugget or two from some cool people. Editors from the Believer, Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, Orion, Soft Skull Press, and Tin House, so definitely worth it.

S177. The Road Less Traveled: How to be a Writer Without a Full-time Academic Gig.*
Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, that’s worth it right there, but I love the focus of this panel, and am really hoping I can get some literature or a podcast of this one.

S184. Change or Die: How Established Print Journals are Adapting to Life on the Internet.
Love the title. A lot of journals are adding an online presence or moving online due to the costs and difficulties of having a print journal. Should be good.

3:00 – 4:15

S189. Linking It Up: Working with Story Cycles, Linked Collections, and Novels-in-Stories.
Big fan of Knockemstiff, so I thought this would be a really good panel to attend, fascinating, imo.

S191. Graywolf Press Reading.
Chance to see Nick Flynn and Stephen Elliott again if you missed them earlier. Big fan of Graywolf, too.

4:30 – 5:15

Nothing jumped out, so get to drinking now.

NIGHT:

There’s the Amy Hempel and Gary Shteyngart reading, that looked really good. I’m sure there are tons of parties too.

SO…that’s all I’ve got. Hit the bookfair as often as you can between panels, that’s a great way to do research, get discounted title and journals, and meet some of you favorite authors, network and pimp your wares. Bottom line, have fun.

Wish I was going. Drop me a line at wickerkat@aol.com if you have something to share or any questions.

 1. Hometown?

We live in Delmar, NY, just south of Albany.

 2. How many AWP conferences have you attended?

Maybe seven or so, on and off since 2001.

 3. What will you be doing this year at AWP? 

I’m not doing any panels this year. The one I proposed and one I was on were passed on, which as I think of it is kind of a relief, since I’m really busy right now. I have made a resolution to go to as many panels on creative nonfiction as I can, since that’s what I teach primarily at The College of Saint Rose. We’re also thinking of starting up an MFA program (who isn’t, right?), so I plan on tugging on a few ears regarding how to start one that works well. I’ll be manning a corner of a shared table representing myself and We Who Are About To Die, the group blog I help run. Other than that, a lot of off-site readings and events. I’m really psyched how the AWP people have integrated—or co-opted?—the whole off-site events business. I’m reading at one on Friday night, representing the supergreat 32 Poems.

 4. What do you enjoy most about attending the conference?

Where to start? Meeting up with old friends who live in different parts of the country or folks I’ve worked with only virtually and not face-to-face. Making new friends. Saying Hi to editors of journals who have published my work and thanking them. Seeing how people navigate the whole looking-at-people’s-nametags-in-the-elevator business. Meeting old students who have gone onto become quote-unquote real writers. The buzz of neuroses-band camp excitement-stargazing has never gone away, like walking down a random aisle at the book fair and oh, there’s Lucillle Clifton or Christian Bok or Ernest Hilbert. Showing off baby pictures of my daughters to strangers. Lately, it’s been nice to get out of town for awhile. 

 5. Since you’ve attended a few of these, what’s your most memorable moment from past AWP’s?

There’s been so many times I have embarrassed myself or just acted like a jackass, but whenever I am at AWP, I feel comfortable and I’m with family. A boisterous, often dysfunctional family, but that’s family. I can say that I’ll never forget speaking on a panel about “switching” from poetry to nonfiction as a writer, and when we opened it up for questions, a woman began her remarks saying that she’s “going to take a while.” Her discourse included a short bio of herself and her writing, which people do and that’s fine, but then she suggested we all start a “new genre called the po-essay.” Up until that point, I think I was fairly diplomatic and even professional. But that term, po-essay, just seemed like a terrible idea. So I said that is sounded a little too much like another word I shouldn’t repeat here. Little did I know that Marjorie Perloff had coined the term already when she provided a blurb for Susan Howe’s The Birth-Mark. (It occurs to me that maybe that’s why AWP didn’t take my panel this year!)

 6. OK, Dan—what’s the question I should have asked you?

 Geez. Probably some question about how excited I am for the upcoming Freddie Mercury/Queen biopic starring Sacha Baron Cohen?

Daniel Nester is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, The History of My World Tonight, and God Save My Queen I and II. His work has appeared in Salon, The Daily Beast, Bookslut, The Morning News, Best American Poetry, and Best Creative Nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

1. Hometown?

Born in Edison, New Jersey. Raised in Paterson, New Jersey.

2. How many AWP conferences have you attended?

Atlanta, NYC, and Denver. This will be number four. Hopefully the food will be better.

3. Tell me a little about the session you’re moderating. Who should attend?

I’m at the Omni Shoreham’s Empire Ballroom, 4:30 p.m. on Friday the 4th, moderating a panel on inclusivity and race in publishing. This will be a conversation between poets and editors from both “mainstream” and “more community-based projects,” talking about their successes and failures in bringing diversity to their various publications. (I imagine what Raina Leon and I do at the ACENTOS REVIEW falls into the category of community-based projects.)

Who should attend?

Anyone with a vested interest in telling and listening to the full story of American literature. Anyone with a desire to be realistic, or revolutionary, about the publishing venues available to them. Writers of color especially. And maybe a few people who are interested, as I am, in hearing what makes one publication “mainstream” and another “community-based,” especially in the digital age.

4. Sounds like a great panel, Rich. What do you enjoy most about attending the conference?

Watching my various literary worlds cross. The poets especially all seem grouped up, cliqued out, separate, MFA’d or non-MFA’d, book or no. Et cetera. The AWP is the one place I can think of where all those dichotomies collide … blending together, as it were, by the time Saturday night rolls around. (Or not … sometimes they tiptoe around each other, too. That can be fun!)

5. Finally, what’s the question I should have asked you?

Hey Rich! Do you have any off-site events you’re involved with?

Why yes, I do. Acentos, the organization I direct that fosters audiences and communities of Latino/a writers, is co-sponsoring a reading in response to Arizona’s unjust SB1070 law … and some of the raging xenophobia cultivated around laws like it.

Friday, February 4 · 6–9 p.m.
True Reformer Building
1200 U Street NW
Washington, DC

Join us as more than 20 poets lend their energy and language to a group reading in response to Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and in resistance to the atmosphere of national xenophobia under which the bill (and its emerging counterparts) were created. Confirmed readers include: Francisco X. Alarcon, Tara Betts, Sarah Browning, Regie Cabico, Carmen Calatayud, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Susan Deer Cloud, Martín Espada, Odilia Galvan Rodriguez, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Randall Horton, Juan Felipe Herrera, Dorianne Laux, Marilyn Nelson, Mark Nowak, Barbara Jane Reyes, Abel Salas, Sonia Sanchez, Craig Santos Perez, Hedy Trevino, Pam Uschuk, Dan Vera, Rich Villar, and Andre Yang. Co-sponsored and presented by the Acentos Foundation, Split This Rock, and the Poets Responding to SB 1070 Facebook group. Hosted by Oscar Bermeo.

Then on Saturday, I’m part of a delegation of writers that will be staging a press conference and mini-poetry reading in response to the law on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. In short, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t emerge from this conference with an FBI file!

Rich Villar is the executive director of The Acentos Foundation, an organization that fosters audiences and communities for the study, presentation, and support of literature by Latinos and Latinas. He serves as fiction editor for THE ACENTOS REVIEW, and his poems and essays have appeared in RATTAPALLAX, MIPOESIAS, LATINO POETRY REVIEW, and the acclaimed chapbook series ACHIOTE SEEDS. He is at work on his first full-length collection of poems and makes his home in New Jersey with his wife, poet Tara Betts. (Photo taken by Peter Dressel)

1.       Hometown?

Born in East St. Louis, IL, raised in Austin, TX and still loving central Texas! I’m a southern gal!

2.       How many AWP conferences have you attended?

I’ve attended four AWP conferences including this one. Austin, Atlanta, New York, and D.C.

3.       As the organizer of the Cave Canem reading, tell me a little about the event. Who will be there?

Everyone will be there! I’m thrilled to host the Cave Canem Fellows Reading. The reading will be somewhat of an inside look at a typical fellows reading at the Cave Canem Summer Retreat. As you know, January, our readings are loud and fun and far from an average poetry reading. We’ll feature 20 fellows from across the years and each poet will have four minutes. It will be a family reunion and friends and guests are more than welcome. 100 percent of the suggested $10 donation goes to Cave Canem. Join us at the Charles Sumner School, 1201 17th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, February 2, at 7 p.m. Poets include Bettina Judd, Robin Lewis, Rickey Laurentiis, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jonterri Gadson, Linda Susan Jackson, Niki Herd, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Wendy S. Walters, Marcus Jackson, Derrick Brown, Brandon D Johnson, Nicole Sealey, Ama Codjoe, Jamaal May, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kamau Rucker, Sharon Dennis Wyeth, Hallie Hobson, and Shelagh Patterson. Basically, we’re going to have a really good time and you don’t want to miss it!

4.       Are you participating in any other sessions?

 Yes! Saturday, February 5, at 3 p.m. – Founding Women: Publishers and Editors from across the Literary Journal Landscape. (Jennifer S. Flescher, Brigid Hughes, Rebecca Wolff, Amanda Johnston, Beth Harrison, Rebecca Morgan Frank) Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, said to love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun? In this panel, six female publishers from a range of media and generations will discuss their own literary matters: the process of creating and sustaining their successful literary ventures. Panelists will discuss the gender politics of publishing and explore the strides the literary landscape has made and the struggles we still grapple with. (Thurgood Marshall South Room Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level)

Immediately after the panel at 5 p.m. is the TORCH D.C. reading at the African American Civil War Museum featuring TORCH: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women contributors Evie Shockley, Melanie Henderson, Tara Betts, Venus Thrash, and others hosted by Randall Horton. It makes for a wonderful combination! Come to the panel where I’ll discuss founding TORCH and where the organization is heading then come to the reading and support the women writers we serve.

5.       Sounds terrific, Amanda! What are you looking forward to most about attending the conference?

I look forward to being among other writers, visiting with friends from across the country, and making new connections with attendees. The opportunity to fellowship and talk shop with other writers and publishers is exciting and I can’t wait to be with my people!

6.       Finally, what’s the question I should have asked you?

Another great question would be – what other readings are you looking forward to?

Friday, Feb. 4 / 8:30 p.m. – Affrilachian Poets 20^th Anniversary Reading at Busboys, hosted by Patricia Smith, with poets Frank X Walker, Randall Horton, Crystal Good, Makalani Bandele, Mitchell L.H. Douglas, Kelly Norman Ellis, Ellen Hagan, Ricardo Nazario y Colón, Stephanie Pruitt, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and Amanda Johnston for an evening of poetry from across the region and beyond. ( at Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St., NW, D.C., 20009.)

Amanda Johnston is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian poet. Honors include 2003 and 2004 Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the 2005 Austin International Poetry Festival’s Christina Sergeyevna Award.  She is the founder of Torch Literary Arts and editor of TORCH: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women.

AIMEE’S AWP EVENTS:

• SAT.  3 p.m.: Omni Shoreham Hotel—S205 –“How a Poem Happens” with Brian Brodeur, Bob Hicok, Dorianne Laux, Eric Pankey and Adrian Blevins *an AWP featured event.*
• SAT. 4:30 p.m.: Marriott Wardman Hotel—S213 –“Outsiders Writing the Outside” with Keetje Kuipers, GE Patterson, Paisley Rekdal, Brian Teare, and Ross Gay.
• FRI. 2–2:30 p.m.: Tupelo Press tables @ the book fair—book-signing
• FRI. 6:15–8 p.m.: Petit Plats café—Tupelo Press off-site reading w/ Tupelo Press authors

1.       Hometown?

Fredonia, NY (that’s reeeeeallly Western NY, about 40 minutes south of Buffalo, in case you are wondering).

2.       How many AWP conferences have you attended?

Wow—hard to believe when I did the counting, but I have been going since grad school, so 10 out of the last 12 years! The only two times I didn’t go those years was because I was hugely pregnant with my two boys.

3.       Your sessions look terrific. Tell us about them, and who should attend?

• The“How to Make a Poem” panel is one of the featured ones at AWP (with  Brian Brodeur, Bob Hicok, Dorianne Laux, Eric Pankey and Adrian Blevins) and I think it will be of interest to anyone who wants to see a little bit ‘behind’ the curtain. It originated from Brian Brodeur’s great blog How a Poem Happens.

• Keetje Kuipers, GE Patterson, Paisley Rekdal, Brian Teare and Ross Gay, “Outsiders Writing the Outdoors.”—It’s late in the afternoon on the last day of the conference, and everyone will most probably be on a plane or in the bar by then, but have you HEARD these poets read?? This is not your granddaddy’s nature writing.

4.       Congratulations on being a featured presenter. What are you looking forward to most about attending the conference?

My husband (who is also the creative non-fiction editor of Mid-American Review) and I live in a sleepy little town in Western NY. Especially during winter, we don’t get to see many of our writer pals very often so AWP is very much a social as well as a pedagogical outlet for us. We each have panels and readers we check out separately and I in particular love wandering the book fair to browse through old faves and new magazines—to finally feel them in my hands—I’m always impressed with the sheer variety each year. The ginormous book-fair is my very favorite part, and where you will almost certainly find me when I’m not attending or giving a reading!

5.       What’s the question I should have asked you?

What will I be wearing? (Aimee—hee hee, I can’t tell if you are serious or not.)

(January—Oh yes, I’m completely serious! Good question. I’m all about the fashion.)

This might be the first time I try to pack everything in one giant duffle bag. I just had a horrific flying experience from JFK to Buffalo and I might *still* be at JFK had I didn’t just bring a carry-on to jump to various flights to make it home, so I have learned the power of bringing one bag when I travel in winter. But it’s hard as I try to leave space for all the books and magazines and pencils and buttons I know I will bring home, but am looking forward to bringing a colorful assortment of shoes—my only indulgence.  :)

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three poetry collections: LUCKY FISH, AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO, and MIRACLE FRUIT. Her writing has been published in several anthologies and was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and The Pushcart Prize. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia.

AWP is not only the second nerdiest book fest of the year (first place is reserved for a Star Trek Cookbook Con; there’s got to be one). AWP is also an opportunity/misfortune for book writers to be book sellers. As more and more publishers are burdening authors to create their own publicity and maintain their own promotion, AWP can be a great venue for playing into this much-demanded duel personality. So why the earlier “/”? Because not everyone embraces this sales position.

I understand. I’m no sales person either. For me, AWP is about ingesting knowledge and beer. So in my case, the answer to the question posed in this blog title is a casual shrug o’ the shoulders. I don’t know. But I should learn.

AWP is full of people who are in a position to jumpstart or boost a writer’s career. Editors, agents, and big-name authors integrate into the crowds of desirous and often delirious writers. The last thing these gatekeepers want, I’m sure, is to spend their few days at AWP hounded by sales pitches and trite conversation about the weather (which have the intention of weaving into a sales pitch at any time: “speaking of rain, my completed novel manuscript is about how acid rain destroys….”) See that ellipsis? That’s the grammatical representation of monologue meeting boredom.

So, as writers, known that yes, editors and agents may be attending in hopes of finding a great client, but no, they don’t want to hear another terrible sales pitch. My advice (not from the perspective of someone who edits or agents, but from someone who also hates hearing terrible sales pitches) is to sell yourself before you try to sell your book. Talk to editors and agents as people first. Word on the street is they actually are people.

Yes. That image above is a giant stack of business cards I plan to leave on various tables in hopes of promoting this blog and its contributors. Shut up! At least you can’t be forced into small talk with a stack of business cards. But if you can,  write a memoir and pitch it to someone.

1.    Hometown?

I was raised in Ontario, Oregon. It’s in the Eastern half of Oregon, nestled alongside the Snake River which separates that part of Oregon from Idaho. Our chief industries are onions and prisons.

2.    How many AWP conferences have you attended?

I’ve attended every AWP conference since it was held in Portland, Oregon in either 1997 or 1998. I can’t remember. What I do remember is that the program for the conference was a thin, 8 page saddle stapled news rag and that the book fair was so small you could see from one end to the other.

3.    Tell me a little about your session. Who should attend?

I’m on two panels this year: Goatfoot, Duende, Fractals: Teaching Prose by Poets on Friday at 10:30 a.m., and Face-to-Face Communities in the Age of Facebook on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. In the first panel, we’ll be talking about the value of teaching poetry/poetics to students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. My particular emphasis is to talk about teaching poetics to undergraduates and why such a practice is important but often missed in the classroom. Students and teachers might be interested in the conversation that’ll take place in the first panel, but I think it’ll be a valuable panel for the general AWP audience. The second panel will be about the various ways technology is used by the poets on the panel to maintain writing communities as well as the Internet’s value as a writing and editing tool. It might be a useful panel to attend if you are a burgeoning arts administrator, thinking about forming an online writing community, or using web publication as the means toward producing some type of literary work.

4.    What do you enjoy most about attending the conference?

Well, there are a number of things that I enjoy equally, but I’ll put them in order 1) Seeing old friends is always the number one reason I attend 2) I also like discovering new ideas for my classroom and my own writing practice 3) and finally, I love shopping at the book fair!

5.    Congratulations on your appointment to the AWP Board of Directors. What do you hope to bring to the board?

Thanks, Jan. AWP’s been an important part in my development as a writer and a teacher. As someone who teaches at a writing program that offers an M.A. instead of an M.F.A., I hope to advocate for similar programs across the nation. Additionally, as an ethnic minority and as a writer of a newer generation, I hope to serve the AWP’s Board of Directors as someone who can offer a fresh perspective in their programming and their outreach.

6.    What’s the question I should have asked you?

You should’ve asked me what I plan on doing off-site. I plan on seeing the Smithsonian Museum.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like The Southern Review Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at Western Washington University.

From The Velvet Podcast blog:

Authors Caleb J Ross (Stranger Will) and Brandon Tietz (Out of Touch) talk about their expectations going into the upcoming Washington DC AWP Conference in February. Caleb calls from his five-time attendance history to help first-timer, Brandon, get the most out of the four day event. And Brandon teaches Caleb a little about how to be a rockstar.

Listen below. Subscribe via Feedburner, Podcast Alley, RSS, or iTunes.

Once again, I am opening up this AWP blog to any and all attending writers who want to blog, tweet, or YouTube the event.

Does that last item in the preceding series work as both a noun and verb like the other two items?

Can I really call AWP a “season” when the event lasts only 4 days?

These questions and more will surely be addressed in ridiculously specific panels during the 2011 AWP Conference in Washington D.C. Don’t believe me? There was a panel last year called Decolonial Poetics: Womanist, Indigenous, and Queer Poets of Color on the Art of Decolonization. But like most AWP panels, I’m sure it was packed; all of the panels with variations of “how to get published,” “how to avoid the slush pile,” formatting your manuscript,” and “bring lots of knee pads and lip balm,” were already full.

If you are going, join me. If you are interested in participating, contact me.

That being said, I’m not done yet, I have a couple panels worth of recordings I haven’t put up yet, some follow-up interviews promised, and I have even figured out what the deal is with the mannequins if you guys missed it and wondered about it.

I found I’m behind this week in school work, and don’t get started with taxes, but look for some more content from me this weekend.

Best,

Todd

The other two are of Abe Smith, (no relation) who I heard read twice: once at the Thin Man and once at the Plus Gallery. I’m going to keep posting after this to give short reviews of the books that I got at the book fair. I’ll post those as I finish them.

Enjoy the videos!

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!

Abby Beckel, Randall Brown, Kim Chinquee, Sherrie Flick, Robert Shapard, and Lex Williford participated in the panel.

Given the high attendance, many of you might have missed it. The room was standing room only. It was certainly worth it, for those  that arrived early enough to get in!

Flash is a fascinating emerging form. As Lex Williford said it ”makes sense of contemporary chaos in short bursts of insight.” Or as Kim Chinquee said is a form of “sound, rhythm, image, and conflict.”

But I’ll let the author’s own words speak for them… The first part of the panel consisted of the panelists’ answers to a series of roundtable questions.

1)      What draws you to Flash Fiction?

Answers to Question 1

2)      How do you decide when you have an idea, if it is going to be flash length or longer?

Answers to Question 2

3)      How do you feel crafting flash is different than crafting a longer story? What tools do you use?

Answers to Question 3.

4)      What do you think makes Flash a particularly relevant form today?

Answers to Question 4

5)      As editors, readers, and teachers of flash, what makes a piece stand out for you?

Answers to Question 5

Each of the panelists then presented a writing exercise from their portion of the Rose Metal Media Flash Guide, and read a flash that was written from it.

Lex Williford

Robert Shapard

Kim Chinquee

Sherrie Flick

Randall Brown

There was a brief Q&A period.

AWPFFQnA

Thanks to everyone for a great panel. Thanks as well to the folks at Rose Metal Press, for providing a fascinating panel for those of us interested in Flash Fiction.

Writing and Teaching the Fantastic- excellent panel that gave me a few ideas for teaching exercises. The delved into alternate temporal states, rewritten histories and, my favorite, normal worlds that are just a tick off. I think this is where the most exciting fiction is happening because, to use one of their quotes, it denudes the camouflage of everyday normalness (or something to that effect.)

What’s Your Platform?- informative, though ultimately didn’t do much for me. If I’d attended this last year, I think I would’ve seen it in a different way, but I feel that most people seriously involved in independent literature are already pretty well-versed in creating a presence and getting their work to eyes abroad.

Byronic Vampires and Melancholy Green Men- excellent, excellent panel. Sort of a preview of the genre panel Saturday morning. They kicked around the genre vs literature question, got some good audience participation, told a lot of jokes and in general advocated for there to be no distinction. I had a discussion with Steve from Flatman Crooked at the Book Fair about the same thing, my stance being that, similarly to Is the Novel Dead? it’s not an important question, that we should be focusing on writing good stories. His position was that if genre remains stigmatized, places like MFA programs won’t deem it viable. Then there were chickens and eggs and all that. A good debate that will probably be waged over cheap beers for years to come.

VERMIN ON THE MOUNT- Amazing reading at the Mercury Cafe, introduced by Richard Nash. I’ll post some pictures when I get home. Matt Bell terrified with WOLF PARTS, Matthew Simmons read a short, Amelia Gray destroyed the room with a Carl story. She’s one fo my favorite writers at the moment and I’m glad I finally picked up AM/PM at the Featherproof table. Several other people read, though the lager haze it obscuring their names at the moment, but Goodloe Byron capped off the night with a rousing set. I love that dude. If you haven’t read him, you should. And he’ll give you a book for free. Really.

Score List: FUGUE STATE- Brian Evenson, REVISIONS OF- Goodloe Byron, I POISONED YOU- Pablo D”Stair, THE AWFUL POSSIBILITIES- Christian Tebordo, WOLF PARTS- Matt Bell, AM/PM- Amelia Gray, FLY-OVER STATE, Emma Straub, YOUR RIGHTFUL HOME- Alyssa Knickerbocker, NOT ABOUT VAMPIRES- A Flatman Crooked Anthology.

Previews: Indie Mag panel with Blake Butler, Mike Young, Aaron Burch, Roxanne Gay and another that’s slipping my mind. Insurgents Surging with Josh Weil, looking at the rise of the novella.

Tonight: The OWP/Velvet reading at Leela’s European Cafe, followed by the Featherproof Afterparty assures me that tonight will in fact be a large one. I can already feel tomorrow crumbling away. See you on the other side.

Jesse Lawrence: Thus far, you’ve written a novel in the Aliens series and one, forthcoming, in the Dead Space world. How did these projects come your way? Does your process differ, and how so, when writing a story in a previously mapped out world versus one of your own creation?

Brian Evenson: It’s a very different process in many ways. With both those series novels I did a long and carefully plotted outline first (20 pages or so), something that I usually don’t do with my other novels. I also wrote both of them pretty quickly, much quicker than my other novels, partly because that was the easiest way for me to keep the plot and characters consistent. Having already-created worlds that I was working in definitely changed the process as well—there were certain things I had to take as given, certain restrictions about what I could or couldn’t do. But both Aliens and Dead Space created worlds I genuinely liked and felt could accommodate me: I wouldn’t have done the novels if I hadn’t felt that way.

JL: If you could write a novel in any series or world which would you choose?

BE: I’d love to enter Richard Stark’s world (or maybe Donald Westlake’s world since Stark was one of his pseudonyms) and write a Parker novel. I’ve read nearly all of those. There’s something about the world view and the attitudes that I find really appealing: the quiet, controlled brutality of the main character and the careful planning of the heists, the way he reacts when things go wrong, etc. I think it would be a very interesting space to move around in.

JL: At this year’s AWP conference, you’re on a panel entitled Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy…Seriously. What are your thoughts on genre, how it is perceived, and on the genre versus literary ideology?

BE: I’ve written about this pretty extensively elsewhere. I’m convinced that too often genre is wrongly used as a dismissive category and that glorifying something by declaring it literary can sometimes gloss over a series of problems. There are a lot of bad books on both sides of the genre/literature divide, and a lot of good books as well. I’ve found my own reading, and my own writing crossing that divide more and more often.
There is another funny thing about genre divisions: they’re not parallel. The mystery genre is defined by, well, there being a mystery that has to be solved. That’s essential and so a kind of basic plot idea is worked into the definition. With SF, that’s not the case: it’s defined more by setting and props that appear within the book. With Horror, it’s different still: it seems, as Peter Straub has suggested, defined more by a mood. When we call something literary, what defines that genre? Use of language? Consciousness of style? There’s a certain vagueness there that results in the term “literary fiction” being applied to very different kinds of work for very different reasons, which makes it a very tricky genre, but a genre nonetheless.

JL: One could say that everything is genre. Most of the book that are dubbed literary are simply dramas. How is it, you think, that genre has come to mean, well, crime, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy?

BE: One thing that’s interesting is that we’ve started using the adjective “literary” to justify other genres. So my work often gets called “Literary Horror,” which to me means that there’s an acknowledgement of a connection to genre but also an insistence that it’s literary. It’s interesting that when you reverse the two terms and say “Horror Literature” it doesn’t have the same effect: it just means the same thing that people mean when they say simply “Horror.” The problem with genre, I remain convinced, is a problem with words and how we apply them.

I’d say this is true with genre in the broader sense as well. If you think of subgenres of fiction like “novel” and “short story”, there’s two very different things going on with both words. “Novel” comes from the word for new, and we still use the term that way (“a novel idea”); short story, focuses on length. There’s a reason that we valorize the idea of newness and innovation in regard to novels; it’s worked into the term itself.

There’s the further problem of confusion of the meaning of genre. Genre could mean the difference between fiction, poetry and drama. It is also used for subcategories within that: the novel genre, for instance. It is also used, usually derogatorially, to describe different sorts of writing, but as I’ve suggested above, the term is not used the same way to define each genre. Genre is a messed up term, and really problematic. And yes, in a way everything is genre, but that’s also to say the term is meaningless.

I think what’s starting to happen—and what I and a number of writers are actively trying to make happen—is that the firm distinctions between genres are starting to collapse. There’s a lot of cross pollination that’s going on at all levels: novels and poems interacting to create hybrid forms, literary and genre fiction (horror, sf, etc.) informing one another, and different genres (horror, sf, mystery, etc.) blurring and learning from one another. There are historical and other reasons for this, but I think it’s very healthy for literature as a whole.

JL: Do you prefer one genre over another? And what is it about such stories that grabs you?

BE: I think each genre, including the literary, has something to offer. What I’m most interested in are pieces that challenge my sense of what fiction can do, that make me see things in new ways, that cast new light on both the fictive and the real. Those books exist in all genres and all places: it may be Peter Straub’s The Dark Matter or John Ashbery’s Flow Chart or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. It may be something by Ken Bruen or Selah Saterstrom or John Yau or Brian Conn or John Crowley or Stendahl. If genre definitions and restrictions are keeping me from discovering those books, they need to be reconsidered.

Brian Evenson’s novel Last Days, published by Underland Press in 2009, won the American Library Association’s Best Horror Novel of the Year award. Also published in 2009 is a collection of stories, Fugue State.

For more on the genre side of things, and more from Brian Evenson, check out this panel at AWP Denver:

S115. Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy… Seriously. (Anthony Smith, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Tod Goldberg, Mark Smith, Seth Harwood) Six writers of genre fiction who also teach and/or have graduated from university creative writing programs dicuss how they approach genre fiction as a serious literary pursuit rather than as a lesser form of fiction. In addition, they discuss attitudes towards genre fiction in the university and how those attitudes have changed over the years.

Tod is the author of Living Dead Girl, finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside’s Palm Desert Graduate Center. He will appear on the Saturday morning panel “Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy…Seriously,” which will look at genre fiction as a serious literary pursuit.

Question 1: What book have you read recently that you absolutely loved?

Tod Goldberg: Next: A Novel by James Hynes. Seriously. Everything literature should be. Just read it.

Question 2: What’s one piece of advice you wish you had been given when you were just starting out?

TG: You don’t deserve anything. Publishers are not waiting expectantly for you to send them your manuscript. It is all up to you, and you have to be willing to put in the work it takes to do it.

Question 3: (In self defense, this question was suggested by Tod, apparently because he really wanted to answer it.) What is one thing that can always found in your refrigerator?

TG: Slice-and-bake cookies. They’re delicious.

Sitting up in the Peak lounge, 26th floor of the Hyatt Regency enjoying to view and trying to finalize my plan for tomorrow.

I have been hearing some people talking about a dozen author reading fom Omnidawn Publishing, at the Magnolia Hotel Ballroom 17th and Stout. Bar from 7-8 if you are into those things and readings by Christopher Arigo, Maxine Chernoff, Laura Moriarity and others. full info should be on page 98 of your book! I’ll probably be dropping by… If I can find it.

Jesse Lawrence: Part of the on-going debate regarding genre and literary fictions is that genre stories aren’t, well, literary. What do the two terms mean to you, and do you think that may have ever been the case with genre stories, but is now no longer the case? That is, has genre fiction evolved in any way?

Stephen Graham Jones: All ‘genre’ means to me, really, is ‘built-in audience.’ But that entails a set of agreed-upon conventions, too. Maybe even a formula. Formulas aren’t in the least inherently bad, though. Or, they don’t have to be. And — surely I’ve said this somewhere in print by now — I take the conventions and formulas to be the baffles, the constraints, the ridiculous stuff you have to focus the critical part of your mind on, such that something real and true and magic can maybe slip through while you’re not looking. To say nothing of how much harder you’ve got to push yourself as a writer, if you hope to be original within these certain boundaries. You really learn what you can do, I mean, when what you’ve given yourself to tell the story with’s a barbarian, an archer, an elf, and this elaborate catacomb system, say. But I’m saying all this from the writing side of things. I’m just as much a reader. And, when I’m strolling the shelves, thumbing books out, most of the time it’s genre titles I’ll be carrying around. Because, I mean, you go into a book, you have no guarantee of quality. No real suspicion, even, unless you know this writer already. When you don’t, though, and, on the front of one there’s this product-of-realism boring suburban house, and on the other cover there’s a gargoyle hand coming down on some poor guy’s head, then, yeah, it’s the gargoyle for me, just because, even if the writing sucks and story self-destructs, still, it’s more than likely I’m going to have gotten to see a gargoyle, yeah? And, coming out of the boring-house story, I’m going to have seen somebody dealing with the doldrums of life, maybe. Which, I can see that on any sidewalk. All of which is to say, I suppose, that books are less mirrors for me, more an escape hatch. I want to be taken somewhere other than here, not deeper into where I already am.
And, as for the terms themselves, they’re all polluted up. The market’s come to call ‘literary’ that which is not ‘genre,’ which is to say that which doesn’t have swords or ghosts or zombies or any of that fun stuff. But that’s way screwed up. What ‘literary’ should indicate is the strength of the writing, the caliber, the depth. And none of that’s isolated to non-zombie books. And neither are all non-zombie books inherently ‘literary.’ There’s quality writing on each set of shelves, and there’s a lot of trash, too. For my money, there’s a lot more trash on the literary shelves, a lot more high-craft / nothing-to-say books, few of which seem to be written in blood like I prefer — as if they mattered, as if the writer was living through this book, was gambling his or her life on it — but, I mean, I haven’t given up, either. There’s still stuff like Await Your Reply or Atonement happening from time to time, and, I mean, Oscar Wao’s from that shelf, and Blood Meridian, and Alice Fulton. But there’s also Kelly Link and Stephen King and Charlie Huston and Max Brooks and Joe Hill and CJ Box and Elizabeth Hand and Max Brooks and Joe Lansdale happening, and usually at a steadier rate. And more and more often on an endcap in-between, a Chabon and Evenson kind of place.
And, why this divide, yeah? Can’t quality writing just be quality writing? I don’t want to say the marketplace is the source of corruption — really, the market’s vital; without it, there’d be no feedback loop, and who knows what ridiculous-indulgent stuff might start showing up — but it’s maybe the river between the two camps, anyway. One side plays in it, the other insulates itself up some tower, pretends that water’s not even down there. Who knows how to fix this. Maybe a flood’ll come, give us a sea instead, a raft made from lashed-together books, I don’t know.

JL: You’ve mentioned before that horror is probably your favorite genre. What draws you to horror? Do you prefer any one subgenre over another? Do you think it has or will make a comeback–horror fiction–the way it did cinematically with the release of Scream?

SGJ: I love the horror, yeah, but kind of doubt we’re in pre-renaissance mode with it. Which, that’s good, I think. I mean, a glut of it like we had in the eighties, and, bam, the next decade’ll be dry, right? I’m happy with it kind of coasting along respectably, really. And, yeah, just all over Scream 4, especially now that Campbell’s signed on. So happy to see Williamson behind the pen again, too. Will always hate Dawson’s Creek for keeping Scream 2 and 3 from maybe being even better than they were. As for why I’m so into horror, though, I think it’s just that it’s basically people with all the trappings stripped away. You know your characters best in extreme situations, and horror’s got plenty of extreme situations. Also, I think horror’s the absolute oldest, most honest genre. Thousands of years ago, you’d walk away from the campfire, hear something pacing you, and run back, try your best to explain what’s out there. That’s what horror is, to me: trying to explain what’s out there. What’s in each of us. Some people say every story’s a mystery story, yeah, and I’ll agree, in that the form of the western novel tends to be always shaped that way. But underneath that, I think, there’s blood and guts and teeth, screams out in the darkness that you don’t know what’s happening. But you can’t look away either.

JL: Is there anything you’d like to see more of? Say, more Conan-esque protagonists or more monsters with lasers kind of stuff. Anything you feel is sorely lacking?

SGJ: Was just re-hitting some of the early Conan the other day. So miss it. And yeah, if somebody can do that still, then, please, put it on a shelf for me. As for anything missing, though, I don’t know. Okay, yeah: werewolves. Vampires were hot, zombies are the new black, all that, but nobody ever gives werewolves any real respect, I don’t think. And I’m not talking change-at-the-full-moon werewolves either, I’m talking the wolves you’d get had Near Dark been about lycanthropy. The way Strieber, say, does them in The Wolfen. But I so loved how McCammon did them as well. Anyway, as nobody’s doing it well enough right now, I’ve got plans, yeah. A perfect title. Just need 1100 pages worth of time to get it all down, I think.

JL: Do you ever juggle stories in your head or have to make a concious decision to ignore one in order to pursue another?

SGJ: I juggle opening lines, anyway, which is where the story lives. But then I just write one down instead of the other, and take off running. However, at the end of novels I’ll always get nervous about ten pages shy and spit out a few short stories, just as practice, or for confidence, that I can still do this thing called writing. At least enough to fake my way another few thousand words.

JL: Later this year, you have a new short story collection coming out from Prime Books, The Ones That Got Away. And another novel, It Came from Del Rio, has recently been anounced. What can you tell us about these, and what’s next beyond that? Perhaps monsters with lasers?

SGJ: Lasers are always problematic for me, because I can’t ask for one at a gun counter as cool as the Terminator could in 84, and I can’t seem to not hear Dr. Evil wanting them mounted on shark’s heads. An impulse I can completely understand. But I’m so in love with lasers, too. That big wave motion gun that would always, just in the nick of time, blast out from the front of the good ship Yamato in Star Blazers? For some people, that Farrah Fawcett poster’s the thing that ruined them for the rest of their lives. For me it was the Yamato.
But, no, no lasers in either of these two books, I don’t think. The Ones That Got Away is seventy- or eighty-thousand words of short horror fiction. Of mine, yeah. From Cemetery Dance and Doorways and Brutarian and New Genre and all around (Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best Horror of the Year v.2). Some unpublished, probably; surely. Have so much more, but tried to limit it to the bloody, the disturbing, the fun. So cool to get to be getting this collection real, too. A dream. No, no: a nightmare. The best kind.
And, the other, It Came from Del Rio, man. Just re-read it, to straighten out any tics, and I’m so in love with this novel, this story, this daughter trying to make amends with her father, that dad doing everything he can for his daughter, which seems to involve walking around even though he’s dead, and maybe (probably) (okay: definitely) kind of using his own head up enough that he has to take the head from this giant rabbit, go slouching across the scrublands of southern Texas, into Austin, his only retinue a loyal pack of chupacabras. Kind of thrilled-in-advance at the cover and marketing that’s going to happen here. Or, thrilled to be sending a zombie shuffling out in the world. The first of many, I hope.

You can find Stephen Graham Jones online at demontheory.net, and at this year’s AWP conference at these two panels:

R187. Byronic Vampires and Melancholy Green Men: Harnessing Genre for Literary Use. (J.W. Wang, Mark Winegardner, Stephen Graham Jones, Tom Franklin, Leah Stewart, Julianna Baggott) Perhaps no word can be more anathema to literature than genre. Yet, in the postmodern world the dividing line is often blurry, or even nonexistent, and we see more and more authors making use of familiar genre elements for their literary pursuits: vampires, the mafia, romance, etc. This panel explores the notion of genre versus literature: what the dividing lines are, how one informs the other, how one goes about bringing the two together, successes and failures.

S115. Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy… Seriously. (Anthony Smith, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Tod Goldberg, Mark Smith, Seth Harwood) Six writers of genre fiction who also teach and/or have graduated from university creative writing programs dicuss how they approach genre fiction as a serious literary pursuit rather than as a lesser form of fiction. In addition, they discuss attitudes towards genre fiction in the university and how those attitudes have changed over the years.

Mudlucious press is doing so much, expect to hear the name again, names like Bradley Sands,  Joanna Ruocco, Alyssa Knickerbocker, Molly Gaudry, Emma Straub, Elizabeth Ellen, Edan Lepucki, Jac Jemc, and Aaron Burch are involved.

So talk for a moment about Mud Luscious press, Who are you? And what do you want to do?

Mud Luscious Press was started in 2007 as an online journal and quickly expanded from the quarterly online issue to a monthly chapbook series and now, our novel(la) series, which released Molly Gaudry’s WE TAKE ME APART at the end of 2009 and will release both Ben Brooks’ AN ISLAND OF FIFTY and Sasha Fletcher’s WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS in June 2010. We feature aggressive and raw literature, and we hope to do it in sharp design and with a clear aesthetic approach.

You’re an editor, us writers live in fear of you! I’d like to know what you want to see and what you DON”T want to see.

What we want: raw, naked, aggressive literature that isn’t afraid to make rhythms and sounds, to use language against itself, to break and wreck and destroy the story as it is written.

What we don’t want: over-written narrative, heavy exposition, focus on dialogue, or emphasis on the resolution as the key to the story.

I think poets, and I am one, often underestimate or don’t plan for chapbooks. I see you produce them, how do you feel about this form?

For us, the chapbook is a quick and dirty way to get print literature into readers’ hands. We hope to, in hand-made and well-designed print form, give a monthly remembrance of what makes physical literature so unbelievably necessary.

What are you into at this AWP conference?

There are a million things we want to see, faces we want to put with names, but specifically we are co-hosting a puppet vs. author reading at the FlatmanCrooked booth on April 9th @ 4pm and we’d love to see everyone there.

And what do you have in the works that we should know about?

Our June novel(la)s are both brilliant and tremendous works of lit that we hope people will pre-order or jump on when they are officially in the world. Also, we just released our eleventh online issue featuring excerpts from the upcoming novels of Michael Kimball, Ken Sparling, Peter Markus, Roy Kesey, James Chapman, Robert Lopez, and a slew of other authors we greatly admire. Plus, our chapbook series in full swing with fourteen releases in 2010 (all for $20 to subscribers). The future? Who knows. But for now, we are feeling good about it all.

I’d like to thank, again, J.A. Tyler founding editor of Mudlucious Press for taking the time to talk to us. ONE DAY, everyone! and we’ll be in Denver!

For those that are curious, upstreet is going to be at the bookfair (K21) and will be having a Thursday night event at 7pm, 910 Arts Event Gallery. 910 Santa Fe Drive, and if you haven’t been paying attention, that’s Denver, CO.

So how about we see some of the answers a lit mag editor has for my questions? If Vivian is interested, I might even do a live interview with her later this week! Oh, and upstreet, no capitals. All lowercase.

Tell me about upstreet. What would you say is your mission statement?

—My vision for upstreet is that it will ultimately contain a mix of work by both established and emerging writers. The established writers will attract readers, and the less-well-known writers will then have the exposure they need to become better established. The most interesting thing about publishing a literary journal is the possibility of discovering new talent.

I sincerely hope that you are looking for writers. Tell me about the kind of writers you want to see submit?

—upstreet’s calls for submissions ask for “quality submissions, with an edge.” I like many different kinds of work, from the traditional to the experimental, so the genre editors have quite a lot of leeway in choosing the content of the magazine. The guidelines brochure contains statements by the three genre editors about what they’re looking for. Our smallest number of submissions is in creative nonfiction, but despite that, I’ve actively tried to build the presence of CNF in the journal.

I see you’re based up in the Berkshires, I know place informs my writing, does it inform your editing? Do you feel upstreet reflects a place, or transcends it?

—I was born in the Berkshires, and have lived there all my life. This is reflected in the title of the journal. When I was a kid, we used to say we were going “upstreet” when we went to the center of my hometown (Pittsfield, Massachusetts) to shop or just hang out. I wrote the editor’s essay for the first issue to explain what the title meant. Since then, there has been a similar essay (or prose poem) in each issue. When I started the journal, I had been managing editor of The Berkshire Review (which is now defunct) for eight years. The editors who helped me start upstreet were area people, and most of the writers who submitted knew me from The Berkshire Review. This is no longer the case. upstreet gets submissions from all over the world, and the more recent issues have each published only two or three writers from Berkshire County. I like to keep a Berkshire presence in the journal because it enables me to hold local readings to launch each issue. Other than that, it’s really a national journal.

Tell me about something that excited you as an editor.

—Well, I’m both editor and publisher, so I naturally get a thrill when upstreet gets recognition in some way. The most exciting example of that so far has been the Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal. But I guess I’d have to say that the most fun I have as an editor is the author interview. I enjoy doing the preparation—reading almost all of what the author has written and coming up with questions to ask—and then, the conversation itself. It really is exciting to talk with someone who has been a successful author, and learn about his/her experiences and opinions about the craft. I’ve been fortunate to be able to interview some pretty interesting writers.

What do you hope to do at AWP? I note your presence, Bookfair table K21, and your reading on Thursday, take a moment to tell us what you are up to, and what you hope to do.

—AWP is an exciting place to be. There are so many events, both on the program and after hours, that it’s impossible to even scratch the surface. I always end up highlighting more things in the program than I could possibly attend, even if I didn’t have to stay at the upstreet Bookfair table for most of the time. And that, of course, is the main reason I’m here: to make sure upstreet’s name is before the writing public. I also enjoy seeing people I went to school with or met at other conferences, and meeting writers face to face who have appeared in upstreet. I get such a kick out of that, having someone come to the Bookfair table and say, “I’m so-and-so, and I had a short story in upstreet number four.”

Thank you so much Vivian for taking the time to talk to me.

Who is Robert Fitzgerald?

In the 1970s, Robert Fitzgerald was Boyleston Professor of Rhetoric, (the poet position that grants ceremonial rights to allow one’s cow to graze on Cambridge Common) at Harvard Unviersity.

He taught forms writing, “Versification” undergraduate.

Fitzgerald was a man of letters. He started his career as a journalist for Time Inc. He traveled to Alabama and Louisiana with James Agee and Walker Evans to study the Great Depression. They wrote the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

What did you learn from him about creative writing and translation?

Fitzgerald stressed daily writing regimens, and carefully and purposefully choosing what to read. To translate you should start from the target language. You should love the puzzle problem of the meaning of words, and the language, the sounds, the difference shapes of things—and you must concern yourself with making it as right as possible. You must consider the function of the line. Write the original language, then below it a line of notes, thoughts, and then the translation as the third line.

What makes translation important?

Today translators bring the ancient and medieval to modern audiences with contemporary references. So much of the world’s literature is inaccessible, unavailable. Translators share and the spread the unfairly unread.

A Tribute to Robert Fitzgerald will start Saturday at 9 A.M. in room 203 of the Colorado Convention Center, Street Level. Panelists will discuss Fitzgerald in different arenas: his poetry, his teaching of critique, of forms and his translation work.

Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator.  She is Associate

Professor of English and was Founding Director of the Creative Writing

Program at Adelphi University.  She blogs at

http://www.judithbaumel.com.  She also lectures on modern and

contemporary American poetry at Oxford University, UK.  A former

director of the Poetry Society of America, her poetry, translations

and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni

Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.  Her books of poetry

are The Weight of Numbers,  Now ,  and The Kangaroo Girl (forthcoming

from GenPop Books).

F152. An Insurgent Surging: The Case for the Novella Now. (Josh Weil, Michael Knight, Tom Franklin, Cynthia Reeves) This panel will examine the novella as a renegade art form whose time has come. We will discuss the underappreciated rewards the form offers writers, readers, teachers, and publishers. But the focus will be on the craft of writing novellas—challenges, rewards, and the unique approaches that the form—all directed towards answering this question: why is right now the right time to refocus attention on the novella?

When and where it be?
Room 110. Colorado Convention Center, Street Level. 12pm-1.15pm

What about it?

I’ve had the good fortune to talk with award-winning author Josh Weil on several occasions and see him read. His novella collection, The New Valley, recently won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. True, they always say these things, but it really couldn’t happen to a nicer person.

I asked him a few questions about the oft-neglected story form, the novella.

NK: Like flash fiction, novellas seem to be popping up more often. Also like flash fiction, they have a notoriously slippery definition. What is your quick-and-dirty definition of a novella? Does the definition lie more in scope or word count?

JW: Well, if you want really quick and really dirty, then word count. In which case I’d say roughly 15,000 – 50,000 words. But I doubt Don Delillo’s new “novel” is even close to 50,000; I’d bet its more like 40, or even 30. And the longest novella in my collection is around 49,000 or something. So, I’d rather go with scope. And if we’re talking scope, here’s the best I can do: If a short story focuses sharply on a narrow part of the world and treats it with great intensity and a novel approaches the world with a much wider lense and greater sweep and treats what it sees with a broad generosity, then a novella compressess the world with the focus of a short story, but it explores that smaller space with a novel’s generous care.

NK: You’re the writer-in-residence at a private high school. Are you teaching beginning writers the novella as a viable art form, or is it something to pick up later?

JW: Nope. They’re capable of dealing with it, but in an intro to fiction class (which is what I teach), I think short stories work better. I’d love to see advanced undergrad classes (and certainly graduate classes) grappling more frequently with the novella, though.

NK: Are there any contemporary writers you feel are ‘experts of the novella’ or are contemporary writers looking to the past for inspiration, conventions and guidance?

JW: Absolutely. There are contemporary masters of the form. Jim Harrison comes immediately to mind. So does Alice Munro (who write both long short stories and some full fledged novellas). And of course George Saunders, Charles Baxter, Denis Johnson, Annie Proulx…They’ve all written novellas. The form is alive and well; it’s just not recognized the way it should be.

WEDNESDAY April 7
12-7 Register

THURSDAY April 8
9:00-10:15
R106. Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Literary Fantastic. *
(Sarah Stone, Joan Silber, Melissa Pritchard, Doug Dorst, Sylvia Brownrigg)
We’ll explore how fabulous or numinous fiction can be meaningful and believable: from completely alternate worlds to literary ghost stories to essentially realist stories that depict characters’ beliefs about the supernatural. We’ll consider great examples and describe ways for writers and their students to unlock their own inventions and move beyond genre cliches. The panel will include handouts with reading lists and writing exercises.

R118. The In Sound from Way Out: Submission to Publication.
(M. Bartley Seigel, Margaret Bashaar, Aaron Burch, James Grinwis, Jennifer Pieroni, Roxane Gay)
Editors from five eclectic little magazines—Bateau, Hobart, PANK, Quick Fiction, and Weave—unpack their editorial projects and processes, quirks and anomalies, across genres, and invite questions to initiate dialogue among panel and audience members.

10:30-11:15
R143. Shameless Book Promotion: Squad 365 Rides Again! *
(Marisha Chamberlain, Margaret Hasse, Jon Spayde, Todd Boss)
Last year, we drew an overflow crowd for an AWP panel on creative book promotion. Participants called us “educational, generous, warm, and funny.” Collaborating, blogging, and presenting as “Squad 365,” we’re two poets, a novelist, and a nonfiction writer with books out from Norton, Nodin, and Random House in 2008, and from Soho Press in 2009. In 2010 we’re back again with another lively discussion about simple and innovative ways to win readers, promote a little on a regular basis, and enjoy marketing.

12:00-1:15
R163. What’s Your Platform? What Agents & Editors Are Looking For in Writers. *
(Christina Katz, Jane Friedman, Robin Mizell, David W. Sanders, Sage Cohen) Yes, the quality of your writing still matters. But becoming visible and influential is more crucial to landing a book deal than ever, according to agents and editors in every facet of the publishing industry. Aspiring authors need to develop a platform in order to get noticed. Fortunately for emerging writers in all genres, there are more affordable, accessible tools available for platform-development and building, which make this important responsibility a pleasure and not a chore.

1:30-2:45 (a TON to see)

R177. Following the Paths to Publication: First Books and What Happens Next.
(Dan Wickett, Seth Harwood, Anis Shivani, Shawna Yang Ryan, Lowell Mick White) The first book is an important, joyous event in the life of any writer. Yet the process of achieving the first book is rapidly changing, largely through accelerated technologies and increasingly fractured demographics. How can writers successfully react to these changes? What constitutes ultimate success? On this panel, five debut authors will discuss their varied paths to publication, the impact the book has had on their lives, and the larger implications of change in publishing practices.

R184. How to Start Your Own Online Literary Magazine: Five Editors Tell All.
(Rebecca Morgan Frank, Michael Archer, Thom Didato, Gregory Donovan, Ravi Shankar) Have you dreamed of starting your own online literary magazine? Join the editors of Blackbird, Drunken Boat, failbetter, Guernica, and Memorious, five longstanding and respected online journals, as they share the ins and outs of developing and sustaining a literary journal on the web. Come hear about the unique advantages and challenges of editing in this expansive medium, and learn pointers for financing, marketing, and managing the technical challenges of a web-based journal.

R185. Best New American Voices 10 Year Anniversary Reading.
(David James Poissant, Dani Shapiro, Christian Moody, Ted Thompson, Laura van den Berg) Best New American Voices, Harcourt’s annual anthology series, features short stories from emerging writers enrolled in writing programs across North America. After ten volumes, the series is drawing to a close, but not before celebrating its 10th anniversary! Series coeditor Natalie Danford will discuss the impact of the book on American fiction in the 21st century, while Dani Shapiro will discuss the stories she chose for the 2010 edition. Four contributors will read from their works.

R186. Ecotone 5th Anniversary Reading.
(Ben George, Robert Wrigley, Benjamin Percy, Kathryn Miles, Cary Holladay, Reg Saner) Ecotone, the award-winning semiannual magazine published at UNC Wilmington, celebrates its 5th anniversary in 2010. In its short life, the magazine has already had its work reprinted in several annuals of the Best American series and in the Pushcart Press anthology, among others. Ecotone seeks to bring together the literary and the scientific, the personal and the biological, the urban and the rural. Please join us for a reading by six of our outstanding and widely acclaimed contributors.

R187. Byronic Vampires and Melancholy Green Men: Harnessing Genre for Literary Use. *
(J.W. Wang, Mark Winegardner, Stephen Graham Jones, Tom Franklin, Leah Stewart, Julianna Baggott)
Perhaps no word can be more anathema to literature than genre. Yet, in the postmodern world the dividing line is often blurry, or even nonexistent, and we see more and more authors making use of familiar genre elements for their literary pursuits: vampires, the mafia, romance, etc. This panel explores the notion of genre versus literature: what the dividing lines are, how one informs the other, how one goes about bringing the two together, successes and failures.

3:00-4:15 (none – bookfair?)

4:30-5:45 (none – bookfair, local, dinner?)

NIGHT: Chabon Keynote at 8:30-10 and Keyhole Party

FRIDAY April 9

9:00-10:15 (none – breakfast?)

10_30-11:45
F138. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, & Writers in the Field. *
(Abby Beckel, Randall Brown, Kim Chinquee, Sherrie Flick, Robert Shapard, Lex Williford)
Join five of the twenty-five contributors to this ground-breaking anthology for a roundtable discussion on the history, cross-cultural influences, reemergence, and current practices in the field of flash. These authors also will offer exercises and read examples of stories that will be of use and interest to anyone who writes, teaches, edits, or just generally enjoys the short short form.

12:00-1:15
F150. Indie Mags: Publishing Outside of MFA Programs and Other Institutional Support. *
(J.W. Wang, Aaron Burch, Dave Clapper, Mike Young, Jennifer Flescher, Blake Butler)
Independent journals provide an alternative to the established journals affiliated with universities and creative writing programs, and they frequently serve as pioneers in the world of literary publishing. Join editors from Tuesday, An Art Project, Hobart, NOÖ Journal, Juked, Lamination Colony and SmokeLong Quarterly for a roundtable discussion about the workings of independently-published literary journals, what it takes to keep them going, and what these journals mean to potential contributors.

F164. The Future of Book Publishing: How Authors Should Navigate the New Market.
(Mary Gannon, Dennis Loy Johnson, Jeffrey Shots, Michael Reynolds, Lee Montgomery, Julie Barer) Editors and agents will discuss the changes that have occurred in the practices and policies of literary publishing—from acquiring books, producing them in all of their incarnations, and marketing them. They will also offer timely advice on how authors should best navigate the changing industry and the new market.

1:30-2:45 (none – bookfair, late lunch, exploring Denver)

3:00-4:15
F197. What We Hate: Editorial Dos and Don’ts. *
(H. Emerson Blake, Katie Dublinski, Andrew Leland, Denise Oswald, Daniel Slager, Rob Spillman)
You won’t find this in the FAQ. Get it straight from the source. Six distinguished magazine and book editors speak candidly about what they love and loathe and everything in between. What do editors really want from writers? What do they absolutely not want? If you’re positively sure you know the answers to these questions, then don’t come to this panel featuring editors from The Believer, Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, Orion, Soft Skull Press, and Tin House..

4:30-5:45
F215. The Road Less Taken and the Ivory Tower: Getting Creative about Creative Careers. *
(Laura Valeri, Andrea Dupree, Margo Rabb, David Rothman, John Brehm) Poets, fiction, and nonfiction writers with different degrees and career tracks discuss the skills and strategies that helped them succeed, including why we should look beyond the MFA vs. PhD argument into the roles of writing programs today, what academic searches really value, how academic careers interact with creative careers, and why finding alternatives that keep us prolific, creative, and advocating for the art is an essential strategy for success.

F229. Navigating Chaotic Changes in Literary Magazine Publishing.
(Melanie Moore, Maribeth Batcha, Carolyn Kuebler, William Pierce, Stephanie G’Schwind) Join publishers and editors from American Short Fiction, One Story, AGNI, Colorado Review, and the New England Review for a discussion of the opportunities and challenges in the current “publishing crisis.” As more readers come to expect free content on the internet, how can literary publishers continue to pay writers, sustain their operations, and build their audiences? As paradigms shift, learn how these magazines are adapting their business models and their magazines to succeed.

NIGHT: Tons of receptions including Tin House from 7-8:15; George Saunders and Etgar Keret reading at 8:30-10, Velvet/OWC/OWP reading from 6-9.

SATURDAY April 10

9:00-10:15
S109A. Insider Strategies for Getting your Books Published.
(Jeff Herman)
Learn proven insider techniques for getting commercially published.

S115. Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy… Seriously. *
(Anthony Smith, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, Tod Goldberg, Mark Smith, Seth Harwood)
Six writers of genre fiction who also teach and/or have graduated from university creative writing programs dicuss how they approach genre fiction as a serious literary pursuit rather than as a lesser form of fiction. In addition, they discuss attitudes towards genre fiction in the university and how those attitudes have changed over the years.

10:30-11:45
S125. CLMP Panel—Life on the D-List: Digital Publishing. *
(Richard Nash, Chad W. Post, Ivory Madison, LeAnn Fields, Leslie McGrath)
Panelists savvy in the ways of zeros and ones—from University of Michigan Press, redroom.com, Drunken Boat, and Open Letter Books—talk about the hows and whys of this next phase of the published word.

12:00-1:15
S152. Harper Perennial Presents: A Reading by Kevin Sampsell and Justin Taylor.
Harper Perennial presents Justin Taylor and Kevin Sampsell reading from their newly published books. Justin Taylor reads from his debut story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, a collection of prophetic, provocative, and dazzlingly written stories that explore the ways our everyday delusions invite pain, disappointment, and even joy into our lives. In A Common Pornography, a memoir told in vignettes, Kevin Sampsell intertwines recollections of small-town youth with darker threads of family history and reveals how incest, madness, betrayal, and death can somehow seem normal.

S160. Conflict vs. Chaos: Workshopping the Violent Story.
(Robin Romm, Daniel Stolar, Eric Puchner, Andrew Altschul, Darrin Doyle)
Narrative fiction requires conflict in order to function, but student writers often equate conflict with violence. Writers like Paul Bowles, Junot Diaz, and Flannery O’Connor have used brutality to great effect. But simply parroting the action won’t produce literary fiction. How do we teach our students to turn violence into complex, literary conflict? How can a student learn to avoid gratuitous gore? This panel will focus on practical methods and strategies for critiquing the violent story.

S163. Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals and Websites in 2010. *
(Dan Albergotti, Dan Wickett, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Terry Kennedy)
This panel examines the evolution of online publishing and literary promotion via digital media in the 21st century. Dan Wickett and Jeremiah Chamberlin will discuss ways their sites have developed an extended literary community for emerging writers, while Dan Albergotti and Terry Kennedy will address how aesthetics of online journal design and presentation have evolved in recent years.

1:30-2:45
S172. Weirding It Up: How and Why to Deploy Unusual Points of View. *
(Kyle Minor, Benjamin Percy, Christopher Coake, Lauren Groff, Holly Goddard Jones) Most craft discussions of point of view are heavy on the basics: single and double voiced first person narration, the central consciousness and the close third, omniscience and the free indirect style. But what happens to point of view when, say, a story demands the writer tell it backwards from end to beginning, or shift the point of view at a story’s beginning or end, or enter into the mind of a monster?

3:00-4:15
S194. Demystifying the Hiring Process: Inside the Search Committee.
(Laura Lee Washburn, Jeffrey Thomson, Amy Sage Webb, Amy Fleury)
Panelists will share extensive experiences with searches, explaining what committees look for and the constraints they’re under. We’ll offer practical advice from how to do a presentation to the “Don’ts” of the interview process. We’ll focus on the committee’s perspective at universities of a variety of sizes to help candidates see how minor details make major differences. This panel continues the conversation from AWP in Chicago with more time for audience participation and questions.

S201. Thirty Years of Mid-American Review: An Anniversary Reading.
(Matt Bell, Matthew Eck, Karin Gottshall, Jeffrey McDaniel, Michelle Richmond, Alison Stine) This reading celebrates the 30th Anniversary of Mid-American Review, the literary journal edited and published by students and alumni of Bowling Green State University’s program in creative writing. MAR is proud of its tradition of featuring work by contemporary writers of eclectic voices and styles, and the five presenters have all contributed to the magazine’s pages over the years.

4:30-5:45 (none – bookfair?)

http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1456

And it is indeed fun to play with. I am, frankly, tempted to just record EVERYTHING FROM NOW ON.

My question is am I limited to 64M of posting or is there another way?

Please Congoscenti, do enlighten your benighted son, ’cause my test recordings, hour and hour and a half, were about 70M.

And seriously, 70 megs? I have a gig on tap! I’m going to be recording everything at AWP EVERYTHING! And the darn recorder is the size of a pack of gum.

Buying a digital voice recorder has made me scared.

1. Authors – peruse the list of authors that you enjoy as a reader, approach them as a fan first.  Then look for the people you respect, and try to go see them read or host a panel.  Most of the time it will give you a bit of a boost, some inspiration, to find out that these men and women are really very smart, extremely talented, and will take the time to talk to you personally.

2. Panels - you will have overlap, times when you cannot be in two places at once, or maybe you have a long way to go.  So plan out your schedule so you that can make as may as possible.  Take a moment to see where you are in your career and what panels will benefit you the most.  See a variety – on craft, on subjects that relate to your writing, go to readings, and support the presses and authors that you like.  Don’t book yourself solid, allow time to eat, take a breather and hang with friends too.  There is a ton of information here, you may get to ask a question too, meet an agent, get an e-mail.  See as many as you can.

3. Book Fair – you may need a couple of trips to really soak it all up.  It is HUGE, but it is finite.  Keep an eye out for signings and authors.  I saw Steve Erickson just sitting at a booth, had a nice chat.  Met Emma Straub @ Avery for the first time this way, and Aaron Burch @ Hobart.  This  is an opportunity to talk to authors, talk to editors, and to find out about new presses, new journal, or to do more research about places you already know and love.  You know how every journal out there says to read their work before you submit?  Do that. You can pick up copies much cheaper here, reduced rates.  Also, sneaky tip – if you wait on some borderline purchases until the last day, or last hours, they may practically give them away.

4. Money – bring some.  This is the time to put your money where your mouth is.  Support small presses, buy that copy by an author you’ve always been meaning to read.  Spend the cash, whatever you can afford.  I bring an extra suitcase that is almost entirely empty just to bring back books and magazines, journals and chapbooks.  $100 easy.  If you start saving now, put aside a couple bucks a week, your coins, an extra $10 or $20 from each paycheck, you’ll have it.

5. Be nice - don’t come up to an editor and say “Why the hell didn’t you publish my brilliant story?”  Be aware of the time restraints that others have, authors and editors, and try not to monopolize an author when there are others standing around.  Don’t get greedy – share your love of writing, meet new people, and just use common sense.  This is supposed to be fun, not a task, not a chore.  Be generous with comments.  “Loved your last issue, the Outdoors one?  Great design and that story by Stephen Graham Jones” was awesome.”

6. Hotel – book it early, NOW.  Book it as close to the event as possible.  Share a room, splurge a little.

7. Be social – go to readings, talk to old friends, meet new friends, buy a buddy a beer, get that nice editor a glass or wine, thank her for supporting you, eat meals, take an author out and pay for it.

8. Take notes – bring a notebook or journal and take notes, jot down web sites, authors, books, magazines and then…ACTUALLY RE-READ IT when you get home.  This is valuable stuff, pay attention, and maybe it will turn into something really exciting.

9. Pace yourself – take breaks, spend time with friends, don’t make it into a flashback to school or some other business conference that you hated. Get a coffee, relax, and don’t feel like you have to see EVERY SINGLE PANEL.  If it doesn’t excite you, when you read the synopsis, find one that does.  If your buddy is into something you aren’t, and there is something at the same time, go see the one that will help you the most and then you’ll have something to talk about later.

10. Build community - we’re all struggling out here, so while you should definitely promote your work, look at ways that you can help others.  Can you contribute a story?  Is there an event coming up that you can Tweet, Facebook, or promote on your blog?  Find other authors that are in you hometown or area.  Hand out cards, connect, take cards, take promotional items, and drop people e-mails later.  Talk about the events later that blew you away – what reading, what new journal looks really cool, who was giving away shots of bourbon at their booth, what editor was really nice to you, what new author did you discover?  Spread the word about what you did and saw and enjoyed.  We’re all in this together.

Have fun, and I’ll see you there.

Peace,
Richard

SEE ALSO: How to have fun and be spontaneous: a list

Mucca Pazza in Chicago, IL 2009

This AWP blog is maintained by author Caleb J. Ross, with content from various amazing contributors.

The annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Projects) conference can be extremely tiring. Between the early morning panels and quick coffee with fellow attendees, between navigating the labyrinthine Book Fair and waiting in line to for a few seconds for face-time with a favorite author, between evening drinks and morning drinks, there is little time to absorb the wealth of information.

That is where we hope to help. I’ve (this is Caleb typing) been to many previous AWP Conferences, and while I’ve gained much, I always leave with a sense of guilt, as though I had spent too much time napping, and not enough time note-taking.

Washington DC 2011 continues where Denver, CO 2010 left off: I want to dedicate my trip to ensuring other writers don’t suffer that same weight. The contributors to this here blog thing will be your extra eyes, ears, and fingers to document as much of the conference as we can. From the off-site evenings, to the vagabond readings, and even some of the panels themselves, we’ll be there to (probably) not entirely subjectively archive the events.

We have a Twitter stream (see the sidebar, or go here), a YouTube channel (sidebar, or here), and TwitPic stream (sidebar, or here), and of course this blog.

Read about the contributors, here. If you’d like to be a part our documentary crew, go here. If you’d like to buy me a drink, email me here.

NOTE: though the powers that run the AWP Conference have not approached me about this blog in any way, I feel it important to state that this blog is not affiliated with AWP. I am simply a multi-attendee who wishes to help other attendees get as much from the conference as possible.

Anyway, I’m trying to get into this ‘community of writers’ thing. Matt is the first person I ‘know’ that I know is going out.

My question is, do you folks have someone you’d like to see?

Oh and if anyone has a flash fiction chapbook out there you want reviewed, I can do that…

T

In preparation, I perused the presenter schedule last night, scanning first for known names (the Brian Evensons, the Stephen Graham Joneses, etc.) and second for panels that seem interesting based on their short descriptions. Why look for names before content? My thinking is that my respect for a particular author will likely be telling of the sort of material they will present. Plus, I can be a bit of a fanboy at times.

At the right, you’ll see a list of the preliminary authors I’m excited to see. This list is a screenshot from a .pdf file that I created. Unfortunately, the AWP site doesn’t have a downloadable .pdf list (that I could find), so let me be the savior my cult claims me to be and save you some trouble. (EDIT: the official site has a .pdf schedule now) Click the link below to download the schedule in .pdf format.

2010 AWP Conference Schedule in .PDF format

So now I find myself in an MFA program, just leaving being a bookseller for three years. How can I resist going out to Denver for AWP?

So it’s December, the conference is in April, haven’t packed my bags quite yet, but I do have a plane ticket, a hotel reservation, and a roommate (thanks internets!) who I know nothing about other than the fact that he’s named Joel and goes by the name Indigo Moor.

Strap in, I think it’s going to be a wild ride….

Though we have eight months until the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, CO, I see no reason to subvert my excitement. As a four time attendee (to be five with this Denver event), I have learned a lot. Expectations have been set, have been met, have been exceeded, and in a few cases have been crushed by weight of disappointing reality (if a reading advertises free drinks, I take that to mean dine-in AND carry-out).

So, with hopes of alleviating preparation anxiety for first-timers and Alzheimeric repeat attendees, I have put together a short list of ways to wring as much from your conference experience as possible.

1. Read the 2010 New Conference Attendee FAQ found at the AWP site. This will help with practical concerns; where to get your name badge, how the overall scheduling works, and even how to sneak in by taking another person’s badge (Q: May I pick up someone else’s badge at Pre-registration?, A: Yes. However, you need to provide a signed and dated letter stating that this person has given you permission to pick up his/her badge) which I don’t condone, but it seems almost too easy. I mean, who hasn’t forged a signature or twelve during this crazy bank job called life?
2. Examine the schedule in-depth BEFORE the conference starts (a tentative list is available here. The final schedule will be posted at the AWP site October; I will link to it once it becomes available now, here. NOTE: the AWP site doesn’t have a .pdf schedule, so I made one. You are welcome. EDIT: the official AWP site has a .pdf schedule now). You will be on your feet all day, carrying more than a human should, and a giant 200 page conference schedule will not be a welcome anchor when trying to flag down your favorite author for a quick chat.
3. Plan your days with the following in mind: the rooms are small and the demand is huge. Make plans for multiple backup panels should the one you want to attend be completely full (but be sure to check back here to see if one of us AWP Bloggers captured the skinny for you).
4. Bring a recording device, audio or video, because I promise that you will not swallow everything during the panels themselves. Also, once days 3 and 4 hit, you will likely cut back a few panels due to exhaustion, and those that do stay on your agenda will have a tough time breaking through your burnout.
5. Pack an empty bag for the many books you will buy at the bookfair. Better yet, plan to mail them home in order to make your airport time easier on your back.
6. Join AWP forums before the trip to network with other conference attendees. It is always good custom to have coffee scheduled. Plus, it makes you feel like a true mover and/or shaker. AWP has an official forum, but a Google search as the conference nears will provide plenty more.
7. Socialize, socialize, socialize (notice that I did not say “network”). Above all else, remember that the Conference itself is more than just series of ego-infused university style lectures (I kid…sorta). It is a time to meet other writers, drink some beers, share a dirty joke, and forget it all in the morning. Don’t worry, though, you’ll likely read about your forgotten exploits in attendee blogs the next morning.

If you are attending Washington D.C’s AWP Conference and would like to be a contributor for this blog, all you have to do is click on “Register” in the footer at the bottom of this page. Choose a username and password, then  I’ll follow up with more info.

We have no bumper stickers or protest placards to swag your way, but we do have contagious passion.As you can see, we have a Twitter stream and a YouTube channel set up to make documenting the events as easy as possible.

Any questions at all, contact caleb [at] calebjross [dot] com.

Consider this blog a hub of observant voices, gathered to report the details, both official and, shall I say, “off-site” (re: the drinks and dirty jokes side) events during the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Colorado.  I understand that the conference is many months pending. I understand that planning this far ahead is a symptom some psychologists would associate with a Hyper-Systemizing disorder. But I understand better than both of those concepts (or at the least the first) that the AWP Conference can be a hectic monstrosity. So having an additional group of eyes and ears to absorb the lights and sounds could be the only way to feel you have truly learned something while maintaining the secret of your crippling scriptophobia (I had to look it up, too).

We will be using Twitter to report real-time intimacies, posting thoughts and pics as opportunities arise (see the sidebar to the left). For the more detailed analysis, we will be posting legit blog entries. Essentially, when we experience something, we want to give you the vicarious sense of having been there.

But who are we? We are a collection of writers, some with a sordid AWP history, some conference virgins, all determined to press from the 2010 AWP Conference a delicious literary extract to be used or abused by any and all. If you would like to join in our coverage, send me an email with your name, a link to your website (if you have one; I’ll be looking mainly for evidence of competency – but don’t worry, we have brain damaged monkeys posting too, so you’ll almost certainly look great by comparison), and just a few short biographical lines. We can’t pay you. But maybe we can meet for an aforementioned “off-site” event.