from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Washington, DC, last weekend.
Wednesday, 11:30pm – A woman with the stiff, arched bangs and deliberate side-part I associate with real estate agents pulled my large suitcase off the luggage carousel for me. She seemed eager for the chance to help someone out. I was delighted by her chivalry.
Wednesday, 11:20pm – At the Dulles airport, a skeezy, fiftysomething guy gave me elevator eyes on an escalator and told me I looked like the AWP “type” after I said hello to him. He had been talking about the conference from Oakland to Denver and Denver to DC so I thought I’d reach out. After he gave me a flyer for his off-site reading, “Live Nude Words” (“I only come to these things for the off-site events”) and a flyer for his Exotic Novel “bad bad bad,” I decided that knowing someone is also a writer is not a good enough reason to make small talk.
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Thursday, 10:10am – After our panel (Teaching in the New Landscape), four people gave me their cards and asked for PDFs of the multimedia curriculum I had been developing. Faith & Sarah told me my practice and flashcards had paid off, that I engaged the audience and didn’t do that thing where I raise my voice in a question at the end of each sentence. My whole body was throbbing with adrenaline (in place of sleep, partly)—I wish it could have lasted forever.
Thursday, 10:15am – I spent about half my preparatory, pre-trip energy making sure I had business cards. Then I forgot to put them by the door for my panel. Maybe two people got them from me, at the end.
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Saturday, 1:30pm – I collected lots of free sample copies of literary journals, including Oyez Review, Orion, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Missouri Review, and Kenyon Review; and discounted copies of Black Warrior Review and Barrelhouse. The guy tabling for Oyez was super nice, a returning MFA and fiction writer from Chicago. He told me if I came to AWP next year, he’d tell me all the cool things to do in the city. The managing editor of ALR, Britta Coleman, gave me a free copy when I told her the journal had published my first literary essay in 2009. She said all the back issues with my essay in them had sold out. Sweet.
Friday, 4:00pm – The editors tabling for The Sun Magazine were standoffish and cold. I had been so excited to meet them. In my nervous, frenzied state, I pretended I had never heard of the magazine and bought a new subscription—even though I had submitted to it once and subscribed from ’06-‘09. Everything about the experience made me sad.
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Friday, 10:30am – I bundled up, got coffee to go, and walked thirty minutes through the cold, fresh air from my friend Nicole’s place to the hotel Friday morning. There was a bridge and bikes and banks of snow and old narrow, stacked buildings; if I hadn’t twisted my ankle it would have been perfect.
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Friday, 10:30am – My favorite career-related panel was Listening to Literature, with Rachel Louise Snyder from The Global Guru, Sarah Koening from This American Life, Maureen Corrigan from Fresh Air, Karen Munson from Washington DC’s WAMU (88.5), and Christopher Turpin from All Things Considered. Every one of the panelists was charming, funny, encouraging and smart, and Rachel and her intern, Meghan, chatted with me for a while afterward. The panel—which was packed to standing room only—made me want to pour my blood and sweat into a career in public radio. And I just might.
Saturday, 3:00pm – My conference closer, Shaping a Life: Voice, Structure, and Craft in Memoir left me surprisingly inspired. The panel description had been sparse, and I mainly went because I needed to go to at least one memoir panel, but I had slept through or arrived too late for all the rest. But E. Ethelbert Miller, Ben Yagoda, Dustin Beall Smith, Michael Downs, and Janice Gary each gave a lovely, unique talk on the craft. Focuses varied from early critical reception of memoir, to madness in memoir, to the personal reasons for writing, to the shaping of a book and considerations regarding inclusion of self, to the frightening and illuminating experience of vacillating between teacher and student. I left knowing that one writes because she must do so, and that this reason is enough.
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Thursday morning – Saturday night – At least half a dozen times each day, I sought out a cushy chair on the hotel’s mezzanine to rest and hide. In three days, I used up half my monthly mobile data service tweeting, mapping and surfing Facebook. I felt so alone in the layered cake of writers buzzing, schmoozing and churning up and down escalators between panels, book fair booths, and the lobby bar/lounge.
I wonder if I would have talked to more strangers if I hadn’t had my new smartphone to retreat into. Though I think I would have still removed myself and watched them—pitching, collaborating, reuniting—and wondered why I was there. Was I supposed to be a teacher, an artist, or a product to be marketed… getting craft-based inspiration, the attention of editors and agents, or curriculum ideas? I imagine I got a bit of all three, but in those moments when I escaped to the mezzanine, the world seemed terribly large, and my place within it, as a writer, seemed to have slipped away in the fray.
