DENVER, 2010
A hotel elevator.
There are two of us. I am 31, a first-year MFA student and a first-timer at this conference I’ve been instructed to attend. The other guy is about to introduce himself.
He nods amiably as I board, glancing at my name tag.
“You work for Redivider?” he says.
“Uh, sort of.” I’d been to a couple of meetings of the student literary journal, and I was there under its aegis. This new career plan — from newspapers and university admin to uh, getting an MFA and then a teaching job — will, somehow, work out, but right now I’m extremely tentative.
“I’m Alex Chee.”
The name doesn’t register.
“I’m Sebastian.”
We shake hands.
He seems to wait for me to say something else. I do not.
“I … just did that interview with Matt. …,” This would be Matt Salesses, then-editor-in-chief of the aforementioned Redivider, whom, at that point, I had met once, and who, it occurred to me now as the elevator’s ascent seemed to slow, had published a long interview with someone named
. An interview I had not read.“Oh!” I said. “Yeah, that was great.”
“Matt’s really great,” he said.
“For sure.”
DING.
“Have a good conference,” Chee said, getting off the elevator at my floor.
I feigned having forgotten to push the right button.
“You, too!” I said, as the doors slid closed and put us both out of our misery.
In my slight defense, I was a fairly recent arrival to this lit world and Chee — author of Edinburgh, Queen of the Night,and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel — had published just the first of those books. A feature interview in our graduate-student journal notwithstanding, he didn’t yet have his hard-earned and well-deserved national profile.
If you’ve been to a gathering of three or more writers, you may have experienced something like this: the missed connection no one wants to acknowledge, the desire for recognition, the wish to be taken seriously by someone more accomplished, the awkwardness that’s no one’s fault.
If you’ve been to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference — an annual gathering of 12-15,000 writers, editors, and publishers that reconvenes this month in Los Angeles — you’ve almost certainly experienced something like this, along with a host of other indignities large and small: the interminable coffee lines, the thoroughly-uncivilized scene at the hotel bar, the myriad slights, unintended and otherwise.
Every year, I find myself trying to cajole a cadre of friends to meet me in [INSERT CITY NAME]:
On Twitter (RIP), novelist
used to cheerfully update her streak of never having attended the conference. Every year, there’s a new batch of people who swear “never again,” or who spend most of the conference tweeting about the glorious respite they’ve found in their hotel rooms.This is all in line with our own self-mythologizing. We’re writers. Introverts! We’re better on the page, less so on the stage. We think things through on our behinds, not on our feet.
Kay Ryan, before she was poet laureate but after she was Kay Ryan, wrote a stunt-essay for Poetry, “I Go To AWP.” It’s a classic of the fish-out-of-water/let’s-see-what-happens genre. Ryan briefly suppresses her “aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts,” to attend the 2005 AWP Conference in Vancouver.
The essay, in which Ryan casts herself as gentle curmudgeon, was my first introduction to this conference. At the time, from the outside looking in, I responded to Ryan’s skepticism. “Make mine the desert saints,” Ryan says before she ventures into the three-day muddle of anxiety and self-regard.
And yet, 20 years after that essay, 15 years after my brief, mortifying elevator ride with a writer on the verge of literary celebrity, I’m about to attend my 14th AWP1.
TAMPA, 2018
Marc Fitten and I are in a Lyft. Marc is a two-time novelist, and a refugee from this literary-academic world who now works in tech — Oracle, Amazon, places like that (He owns a boat). All I know is that it seems to have something to do with making unparsable LinkedIn posts.
But it’s the second night of the conference and we’re not talking business. Marc has returned to AWP after a few years away and we’re headed to the reading a friend has set up at an independent bookstore. We’re brimming with camaraderie and buzzing from cocktail hour.
“You are writers?” our driver asks.
I don’t love when cab drivers chat me up. It makes me feel defensive, as though I should apologize for being there (what am I doing with my life? I don’t know!). But Marc doesn’t know a stranger, and soon we’ve give him the details: we are writers. Two of the thousands who have descended for this .
“I love to read,” our driver, whose name is Randy, says. “I keep a Kindle in my glove compartment to use between rides.”
“You should come to the reading!” Marc says.
He does.
The reading features some great performances including from Hanif Abdurraqib, who was already a well-regarded essayist and poet but not yet a MacArthur-certified “genius” or NBCC Finalist read a piece on the singer Julian Baker and Dinty Moore teacher, essayist and founder of Brevity Magazine, who, on something like his 35th straight conference, compared AWP to a family reunion, “except you like the people.”
There were many others — too many. The reading is long, as these things go, almost 90 minutes — but Randy loves it. He’d moved to the U.S. from Jamaica less than a year before, and he never knew there were things like this in Tampa. He buys three books. It turns out he harbors his own writerly aspirations.
Marc and I head out to some party, encouraging Randy to join us later at the hotel bar, where hundreds of the attendees will return after dinners and readings elsewhere, stand in interminable lines, and never get their drinks, but at least will do it together. If he’s interested in meeting more writer-types he should meet us there.
He does.
Around midnight, Randy materializes beside me. We embrace like old friends. Back at the table, the three of us scream out our life stories over the din of 300 others doing the same thing. It turns out Randy drives for Lyft because he finds it a nice way to meet new people in his new city. He makes “real money” by day trading on the Jamaican stock exchange, and he harbors the notion of writing his own book.
After an unsuccessful sojourn to some other bar (this, too, is sometimes part of AWP, a freshman-year-like wandering in search of a better party), Randy drives us home. Marc, who’s on a panel the next day, invites Randy to come.
He does.
—
“The schedule is a 230-page affair. I note with rising alarm that there are up to 15 choices for what to do, each hour and a half session, morning to night, for three days.” — Kay Ryan, “I Go To AWP.”
The panel schedule doesn’t come in catalog form anymore — there’s an app for that. And after three or four years of packing in as many as I could, I spent another five going to none.
“[Panelists] refer to their own professors and various writing programs where they’ve taught or been students, and the audience murmurs, laughs, and groans in response, because that’s the kind of church this is.” — Ryan
Panels can be terrible. If you’ve been going for awhile you start to hear the same things over and over. I’ve snuck out of my share. But I’ve also seen Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa hold a Washington ballroom in rapt silence.
And whenever I see the spine of Sunil Yapa’s The Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, I remember the story he told of that book — of losing the computer on which was stored his only, unbacked-up original draft. I remember the collective sigh of sympathetic despair that rose up, and the marveling murmurs of appreciation, of something like a barely-suppressed standing ovation, when he asserted that he just “wrote it again.”
After Marc’s panel, we want to show Randy the Bookfair, but you have to have a badge. We score one from the friend of a friend, who’s on his way out of the conference, and we lead him there.
“Tomorrow morning at the AWP bookfair a young writer will be able to meet everybody, editors, publishers, all in one place. They’ll all be sitting there behind their piles of books and journals. The hopeful young writer could have conversations, exchange email addresses, hand them manuscripts. Next month if he sent an editor some work he could start his email with, ‘I’m following up on our conversation at last month’s AWP bookfair....’ It kind of makes me sick to think about.” — Ryan
Ryan, an admitted hermit, preferred to let her work speak for itself. A good bet if you’re Kay Ryan, but this is also why she spent a bare four paragraphs2 on the oppressive, pulsing heart of the conference.
It can be anywhere — L.A. or D.C., Chicago or Seattle — but it’s always the same: a cavernous, fluorescent-lit hall that is at once really hard to find and, once there, difficult to exit.
The more established publishers and journals cluster in the center with their elaborate set ups, while the edges are peopled by plucky up-and-comers hanging outtheir shingles on a bare table.
I used to wander the aisles with Matt, a memoirist and academic who teaches at Allegheny College in Western Pennsylvania. He has a son named Sebastien, we have this joke about my being his son (it’s only — and barely — funny to us but, as Dads, we persist). We’d catch up on our past years and “happen” upon the tables of various journals he’s published in lately.
Or I’d meet up with Julian Zabalbeascoa, whose gripping novel about the Basque experience during the Spanish Civil War, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here, was published last year and is a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Julian and his wife, Katie Sticca, Managing Editor of the literary journal Salamander, live in Boston, not all that far from me, but I mostly see them in these cavernous downtown halls in some other city. Big, bald, bemuscled, Julian is an effervescent and friendly presence in whose tailwinds it is easy to follow.
One year — who’s to say which one? — Julian stopped at the table of the journal War, Literature, and the Arts. Julian had a story in a recent edition. As he spoke with the journal’s editor, I struck up a conversation with another guy who’d wandered over.
His name was J.A. Moad. He’d been an Air Force pilot, and now flew commercially for Delta. He’d written a three-act one-man show called “Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home,” and had recently completed a three-week run of these performances. He was flinty. He talked low and out of the side of his mouth. I had to lean in to hear him.
When he sidled, up, I’d been talking about my own book project. I had thousands upon thousands of words, but I couldn’t figure out where the ending was or even how it should work.
Moad responded — low and out of the side of his mouth — with some really smart things about the idea of endings that I wish I’d recorded. What I do have is the inscription on a copy of his play, which I bought at the end of our talk: “Sebastian, Here’s to the music. Keep bringing it and finding the shift in the ending, toward a new direction.”
It loses something out of context (you actually did have to be there) but it reminds me of a couple of things: the feeling of renewed enthusiasm I had for my project in the wake of that conversation, as well as the fact that one of the things that can make this experience great is that everyone at AWP is carrying around stories — their own stories, their friends’ stories, stories they love and stories they hate — and their ideas about how stories work and what they should do.
Randy made his way methodically up and down the aisles of the Bookfair, collecting journals and books and other things people were mostly giving away because it was the last day.
“So much poetry!” he said, marking one of only a handful of times in Bookfair history that exclamation has been made in enthusiasm rather than derision.
We were juiced. We made a lot of big plans. Maybe we’d propose a panel for the following year — “How we persuaded a civilian,” or something. None of that happened. We lost touch. The plans and contacts that get made at AWP don’t always — don’t usually — come to fruition.
But while you’re there!
While you’re there, you’re in the middle of a group of people obsessed with the same general goal: how do I get my words out into the world? And you can kvetch and commiserate over your shared high-effort, low-reward endeavor.
Next week (probably!) some tips and tricks. Or maybe just some more thoughts about why I’m a sucker for this thing. Have you been to AWP? Do you have any advice? Things you love? Things you hate?
I broke my in-person streak in 2022, when my Dad fell unexpectedly ill.
Five if you count the standalone sentence: “On the other hand, maybe there will be free keychains.”
I love this memory. Thank you!
This is weird to admit but seeing the photos of the booths and readings lowers my first-timer anxiety.