It would be impossible to write an all-encompassing article about any AWP Annual Conference & Bookfair, but before embarking on the 2012 session in Chicago, our first AWP ever, we had our sights set on covering as much as was humanly possible. Full Stop accepting our piece made us journalists first and attendees second. Makeshift press hats were considered. An evenly balanced schedule over the three days of 550 book fair exhibitions, 400 panels, the keynote address, and countless readings and off-site events would be struck — some fiction here, some poetry there, an occasional smattering of MFA and teaching-related discussions in between. In order to cover the most ground we decided we’d split up each morning, separately sit in on different panels, individually wander sections of the massive book fair, rock, paper, scissors for the off-site events we both wanted to attend.

And then we realized that was stupid. We must confess we had little interest in spending 75-minute blocks on any panel with “pedagogy” in the title or listening to writers debate whether or not to publish on their iPhone. And our ambitions to divide and conquer were pushed aside when we realized how many talks we were both excited about, and how silly it would be to crush that excitement for the sake of parity. Amidst thousands of strangers, it would be nice to have a friend to share everything with.

We didn’t see the keynote address, we fell asleep while authors with Pulitzers and PEN/Faulkners read their brilliant work, and most regrettably, we went to very few panels that featured poetry. In the end, with our weak writerly immune systems, we felt happy enough just to emerge relatively unscathed. So here it is: the trade secrets, the panels and moments we kept bringing back up over meals — really, everything that inspired us to discuss hotel arrangements for the 2013 AWP in Boston on our El ride home.

Some Food For Thought

Hannah Tinti: “You are Hugh Jackman.”

Donavan Hohn: “I chased the toys because I started writing about them.”

The moderator of “There Will Be Blood: Writing Violence in Fiction”: “[Benjamin Percy’s] got nothing [to say] about violence. It’s because his characters are all bears.”

Marilynne Robinson: “My fiction embodies the things I hope my nonfiction will protect.”

Lauren Groff: “There’s no one better than Satan.”

Events We Wish We Were Still Attending

“The Long and Short of It: Navigating the Transitions Between Writing Novels and Short Stories”

Moderator Bruce Machart admitted that he formed the panel after recently encountering difficulty switching between forms. Erin McGraw, detailing her struggles to find sustainable ideas, and Hannah Tinti, speaking about her moments of crises when it comes to ending stories, matched his frankness. Kevin Wilson won us over with his talk on failure, confessing that three-fourths of his story conceits fail, which he now accepts as an integral part of his process. We, bobble-headed in the sixth row, nodded endlessly in agreement.

“Beyond Pulp – The Futuristic and Fantastic as Literary Fiction”

Leave it to Brian Evenson to aptly label George Saunders a gateway drug that exposes literary readers to genre work and vice versa. Despite all of Evenson’s insights, it was Kevin Brockmeier whose speech we dwelt on afterward. He read aloud from four genre and literary passages, J.G. Ballard and William Maxwell among them, to illustrate how unnecessary and inaccurate such barriers are.

“There Will Be Blood: Writing Violence in Fiction”

Over bottles of Bud Light, Antonya Nelson, Alan Heathcock, Benjamin Percy, and Alexi Zentner participated in one of the more charming panels, despite its grim topic.  Some highlights: Percy and Zentner discussing the disturbing trend of undergraduate male writers composing long, titillating rape scenes; Percy’s synopsis of Chuck Pahalniuk’s “Guts” as “a long list of anal injuries”; and Zentner describing a story whose title and author he couldn’t place, only to realize, with some help from the moderator, that it was Heathcock’s “The Staying Freight.”

“The Rumpus Reads for 826 Chicago”

We arrived at The Boring Store late and found ourselves stuck behind two excited college-age girls. “Oh, my god,” went one. “That’s Stephen Elliott.” Which made us both crack up, not because it’s ridiculous to be excited to see the editor of The Rumpus, but because in the world outside of AWP, that sort of giddiness would be reserved for C-list celebrities and contestants from The Voice, at the very least. We reserved our giddiness for Cheryl Strayed, who made her first public reading appearance since her coming out party for Sugar. Hearing her “Write Like A Motherfucker” column read aloud almost brought us both to tears.

“Short but Not Sweet: Three Emerging Writers Read from Debut Story Collections”

This panel’s three young authors — Emma Straub, Stuart Nadler, and Megan Mahew-Bergman — read from their recent (and forthcoming — Mahew-Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise comes out this week!) debut short story collections before speaking eloquently on the strange experience of publishing story collections in a novel-centric market. In the Q & A, the barrier between the speakers and audience seemed thin — the questions were specific and personal, and it was obvious that some audience members were struggling to sell their own collections. We talked to Straub (who was wearing great lipstick, one-half of this reporting team noted) after the panel, and she advised us not to go to grad school until we were ready. This was a nice change of pace from the barrage of MFA-related questions we had been asked at the conference: Are you in a program? When are you going to apply? What’s your top choice? “Being twenty-two is confusing enough without worrying about MFAs,” Straub said. We agree.

The Bookfair 

Oh, the bookfair. Our first impression was pleasant surprise. “Oh!” we exclaimed. “We thought this would be totally overwhelming, but it’s totally manageable!” “Look how well-lit and spaced out these booths are!” And then we realized that this was only the first ballroom. There were four. And descending into two of these rooms was like going below the deck in Titanic, except without a young Leo DiCaprio to hold your hand. The lighting was prison-or-public-school-grade florescence, the tables were crammed into the aisles, and there were people everywhere, thousands of writers all having thousands of crowd-induced panic attacks. Better reporters than we would have figured out what determined the class divide — was it money? seniority? some other quality determined by the Grand Elders of AWP?  Though it did seem like a lot of larger organizations, university-affiliated and well-established magazines and presses were in the high-rent district and their newer, smaller counterparts in the shantytown, there were plenty of exceptions.

Besides the Jack/Rose dichotomy, the biggest impression we left with was incredulity that so many magazines existed, tempered by the sad fact that many of them, due to a lack of funds, might not make it to next year’s conference. It also warmed our hearts to see the local magazines and presses (Knee-Jerk Magazine, Artifice, and the beautifully-designed Featherproof Books) there in full spirit; such is the joy of attending AWP in your home city.

Memorable Marketing and Swag 

A matchbox with to-scale book cover from the press’s catalog. (Atticus Books)

Free mini Slim Jims, for the fair attendee who is tired of all the free candy and longs for some good ol’ mechanically separated chicken. (Birmingham Poetry Review)

Buy a subscription to our magazine and stash your stuff (coats, tote bags overflowing with books and lit-mags, tiny dogs) at our booth! Savvy.  (Eleven Eleven)

Free, albeit slightly stale fortune cookie which read “Your simultaneous submission will be accepted by five magazines at once.” Very funny, cookie. (Jabberwock Review)

And marketing we vaguely remember, though at this point, it all feels like a fever dream: a raffle for a vintage typewriter, the opportunity to take a picture wearing one of Edward Gorey’s twenty-one fur coats in exchange for a donation, and a ring toss onto the antlers of a paper-mache stag.

Authors in our Dream All-Star, All-Male Barbershop Quartet, Based on the Melodiousness of Their Reading Voices

Lead: Alan Heathcock
Tenor: Kevin Brockmeier
Bass: Benjamin Percy *
Baritone: D. A. Powell

*Apparently, Percy absolutely KILLED at AWP Karaoke (the song was Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”), as did Lauren Groff, who was the highlight of “Villains and Killers and Criminals, Oh My: Representing Evildoers in Literary Fiction.” We did not attend this event and will regret it for the rest of our swooning, growly-voice-less lives.

Events We Wish We Were Still Attending

One Story Magazine Celebrates 10 Years”

We were obsessed with One Story throughout the conference, signing up for discounted subscriptions and scooping up single back issues at Chicago’s Open Books. Editor-in-Chief Hannah Tinti and publisher Maribeth Batcha discussed their decade-long history at a 9 a.m. panel, which, in our drowsy stupor, had the loose, behind the scenes feel of a DVD commentary. The session was a celebration of the small triumphs — maintaining low printing costs, mentoring and spotlighting emerging writers, becoming a nonprofit, acquiring an office — needed to keep literary publications alive.

 

“Why Time Matters: A Discussion Across the Genres”

This meticulously-organized panel discussed how to deal with the passing of time in five different genres: the novel, the short story, the play, the nonfiction essay, and the poem, with an ambassador from each genre like a literary U.N., minus the tiny flags. Poet Fred Leebron was the hero of the day. His remarks on Larry Levis’ “After the Blue Note Closes” were, well, remarkable, and the success of the whole talk should be noted by those planning panels for next year: more cross-genre panels, please! Not only does it make for more interesting discussions between panelists, but it also encourages cross-genre friendships, because we all know that poets and prose writers make great friends. 

“Ambitious Fiction: Tackling Big Ideas, Lots of Characters, and/or Lush Language”

Organized by indomitable half-human-half-penguin Lucy Jane Bledsoe, this panel’s speakers advocated for ambitious, complicated, risk-taking fiction. “Sprawling and uneven is higher praise than perfect and meticulously realized,” said the charming Jane Smiley. “The epic can’t be written economically,” said bilingual writer and translator Achy Obejas, whose comments on her Spanish and English writing voices were fascinating. With everyone’s remarks came caveats — no one was endorsing purple prose or over-writing — but that big topics (Bledsoe’s Antarctica, for instance) require big prose.

Book and Stories Recommended by Panelists

Rebecca Barry, Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories
Brian Evenson, Last Days
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
T.C. Boyle, “The Love of My Life”
Robert Stone, “Helping”
Peter Carey, The Fat Man in History
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

A warning: by the end of AWP, it will be difficult to keep your eyes open. Not only because you’ve been moving non-stop for three days straight with little sleep in between, or because three days of artificial hotel lighting start feeling like barbells attached to your eyelids, or because, in this sleepy stupor, hearing somebody read to you makes you regress to elementary school bedtime rituals. It especially didn’t help that the last person we saw read at the conference was Marilynne Robinson, whose prose is so seamless and voice so comforting that one of us began to nod off immediately. The panel, “Literature and Evil,” had been put together by the Center for Fiction, a new conference sponsor, and featured Robinson, Ha Jin, and Paul Harding. It was held in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton and was surprisingly hard to find considering the room was as large as an airplane hangar and as exquisitely gilded as Louis XIV’s fanciest underpants. Robinson’s reading summarized the three days we’d spent navigating hotel lobbies, squeezing into elegant conference spaces, listening to writers whose books we’d read in subway cars and (aptly enough) in bed reading from those same books beneath chandeliers. And in that brief few minutes we remembered why we had scrapped our lofty journalistic goals in the first place. We weren’t here to report anything back. We were here because we wanted to listen. And so we did.

Illustrations by Allie Tova Hirsch

 


 
 
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