The AWP 2011 Conference has come and gone. Many thousands of writers descended upon the nation’s capital for three (or four, or five in some cases) days of intensive and often exhausting conversations, panels, readings, meetings, greetings, wanderings, searchings, tweetings, and browsing hundreds of tables in the annual book fair (to be fair, not all the tables had books–reviews, journals, art, and informational displays from universities and the like also filled the acres and acres of conference center space).
Writers spend a lot of time alone. It’s hard not to put a lot of thought into my expectations of what AWP should be. A friend of mine always suggests that I should attend the conference with a mind of what I can bring to the gathering, not what I can get from it. Good advice, but not always easy to enact. Still, I went this year with two goals: 1). To talk to people I did not know. Specifically, to introduce myself to people. And 2). To not mention my own writing/manuscripts/publishing dreams to any table in the Book Fair. I’ve heard that running a table is mostly waiting for people to ask you how to publish with whatever particular press/review/magazine you happen to be working for. I didn’t want to be that guy: “Hey, how do I get published with you guys.” Instead, I went looking for interesting tables with interesting products and people selling those products. I totally blew any book budget I might have had. I talked to many, many people. I will not remember any of their names and they are unlikely to remember mine (after this week, I’m sort of unlikely to remember my own name) but the names don’t seem to matter. Despite some of the strangeness of the event, it was evident that I was involved in the larger activities of the writing world, a world that seems to be taking place more and more outside the traditional publishing houses.
Because of the snow, I canceled my plane rides and took the train to and from D.C. I’m now a train convert. A very pleasant experience all around. I read on the way down and slept most of the way back (except for the time I spent watching The Bourne Identity, which was a nice antidote to a literary week). Now, I’m trying to make sense of what I just went through. The one thing I learned about this sort of event is that I can’t make anything happen. Events of this scope require participation, but not direction. I had to let the days unfold as they would. The more I tried to wrangle a “good” AWP conference into being, the more strangled the whole thing felt. So, I dropped the oars and let the currents take me. In my next post, I’ll list my favorite moments from the conference, and then I’ll write a bit about the books I found, in hopes that some folks reading this blog might think about buying them too. Part two later tonight.
