(This was going to be a breakdown of my experience of AWP and then it turned into a primer for new attendees. Maybe it will be useful to people google searching AWP.)
If you haven’t been to AWP, it’s probably for a few reasons.
1)
You’re a regular person who doesn’t concern
themselves with strange hyper-cultures.
2)
You’re not a Creative Writing Grad Student,
English Professor, Lit Journal Editor, Small Press Owner/Manager, Poet,
Novelist, Memoirist, Satirist, Essayist, Slam Poet, Genre Junkie, Agent,
Publisher, etc.
3)
You exist in the real world where famous people
are movie stars and rock stars not authors and poets.
So if you’re not any of these, then you don’t know what AWP
(The Association of Writers and Writers Programs) is all about, where it is
taking place every year, and why you would be interested in this meeting of
11,000 lit nerds. Your life may be
less. Or it may be better.
It’s a scene. For a
writer, it is simultaneously inspiring and depressing. To be in a place where Fiction and Poetry and
Essay is the center of the universe is amazing and makes you feel at home. That you can talk to anyone, to thousands of
You, just waiting to gush over the absolute cultural importance of books is something. That everyone understands why you’d rather be
lost in a fake world than found in the real world is refreshing and worth
exploring.
But to be a writer among thousands of other writers
sometimes diminishes your uniqueness. It
makes you feel like one of the pack, all fighting for a little sliver of
immortality. It’s easy to lose your
sense of camaraderie. A usual AWP
conference is a bipolar rollercoaster of importance and obscurity.
The panels range from stuff as broad as “How to Land an
Agent” to crazy specific stuff like “Gender Studies of Uzbekistani Poetry
Written By Survivors of the Frog Plague of 1936”. One of those panels was real and one of them
you wish was real.
I have to recommend balance.
You can’t go to every panel. You
have to ditch. You have to eat lunch and
hang out in the bookfair and get a sense of the city and just not let yourself
get sucked in completely. Because if you
don’t detach here and there, it’s dangerous.
Your ego is at stake. Either it
will swell with the headiness of writerly importance or it will deflate rapidly
and leave you charging your iPhone in a corner, tweeting about how these hacks
will one day fall at your feet and worship the meager words you let them sup
on.
Eat an expensive meal while you’re there. Get jazzed about something else for an hour
at least.
Lastly, there’s the Bookfair. This is a whole different animal. It’s giant rooms filled with tables of
journals and MFA programs and small presses and sometimes some weirdo just hawking
his own book. Stay away from that
weirdo. Everyone else is normal.
The MFA programs are interesting because as a graduate of an
MFA program, it’s like driving by a bunch of car dealerships after you bought
your car. So they must be for a younger
crowd. I barely even knew about AWP
before grad school so it seems weird that undergrad students are so up on it
that they know to go to it and scout schools.
The journal and small press tables are where you should
spend most of your time. They’re friendly
and most of them are students that were given a free pass to AWP if they sat at
the table and hawked some books. The
students look bored and are frequently dying to speak to someone to pass the
time.
The presses are interesting but it’s a like a mobile
bookstore where you’re looking at the owner of the bookstore and trying to
figure out how to escape. You may buy
something sometime but you’re not a high roller and you can’t just shell out
for any random book no matter how much the publisher or the author put their
whole soul into it.
Here’s the deal. AWP
is great. If you’re the right
person. If you can immerse yourself,
cool. If you have friends to go with,
friends to meet, even better. The
excitement of the world revolving around your craft for three days is good for
the soul. You should leave thinking: I can’t wait to get home and write! If you go home and never write again, well, that’s
one less person for them to compete with. Success either way.
