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So I went to my first AWP this year a few weeks ago, right after ICFA actually. I left Monday morning to hang with my cousin Andrea (her mom is my dad's aunt; moved to Portland back in the 70s, and Andrea is just a couple of years older than me). We ate a lot, and we also played a lot of Just Dance on her Kinect. It was a lot of fun! Also I am terrible at it. I'm also terrible at DDR which is why I always pick the easiest levels, but the amount of coordination needed for Just Dance is WAY more than I expected. But it was wonderful being able to do a thing with my cousin that wasn't just eating out all the time! We also went shoe shopping, and I have a lovely new pair from Abeo with a bit of a heel. We hit up all three shoe shops in the mall and this pair was kinda pinchy, but it was the one pair that made me wanna dance.
On Wednesday, I took a Lyft over to the Convention Center to meet Maurisa. The line was already really long, although it moved at a quick clip, since the registration area had about 12 computers set up for people to sign in themselves, and printers to print out badges, with volunteers nearby to hand out lanyards. It was really efficient! And very impressive, considering how many people were there.
The program book was a TOME, and I decided I was totally going to try to go to as many panels as I could. I didn't get to all of the ones I wanted to do, though. The ones I do recall going to are:
- A panel on alternatives to the traditional writing workshop. This was more about teaching writing, and more about the academic setting of creative writing, but it was still really interesting! One of the panelists taught memoirs, the other taught a mixed media hip hop class (lots of integration of blogging, video editing, and other interesting videography stuff). The one that struck me most was a guy who had taught a group of pre-college art students over summer. In art classes, the workshops begin with the students themselves making presentations of their work, explaining what they were trying to accomplish with it, asking for feedback on specific areas. It's topsy-turvy from how it gets done in writing classes, where everyone else gives their feedback and the writer just sits there. Someone in the audience asked how this doesn't end up becoming a validation-request type session, and the faculty member said that it was actually really effective for minority students, who have to endure cis white male readers repeat "I didn't connect with the text" because sometimes that is not the point!! So the writer gets to lead the discussion with what they were trying to accomplish, and the readers understand where the writer is coming from and can give more meaningful feedback that way.
I'm still think about this weeks later. My mind is blown. And it feels surprisingly intuitive?? Whenever folks ask me for feedback on writing, I generally start by asking what they're looking for specifically anyway. In this method, the writer also is expected to think critically about their own work and talk about it. I was taught that the writing should speak for itself, but I can see how this approach in workshopping is valuable too--if the writer is saying one thing, but the readers are seeing another thing in the text, then that's useful feedback too!
- A panel on Asian ghosts, which I had been initially excited for until I saw the moderator was a white dude. And it still could have been awesome! It appears to be a convention at AWP that panelists begin with a reading from their own work, which is relevant to the panel topic somehow. And the moderator prepares by reading the work in question, which I thought was very interesting. Still, the moderator was kind of a bad person to moderator the topic, because, just, ugh, at one point he was like, "convince me that there are benevolent ghosts, since I only ever hear of violent ones" and just like, gwailo shut up!!! Then he said, "do you actually believe in ghosts? I'm a rationalist so I don't" and WOW how is this even relevant.
- A panel on indie magazines, which was... significantly less useful than I wanted it to be. A lot of it was the founders talking about their struggles in staying afloat, without really talking about the magazine as a BUSINESS and any long-term planning. Only one of them had seen intergenerational longevity; the EIC had bought it off the previous owner. But he kept it afloat by submission fees. Disappointing all around.
- Luckily right after, I had a choice between "Small Press Success" and "Small Press Accounting 101" and texted Jill asking which I should go to. "Go to the Accounting one. I don't trust anything with 'success' in the title." And that was SUPER useful! I was late because I got lost trying to find the ballroom, but the panelists were all sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the panelists were all professional accountants. The moderator was really good at explaining stuff, but also good at handing it off to the panelists to explain specific terms. There was an Excel file being projected. It was really good stuff; a lot of things I vaguely remembered from high school, and some I'd picked up through osmosis, but it was so useful to have it all laid out.
- I tried going to a panel about craft talks, because the panelists are from the Napa Valley Conference which is apparently famous for craft talks and I...... found it dreadfully mealy-mouthed and vague. It was all "I don't really know what makes a craft talk so great, it's simultaneously so personal and yet so universal" and after about ten minutes of this nonsense I walked out.
- I went to Nisi's panel on alternate history instead, which wasn't quite as interesting as I hoped, but someone asked about the utopic impulse in alternate history, and whether utopia could be separated from the State, and I approached her afterwards to discuss Tom Moylan's work on utopia, as well as Parable of the Sower in which there's a utopic space that's not dependent on a larger state government to run it.
I... did not know that I was approaching Larissa Lai.
I met Larissa Lai!
Which leads me to talk about my social activities!!
I roomed with Angela and Maurisa, from UCR, and also with Darcie Little Badger!!!! Darcie had to come in late, and Maurisa had free credits from Zipcar, so we drove out to get her. It was really fun, and it was good to catch up with Maurisa. Darcie and I took the couch in the outer suite because it was softer.
The next morning we went to breakfast with Tempest and Nico (Nico is a local). Meals were also had with Nisi and Tempest (and Darcie!), breakfast with Alan (and Darcie!) and I organized a dinner for the Asians in Publishing Facebook group members. There were 7 of us, and it was nice to meet folks face to face, like Yilin Wang.
I also got to have a reunion with my Clarion classmates! Alan, Jen, Mackenzie, Maggie and Emily were there, as was Kelly, since Small Beer Press regularly does AWP. AWP is in Austin next year, and Tachyon has an employee there, so if I'm around next year, I'll look into how much it costs and maybe pitch to Jacob to do the Austin show, assuming of course we don't miss the deadline.
The vendor hall was large, and kind of reminded me of SDCC, even if it wasn't that as big as that? But large enough that it was a bit hard to navigate. I am pretty sure it was easier to go through the hall to get to the other side of the convention center (panels were EVERYWHERE, I don't know that they had any empty rooms) but because the vendor hall was so large, and also had only one entrance because they weren't letting non-attendees in, it was difficult to figure that out.
I hadn't known that AWP ending on Saturday meant there would be programming all the way into the evening, otherwise I would have planned to leave on Sunday instead!
But it was all in all an overwhelming experience. I'm not sure it'd be a conference I'd go to regularly, but to be fair, getting an AWP membership also meant getting the Writer's Chronicle, which is actually a really good publication, I really enjoy reading it. I never think I will, but then I just settle down to read it, and I just dig it. I don't LOVE everything, but I do like the literary analysis and craft stuff in it. I'm not a fan of poetry? But I do like poetry analysis! Weird. It makes me wonder if I would read Locus more if there were more essays on craft in it, rather than just interviews and reviews.
On Wednesday, I took a Lyft over to the Convention Center to meet Maurisa. The line was already really long, although it moved at a quick clip, since the registration area had about 12 computers set up for people to sign in themselves, and printers to print out badges, with volunteers nearby to hand out lanyards. It was really efficient! And very impressive, considering how many people were there.
The program book was a TOME, and I decided I was totally going to try to go to as many panels as I could. I didn't get to all of the ones I wanted to do, though. The ones I do recall going to are:
- A panel on alternatives to the traditional writing workshop. This was more about teaching writing, and more about the academic setting of creative writing, but it was still really interesting! One of the panelists taught memoirs, the other taught a mixed media hip hop class (lots of integration of blogging, video editing, and other interesting videography stuff). The one that struck me most was a guy who had taught a group of pre-college art students over summer. In art classes, the workshops begin with the students themselves making presentations of their work, explaining what they were trying to accomplish with it, asking for feedback on specific areas. It's topsy-turvy from how it gets done in writing classes, where everyone else gives their feedback and the writer just sits there. Someone in the audience asked how this doesn't end up becoming a validation-request type session, and the faculty member said that it was actually really effective for minority students, who have to endure cis white male readers repeat "I didn't connect with the text" because sometimes that is not the point!! So the writer gets to lead the discussion with what they were trying to accomplish, and the readers understand where the writer is coming from and can give more meaningful feedback that way.
I'm still think about this weeks later. My mind is blown. And it feels surprisingly intuitive?? Whenever folks ask me for feedback on writing, I generally start by asking what they're looking for specifically anyway. In this method, the writer also is expected to think critically about their own work and talk about it. I was taught that the writing should speak for itself, but I can see how this approach in workshopping is valuable too--if the writer is saying one thing, but the readers are seeing another thing in the text, then that's useful feedback too!
- A panel on Asian ghosts, which I had been initially excited for until I saw the moderator was a white dude. And it still could have been awesome! It appears to be a convention at AWP that panelists begin with a reading from their own work, which is relevant to the panel topic somehow. And the moderator prepares by reading the work in question, which I thought was very interesting. Still, the moderator was kind of a bad person to moderator the topic, because, just, ugh, at one point he was like, "convince me that there are benevolent ghosts, since I only ever hear of violent ones" and just like, gwailo shut up!!! Then he said, "do you actually believe in ghosts? I'm a rationalist so I don't" and WOW how is this even relevant.
- A panel on indie magazines, which was... significantly less useful than I wanted it to be. A lot of it was the founders talking about their struggles in staying afloat, without really talking about the magazine as a BUSINESS and any long-term planning. Only one of them had seen intergenerational longevity; the EIC had bought it off the previous owner. But he kept it afloat by submission fees. Disappointing all around.
- Luckily right after, I had a choice between "Small Press Success" and "Small Press Accounting 101" and texted Jill asking which I should go to. "Go to the Accounting one. I don't trust anything with 'success' in the title." And that was SUPER useful! I was late because I got lost trying to find the ballroom, but the panelists were all sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the panelists were all professional accountants. The moderator was really good at explaining stuff, but also good at handing it off to the panelists to explain specific terms. There was an Excel file being projected. It was really good stuff; a lot of things I vaguely remembered from high school, and some I'd picked up through osmosis, but it was so useful to have it all laid out.
- I tried going to a panel about craft talks, because the panelists are from the Napa Valley Conference which is apparently famous for craft talks and I...... found it dreadfully mealy-mouthed and vague. It was all "I don't really know what makes a craft talk so great, it's simultaneously so personal and yet so universal" and after about ten minutes of this nonsense I walked out.
- I went to Nisi's panel on alternate history instead, which wasn't quite as interesting as I hoped, but someone asked about the utopic impulse in alternate history, and whether utopia could be separated from the State, and I approached her afterwards to discuss Tom Moylan's work on utopia, as well as Parable of the Sower in which there's a utopic space that's not dependent on a larger state government to run it.
I... did not know that I was approaching Larissa Lai.
I met Larissa Lai!
Which leads me to talk about my social activities!!
I roomed with Angela and Maurisa, from UCR, and also with Darcie Little Badger!!!! Darcie had to come in late, and Maurisa had free credits from Zipcar, so we drove out to get her. It was really fun, and it was good to catch up with Maurisa. Darcie and I took the couch in the outer suite because it was softer.
The next morning we went to breakfast with Tempest and Nico (Nico is a local). Meals were also had with Nisi and Tempest (and Darcie!), breakfast with Alan (and Darcie!) and I organized a dinner for the Asians in Publishing Facebook group members. There were 7 of us, and it was nice to meet folks face to face, like Yilin Wang.
I also got to have a reunion with my Clarion classmates! Alan, Jen, Mackenzie, Maggie and Emily were there, as was Kelly, since Small Beer Press regularly does AWP. AWP is in Austin next year, and Tachyon has an employee there, so if I'm around next year, I'll look into how much it costs and maybe pitch to Jacob to do the Austin show, assuming of course we don't miss the deadline.
The vendor hall was large, and kind of reminded me of SDCC, even if it wasn't that as big as that? But large enough that it was a bit hard to navigate. I am pretty sure it was easier to go through the hall to get to the other side of the convention center (panels were EVERYWHERE, I don't know that they had any empty rooms) but because the vendor hall was so large, and also had only one entrance because they weren't letting non-attendees in, it was difficult to figure that out.
I hadn't known that AWP ending on Saturday meant there would be programming all the way into the evening, otherwise I would have planned to leave on Sunday instead!
But it was all in all an overwhelming experience. I'm not sure it'd be a conference I'd go to regularly, but to be fair, getting an AWP membership also meant getting the Writer's Chronicle, which is actually a really good publication, I really enjoy reading it. I never think I will, but then I just settle down to read it, and I just dig it. I don't LOVE everything, but I do like the literary analysis and craft stuff in it. I'm not a fan of poetry? But I do like poetry analysis! Weird. It makes me wonder if I would read Locus more if there were more essays on craft in it, rather than just interviews and reviews.
