1. Award George Saunders the Nobel Prize in Decency
Have you ever met a single reader or writer who does not worship George Saunders? You have not. You have not because George Saunders represents everything writers should be. I’m not talking about his prose here. That speaks for itself. I’m talking about the way the guy conducts himself. I’m talking about his humility and his genuine concern for the feelings of those around him. See, a lot of what happens at AWP (though it doesn’t get talked about much) is that younger writers are watching more established writers for clues as to how they should behave. Should they hold court loudly in the bar area? Should they look down upon the rabble from the feeble ramparts of literary fame? Should they drink to excess and grope the nubile acolytes? Or should they take seriously the influence they now wield. It’s certainly true that writers owe us nothing more than their stories. Faulkner neglected his children, Mailer stabbed his wife, and so on and so forth. But it is a delight to encounter a writer who lives up to ideals set forth in his work. And an example.
2. Flirt with Other Married People
Why not? It’s not against the law. You are happily married. You love your husband, your wife, your dear Significant O. And yet here you are, in the swirl of this annual mania, this sad, lovely space where Mid-List Authors Come to Feel Like Rock Stars, and who should sashay toward you in the half-lit corporate bar but the one and only Michelle Richmond, smiling, tipsy, above all sexy and prepared to ratify your notions about her dress, which reveals her fine white shoulders. As a reminder: you are happily married. So is Michelle. So is your comrade Dr. D. But none of this stops any of you from engaging in shameless Married People Banter. At one point, Dr. D shows Michelle a photo of his darling child and Michelle, in her balmy Alabama accent (dainty hand set daintily upon chest) announces that her milk has just let down. She will now be lactating for our benefit. So it goes for another, say, fifteen delicious – and harmless! – minutes. (The harmlessness being emphasized here because Michelle Richmond is married to an FBI agent, a man who owns guns and possibly cuffs.) Soon Michelle will be dragged off to a burlesque event and Dr. D, still aglow from her radiance, will confess to me that, despite being incredibly happily married, he has a major crush on Michelle’s dimples. “I want to lick the inside of those dimples,” he observes quietly. “I want to perform dimplelingus on her.” Amen, brother.
3. Tell Stories About Nightmare Readings/Panels
You wish this didn’t happen. You wish we didn’t make such judgments. But AWP is, at the end of the day, and the beginning, a trade show, the wares on offer being the eloquence of our selves in those tense sacred moments under the lights. And if you put yourself up for such inspection, well then you must live with the consequences. It’s impossible to do something this difficult, on a cultural margin this thin and crowded, without exciting grievance. So fine: do what you need to do. Get it out of your system, buddy. But for God’s sakes keep your voice down.
4. Submit to the Brownian Movement of Social Anxiety
Because we’re all so terrifically nervous and unaccustomed to this kind of stimulation and because there seem to be so many people around, literary acquaintances illuminated by the familiarity of a chance meeting some years ago, wherever it was, and we take this to be our job for the weekend, to be social creatures, to scan the room for nodes of power and intrigue, to make the chatter expected of us, to figure out where we go next and with whom, to keep the party rolling, to keep at bay the realization that this is all just a sweet, foolish charade, a fleeting return to the pleasures and disappointments of high school.
5. Lament
So many booths in the Grand Hall, where they hold the book fair. So many little snacks set out just so – Lifesavers, lollipops, chocolate kisses – the heartbreaking enticements of the failing enterprise. So many authors sitting behind tables waiting to sign books that nobody wants (I am one of them), all of us Willie Lomans, all of us telling the story of what could be, what should be, the American story. So many reminders of the smallness of our pursuit. And so many younger folk, marooned in these empty booths, hunched over their tiny glowing screens, their crabbed thumbs issuing frantic pleas on a keyboard the size of an hor d’oeurves. What are they typing? Help! Get me out of here! I didn’t sign up for this!
6. Rejoice
Because for God’s sake, you’ve run across Tod Goldberg, perhaps the funniest person your wife has ever met. He’s on the outskirts of the Grand Hall, looking (like all great promoters) utterly unconcerned with the business of promotion. He’s here to pimp the MFA program he now runs, by some small and perilous miracle of bureaucratic non-oversight. Goldberg with his tight golf shirts with his wide grin and boundless LA confidence. He could sell a tanning bed to an albino. He could sell integrity to a Republican. He once made you eat various forms of pork, in Las Vegas, at one of the Casino buffets. It felt like the first seating at the Apocalypse. Then he took pictures. Only Goldberg didn’t convince you. He let you convince yourself. He should be in the movies. He should be telling Mel Gibson what to eat for lunch. Instead, he sits back and talks about eating pussy, while one of his students sits on the carpet behind him, rolling her eyes with bottomless patience.
7. Trip Out on the Strangeness of Denver Itself
This city with its fancy, barren downtown and its endless highways. This is the loveable West, the way they drew it up all those years ago. But it all feels too new, too sprawling and imposed, and you can’t help feeling slightly corrupt (or perhaps party to a larger corruption) as you gaze out at the snow-capped girdle of mountains rising in all directions like a beer ad.
8. Consider Intervention
The young woman – let’s call her Stacy – winds up on a bad trip. She’s loud and miserable, a poet in cowboy boots. She doesn’t want your attention. She wants her father’s attention. But he hasn’t called and today is her 24th birthday. She says this over and over, to whoever will listen. Dr. D buys her a cupcake, but it doesn’t help. She hates traveling. She hates meeting people. Her complaints are boring. Dr. D (that gentle soul, that inveterate reader) wants to set a hand on her arm, wants to say something to her, about the need to move past complaint, into the true grief of her circumstance. But she’s committed to this exhibition of sorrow. There’s nothing he can do but hope she finds her way out of blindness. This is what it is to be a reader.
9. Sleep
It’s nearly impossible. Your system isn’t built for this. Your needs have gone soft. You miss your children. Your son’s tiny mouth, the smell of his breath. You miss your wife. It’s three am. Then four. He’s probably getting up now. Standing at the railing of his crib, looking for you.
10. Remember that You’re Still Lonely
So this is how it ends each year: the tribe disperses, taxi by shuttle by rental car, dispatched giddy and hollow-eyed to its precincts of origin, to Fresno and Palm Beach and Denton, Texas. Farewell, everyone says. Farewell. See you next year! Your luggage is filled with business cards and magazines, little monuments of hope. The airport feels giant and barren. The light beats down upon the merciless retail placards. And you know what’s waiting for you at the end of the line, that panic room where you’re supposed to create more things, just you and whatever you’ve been hiding from, the terror you convert to drudgery. It makes you miss how it was just a few hours before, all the pointless chatter and sloppy plans, the buzzing lobbies, the desperate pretending that we’re ever anything other than animals in search of love.
25 responses
Yep. That’s about right. Disappointed to have missed you, Steve, but will catch you at the sad whirl in D.C.
Delightful stuff, Steve. I’m looking forward to “Rock and Roll,” which is on order and should arrive this week.
Also, a stirring call to action for all fathers of little girls: “Stacy … [is] loud and miserable, a poet in cowboy boots. She doesn’t want your attention. She wants her father’s attention. But he hasn’t called and today is her 24th birthday … Dr. D. wants to set a hand on her arm, wants to say something to her, about the need to move past complaint, into the true grief of her circumstance. But she’s committed to this exhibition of sorrow. There’s nothing he can do but hope she finds her way out of blindness. This is what it is to be a reader.”
Wow … and yikes.
After all the anxiety-producing, stimulating, socializing, hoping and posing overload that is AWP, it all comes down to this for me: books live, writing matters, and when the blank page tries to stare me down this morning, I’ll look back to that hall of books and mirrors and think more tenderly toward myself. What a crazy, quixotic, essential pursuit this is.
“…Younger writers are watching more established writers for clues as to how they should behave.”
Indeed, and I was. Some of their behavior was laughable, others, laudable.
I was told by one professor, who has been an AWP attendee for 13 years, that he felt like an impostor for the first five.
“In some senses, it’s a place where everyone is wearing variants of gray and black and the latest fashionable eyewear,” he said.
Damn, those writers have good taste in eyewear.
Either way, I can echo Tracy’s sentiments: “books live, writing matters, and when the blank page tries to stare me down this morning, I’ll look back to that hall of books and mirrors and think more tenderly toward myself. What a crazy, quixotic, essential pursuit this is.”
Well said.
If only it didn’t continue on in the Super Shuttle, and then at the aiport, and on the plane home…
Have to second the comment about Saunders, who was not only incredibly gracious to a gushing graduate student ( me..) but gave her his personal email address so that he could communicate with her students when she next teaches “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.” Which, of course, will be next semester. An incredibly generous and very patient guy—and intimidatingly talented, too..
As a publisher stuck at my table hawking books 95% of the time, I came away thinking there is no better people-watching anywhere than at AWP. Wish I’d seen Saunders, but did fall in love with a new, strange book: The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean).
Faulkner only had one child. True he had a stepson, but I think saying “Faulkner neglected his children” is a little misleading. He also had a mentally ill, alcoholic wife who he spent most of time fighting with.
brilliant. i don’t know anyone you’re talking about but you do it so well. really enjoyed the read. will be back. cheers, mate.
At AWP we are all imposters, stars, and scared children, depending on the moment. We all want to be the cool kid, but, just like in high school, I will settle for being an enigma.
If I was there, I would have asked for your signature! Are you going to BEA?
One of my top items learned at AWP this year was to never eat lunch with Tod Goldberg because he’s too funny, and you might die.
Also, your newest book made the plane ride home a joy. Thanks for that.
I was sad to have missed your reading, but enjoyed this post. It was my second year attending AWP, my first presenting at AWP, which is a whole new level of stress and fear of judgment and neuroticism. And far less sleep. It’s always so heartening to see so many people who CARE so much about this business. But it’s so overwhelming that there are so MANY. At least there was free booze and excellent people-watching at the AWP dance party.
Always a pleasure to read your writing.
This the finest retropective (and perspective) on AWP I’ve seen. Funny, so funny. Thank you for making me laugh at myself. Also, to Jacob, I am sorry it didn’t continue for you. I had the great good luck of having more reunions on the Super Shuttle, in the Airport, and on the plane, always surrounded in transition like the day my parents dropped me off at college. Bravo again to this.
Thank you for the refreshing post that probably said what everyone really wants to say. You wrote exactly what I thought:
This city with its fancy, barren downtown and its endless highways. This is the loveable West, the way they drew it up all those years ago. But it all feels too new, too sprawling and imposed…”
Almond–Damn you, where were you! I only saw you from afar. I was late for the Southern Review reading and you already spoke. But your hair looked really shaggy and long from far away.
With hubby and son at home I tried to flirt but found my total dork button was turned to eleven.
This essay is awesome and accurate and hilarious.
One small thing, and I don’t know why I care enough to say it. But just to defend Denver a little — and I’m not sure I want to, really, since it’s my hometown, and everybody loves to hate their hometown — I wanted to say that the off site readings gave me a completely different, and better, impression of Denver, where I hadn’t really explored since I left twelve years ago. Not everything there is corporate. The funny thing is how much better the place is since I was in highschool. There used to be absolutely nothing there. Still, it is scary how corporate the convention area is. It’s the Coors family’s wet dream.
I’m with Seth, a Denver expat and newly-converted defender. It was a city I spent the first 23 years of my life trying to escape. You should’ve been there in the early 90s; talk about Ghost Town. I love the new iteration–and not far away (but far enough that few probably made it) are some great little walkable communities that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. Viva la Mile High City!
Steve, this is too excellent. I’m sorry not to have seen you in Denver, but I understand we will both be scarfing down pork in Palm Springs with Mr. Goldberg this June, along with Betsy and Jill and Rob, which sounds to me like a mini-but-less-anxiety-provoking AWP. Someone said above that she has resolved never to eat lunch with Tod because she might die, given his propensity for making people choke laughing . . . I can testify that I spent late night at a Denver diner spasmodically coughing with laughter thanks to Tod, and only because I was so dehydrated from the altitude did I not wet myself. Is it wrong if I now want to flirt with Michelle Richmond too? (Oh, I love Michelle Richmond! I’m so glad you picked someone good for that part, and not someone nasty.) Ah, AWP flirtations. I used to travel with an intern in her early 20s who habitually slept with older, married AWP guys on conference tables after hours, but these middle-age days yes, it’s harmless banter in the hotel bar. How did I miss seeing you? Well, other than the fact that I’m half-blind and I was probably drunk. Hope you’re enjoying smelling your kids back home–I know I am!
BTW, I love that Stephen says he has great taste in older men and so has a crush on you–but really, I think you may be getting a bum rap there because I don’t think you’re all that much older than Stephen, who is only a year or two younger than I am, I believe. Yikes!
#8, the weeping 24-year-old (whom I’d never met before), asked me, while choking back sobs, if people my age still have hot sex.
That was quite lovely and touching, and congruent with your selections at the reading with The Sun.
The muchness of the event reminds us that we are dust in the wind, as the song goes, but we can be sparkling dust if we choose.
Oh please, please, please make #2 my obituary, at such point in time when an obituary becomes necessary. I want to be remembered as someone who lactates on command. I absolutely must meet this Tod character, if only to check out the golf shirts. Gina Frangello, right back at you, babe.
seems crazy to me that AWP is totally obscure to those who aren’t writers. just goes to show the cultural margin we live on (i guess we all think we live at the center…).
George Saunders is the coolest man alive. When he was visiting my campus to give a reading a couple of years ago, he came to the “cheese-n-wine get-together” afterwards and basically turned it into a dance party. Dude fuckin’ rocks, full stop. Warm and unpretentious — and just as funny in person as you’d hope he’d be.
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