One week ago this morning, I’d been awake for just over thirty hours, and was seeing stars while getting ready for Cheryl Strayed’s release party for Wild, thrown at the home of Rachel DeWoskin, a glam literary friend whose furniture does not come from Ikea (or from a dead grandmother whose taste while alive was dubious at best). Soon I was sipping champagne, cooing over Sasha Hemon’s adorable baby daughter, and listening to Cheryl talk all things Wild while guests like Pam Houston, Zoe Zolbrod and Bernardine Dohrn beamed proudly. It would be another twelve hours before I finally crashed that night. Such is the “magic” of the AWP Conference, in which bookish types get together to party like it’s 1999 . . . albeit in many cases we were already in our 30s in 1999, so even then our memory of dance clubs was growing slim.
One of the most infamous aspects of AWP is the gossip it spawns afterwards . . . back in the 90s, this entailed an Other Voices intern who was fond of hooking up with interns from other magazines on conference tables after hours. Once, in Albany, before the era of there being so many off-site parties that even the nerdiest of profs feels like a belle whose dance card is overly full, this intern begged us to take her to a tattoo parlor so she could get her first tattoo at AWP–and so, partially in her honor, I chose the day after the conference this year to get my own latest tattoo, commemorating a childhood friend who died in December. In so many small ways, AWP quite literally charts history for many of us, ticking off the years. It can seem, on the surface of things, pretty depressing: a bunch of aspiring-to-midlist writers all trying to schmooze in a cavernous, poorly designed hall, perpetually getting lost in the aisles thanks to our piss-ass-writerly senses of direction, with only a lucky few presses earning back in revenue the (increasingly exorborant) fees shelled out to buy a table and ship books to whichever frigid city plays that year’s host. It would not be an overstatement to say that I have never attended an AWP where somebody didn’t cry, at least briefly over the course of the conference, crouched behind the Other Voices Books table in the fair . . .
And yet: in this increasingly virtual age, my affection for this clusterfuck of a conference has only grown deeper. It is one of the few chances for those of us who interact daily on Facebook, Twitter, email, and especially on the pages of each other’s books and journals to come together and drink cheap, forbidden-by-the-Hilton wine midday or listen to in-person readings or hear writers like Vanessa Veselka and Rob Roberge put on their other hats to play guitar and sing. It’s a chance to see Stacy Bierlein’s new shoes and get picked up by Isaac Fitzgerald and swung around, and to realize that Brainy It Girl Emily Rapp actually looks like a freaking model. It’s a chance to have cocktails with the whole Dzanc Books family, and to exhale a sigh of relief as every professional ball I’ve managed to misplace these past few months gets scooped up by Matt Bell and volleyed back over the net where I can find it again. AWP is like a family reunion of sorts, but with a hand-picked family. This time around, I even led an excursion of some of my favorite literary suspects (Bryan Tomasovich, Brad Listi, Tod Goldberg, Rob Roberge, Chad Faries) to see the bar my father used to own, an obscure old-bookie-joint on an untrendy stretch of Damen Avenue, and photographed them under the sign smoking and mugging like the old band back together for a reunion tour.
I’m sappy about AWP, I guess you could say.
This week’s Sunday Rumpus features two less sentimental takes, from two guys I actually introduced in a round-about way, by publishing both of their mostly-still-novice-asses back in 1998, in my own inaugural issue as the Editor of Other Voices magazine. Yeah, I’m a little bit of a sucker: that they’ve basically been best friends ever since is something I’d count as one of my highest achievements as an editor. It’s all about relationships, in the end, isn’t it? Not “networking,” but real friendships: the people we write for and to and with in the trenches. Now if only they would hold this fucking conference somewhere warm, involving a pool . . .
P.S. Here, others share what they learned at AWP 2012, thanks to Michael Filippone . . .
