What exactly is the purpose of AWP? To meet new or online-only writer friends? To interact with your favorite authors? To advance your own writing career with networking maneuvers and information absorbed in panel discussions?
For the Rumpus’s Steve Almond, it’s a complex question, which he tries to answer in an essay for the New Republic.
But there’s a larger and more unsettling truth lurking beneath his gripes, one that AWP inadvertently drives home: As a pursuit, literature is in a phase of incestuous contraction. Yes, people still read novels and stories and essays and poems. But today most of those people are also writers.
