Have you been wondering what the point of the AWP conference might be to the 11,800 who attended this year? The Atlantic gives the ins, outs, and mishaps of the conference, along with tenuous or even doubtful optimism for the future of publishing:
I asked the editors of two-dozen journals to briefly describe their publications and what they look for vis-à-vis content (genre, aesthetics, etc.) and the response was universally this sentence: “We publish poetry, fiction, art, and creative nonfiction. We’re looking for anything good” (with the occasional rearrangement of said words). While I do not doubt them, I wondered how such journals (and there were legions present, though I couldn’t get an exact figure, as some were under the guise of host MFA programs) could distinguish themselves in a wildly overcrowded field.
