Notes from AWP

Or, finding community among 10,000 people

My college roommate, Heather, is doing an MFA. She, like me, is mid-career (and mid-life), though her career is in tech and mine is in words. But tech is not enough nourishment for a reflective soul, and Heather has always been a writer too. So she is doing an MFA and writing a novel. I am writing a novel too, as you’ve probably heard. So we decided we would go to AWP.

AWP stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (why not AWWP? I don’t know), and is the annual national conference for MFA students, and writing teachers, and aspiring MFA students, and aspiring writing teachers, and sometimes also me. On Thursday morning I went to check in.

“Oh, loose cannon! Where are you guys out of?” asked the guy behind the desk after I made it to the front of a very long, very snaking, but very well-managed line.

“Where… what?” I asked.

“Loose cannon,” he said, indicating my badge. “Isn’t that a literary magazine?”

“It’s a phrase meant to indicate that I am not affiliated with a writing program,” I explained. There is nothing better than explaining a joke. Explaining makes all jokes funnier.

(No, it does not.)

The guy looked doubtful. “I’m pretty sure it used to be a literary magazine,” he said.

AWP can be dizzying, even with a plan. I found myself attending a number of panels about AI, because I am still figuring out what I think about it, and was curious to listen to other writers and teachers of more settled opinions. Heather went to process talks and a meditation and a panel about archives that I was jealous of after I heard her talk about it. From the AI panels I learned that AI was the enemy of the good, and that it must be resisted by any means necessary. No one talked about the futility inherent in these dicta. How can we make go away the un-go-awayable thing, we all seemed to be wondering. Will organizing do it? Lawsuits? Morality? Artistic truth? We are all afraid. But at least, for a time, we all got to be afraid together.

A number of people I knew were to be found among the throngs, at least in theory, though I did not actually find them. The famous poet was there! But I didn’t get to see her. Instead I went to a panel on Black writers working on surrealism and fiction of the absurd, which was probably the best talk I’ve been to in awhile. How to portray a reality too real to be borne, seemed to be an organizing question. In my notebook I wrote a quote, attributed to Percival Everett, that you cannot satirize what you do not love.

We closed out AWP by attending a reading of poetry and flash fiction from the Hopkins Writing Seminars held in a de-sanctified church, with barbeque in a buffet in the back and an open bar. A hardy group of MFA students were stationed outside, puffing on vapes and directing attendees to the appropriate ramp. We thanked them before disappearing into the night, in search of dinner and processing, alone together instead of in a crowd at the Baltimore Convention Center.

So what’s next?

Weirdly, just before AWP, I shared a story on Threads (the Meta knockoff of Twitter) that went kind of viral, about my ultimately successful attempt to get my son’s Snoopy watch repaired. The anecdote was seen by more than 250,000 people, all of whom were there either to express joy at the existence of Snoopy watches, or delight at serendipitous moments of kindness expressed between strangers.

I also took a break during AWP to do a reading for Dracut Arts which is now up on YouTube. You can see my new high-powered reading glasses.

And I’m still writing. Slowly, surely. And probably with too many characters and points of view. But I am writing.