Good news: I found my notebook. Which was an auspicious start to a solid day, full of friends and readings and a side trip to the Seattle Public Library and book sales and one last panel and . . . and . . . and . . . .
And I’m exhausted, gang. AWP has breathed so much life into my writerly being, but it’s a reciprocal motion and this long, vast, intense conference has sucked away every reserve of energy I have. And I’m not even finished: sunnyoutside press is closing things out with one last reading, from 10 pm til 1 am, and according to the roster I’m the last man at the mic. Which is wonderful and I cannot wait, but I’m so grateful I came on the train because at least some of my four hours home will be spent asleep.
Another hour of that trip, though, will be right here in the blog, because I have so many more things to say about today and about this week, and I simply don’t have time to write them all tonight. My reading starts in less than an hour and I was hoping to put some food in me before it begins.
So I hope you’ll bear with one more photo-laden recap before I settle in for a longer post of words tomorrow.
One Story magazine always has one of the coolest booths at the bookfair. This year, they set up a “Writing Advice” display and invited everyone to write down their one piece of advice. The response was so enthusiastic it spilled over from the banners to a pillar display:
My own advice was this:
Later, I took a trip to the Seattle Public Library, where I spotted someone’s wry note left on the front counter by the 5th Street entrance:
This evening, I rode a bus south toward my final reading of the conference, and I was surprised to find a bookmark from Sundog Lit, the magazine run by my friend Justin Lawrence Daugherty, on the floor of the bus. It seemed such a fitting visual metaphor for the end of AWP that even in the poor light with nothing but my cell phone, I had to snap a photo:
Samuel Snoek-Brown 