Just a quick note about my first evening in Minneapolis. There was a bit of a saga getting here, with a nearly 2-hour flight delay in Seattle (you might have enjoyed my comments on Facebook or Twitter), but I won’t rehash all that except to say that even with the timing screw-up, Alaska Airlines did right by all us passengers, and I’m grateful for them making the delay not only bearable but even sometimes funny.
The upside of the delay was that by the time I got to my hotel downtown, it was legitimately dinner time, amd better still, my good friend Brianna Pike was nearby and hungry as well. So we went to a cheesy fake-British-pub restaurant (with a really decent menu, actually) and whiled away a couple of hours talking about writing and teaching and our careers in our respective community colleges.
You might remember Brianna Pike from my recent post about her 30/30 Project with Tupelo Press for National Poetry Month. She’s still writing a poem a day, even during the conference, and you can still contribute to the fundraiser and assign her a topic or even receive a signed poem of hers.
After dinner, I met up with my conference roommate, author David Atkinson, whose book Bones Buried in Dirt you should definitely buy and read. We’re both in the middle of new projects, so while we spent some time exploring downtown and finding a cup of coffee, we were mostly eager to sit in the room and work on our respective fiction projects. So here we sit.
In fact, I mostly just wanted to post this so I could share some photos from today — nothing impressive, just a few quick snaps of the area around my hotel — and then get back to work. Because it’s a writers conference, and I ought to be writing.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 