So, I’m back home in my beloved Portland, and despite having only carry-on bags for my trip, I’ve still managed to bring home quite a haul.

• Drew Andrews, The Shepherd’s Journals (Blue Skirt Press)
• Allie Marini Batts, Pictures from the Center of the Universe (Paper Nautilus)
• David Breeden, They’ve Played for Timelessness (with Chips of When) (VAC Poetry)
• David Breeden, This Is Just to Say (VAC Poetry)
• Matthew Burnside, Book of If & Ever (Red Bird Chapbooks)
• Matthew Burnside, Escapologies (Red Bird Chapbooks)
• Caroline Cabrera, The Bicycle Year (H_NGM_N Books)
• Chloe Caldwell, Women (SF/LD)
• Jenny Drai, The New Sorrow Is Less Than the Old Sorrow (Black Lawrence Press)
• Franki Elliot and Shawn Stucky, Kiss as Many Women As You Can (Curbside Splendor)
• Grant Faulkner, Fissures (Press 53)
• Molly Gaudry, Wild Thing (The Cupboard)
• Eirik Gumeny, Storybook Romance (Red Bird Chapbooks)
• Tamara Linse, How to Be a Man (Willow Words)
• Wendy C. Ortiz, Excavation (Future Tense Press) (bought from Reading Frenzy in Portland but signed at AWP)
• Liz Prato, Baby’s on Fire (Press 53)
• Amber Sparks & Robert Kloss (illustrated by Matt Kish), The Desert Places (Curbside Splendor)
• Joe Wilkins, Leviathan (Iron Horse)
• Bill Yarrow, Blasphemer (Lit Fest Press)

• American Literary Review
• The Common
• Driftless Review
• Ellipsis
• The Madison Review
• Night Train
• One Story (“Snow Men,” “The History of Living Forever,” and “World’s End“)

I also want to give a quick shout-out to a few of my favorite tables in the bookfair. There were loads, but I honestly didn’t get to every table — the bookfair was dizzying — so I can only highlight a few of the coolest of the ones I saw:

• Blue Skirt Productions, with crayons and music cds and their microfiction contest
• Driftless Review, with a board of paint-penned workshop one-liners
• The Common, with a map on which you could label the places where you told your stories (I pinned Cameron, Louisiana, for Hagridden)
• Broadsided Press, with a very cool set-up of themed micro-broadsides on viewfinder discs(!) and ambient audio on headphones
• The University of Louisiana-Lafayette graduate program, with the Rougarou literary journal (the staff there now have a copy of Hagridden, since we have the Louisiana bayou and the rougarou in common!)
• Zoetic Press, where I got a shot glass filled with St. George’s Terroir gin (new to me, but I liked it! good sipping gin to go with their good books)

There’s good news and there’s better news:

Last night’s “reading” wasn’t actually a reading — it was just a final excuse for all us writers to gather and enjoy each other’s company over a few drinks before we all dispersed to our various corners of the country. And that was wonderful. Despite how noisy and crowded the bar was, the whole evening was low-key and friendly and a perfect way to wind down our AWP.

And better still: the company was amazing, and it included a lot of people I’d been hoping to see but hadn’t yet run into! I didn’t get any photos last night, though Meg Tuite filmed a bunch of us, but if you’ll allow me to share some names with you: I was thrilled to meet Mike Joyce and Teri Lee Kline (and her charming husband!) and Doriana Maria Lareau, and we all enjoyed one last chance to utter the most common phrase of AWP, “I know you on Facebook!” And I was delighted to see my friends Gay Degani, Meg Tuite, Robert Vaughan, Bill Yarrow, Len Kuntz, and Karen Stefano — we all had a wonderful time discussing our conference and our various new writing projects and our plans for AWP in LA next year.

Tomorrow, look for one last post: a final recap of my conference as well as — and more importantly — a lengthy list of the writers I met and the books I bought, complete with links to writers’ websites and ways to buy your own books.

And finally, I’ll leave you with Mary Richards as she looked at 4 am on my way to the train this morning, because we all need a little Mary Richards in our lives:

Gang, I’m beat.

But it’s the best kind of beat. You know that sort of exhaustion you feel after a really intense workout where you can’t move but you still want to because the workout felt so good, so immediately beneficial, that you want to do it all over again? I don’t know that feeling — I don’t work out — but I imagine it must feel like this.

Today was supposed to be a lighter day, just a couple of panels and mostly making my last rounds in the bookfair. And it was that, really, but as I started browsing the bookfair I wound up meeting a TON of new people: literary magazines and publishers I’m excited about, magazines and publishers I’d never head of but am thrilled to know about now, and authors I’d been looking for the whole conference but didn’t find until today. In one tour through the bookfair, I ran into Jason Jordan chatting with my sunnyoutside pressmate Tim Horvath, who I followed to the Red Bird Press table, where I bought chapbooks I’ve long wanted by Eirik Gumeny and Matthew Burnside, which reminded me to check in with my own chapbook press’s table, where I found James Brubaker . . . . You get the idea.

(Check back for links to all those authors’ work when I do a roundup post after the conference, because I want you all to buy their stuff but I’m blogging from my phone right now.)

And on my way to and from the bookfair I found Terry Burns, a former colleague from when I taught in Wisconsin; Tamara Linse, a writer I just met this conference, whose book How to Be a Man I’m looking forward to; amd Jesse Lee Kercheval, whose book Building Fiction I always teach from im my workshops and whose memoir Space is beautiful.

My last panel was on building a creative writing community on a community college campus, something I’m involved in now at Chemeketa Community College and and loving. (Student writing club and creative nonfiction class, you are going to love what I bring back from this panel.)

Now, of course, I’m on the other end of the sun’s arc, the day still beautiful but from a different angle. And friends, I am asleep on my feet. Which is not good, because I still have one last reading to go to, and, as last year in Seattle, it’s effectively the last reading of the conference. It starts at 9 p.m. I have no idea when it’s going to end. And I’m catching a plane so early in the morning that I have to leave the hotel before the sun comes up.

So I’m calling this part 1 of day 4, since I have more I can say, especially after this final reading, but there’s no telling when I’ll get around to posting it. Maybe tomorrow from the airport, or maybe the next day, after I’ll have already returned to my college classrooms and begun reporting all this to my students.

So since this is effectively the last live post from the conference, let me just say that I am so, so happy I came this year. It was the first time I wasn’t here supporting a lit magazine or graduate program, or promoting my own book because it had just come out. And I did both those things this time anyway, because I’m loyal to my old grad program at the University of North Texas and the American Literary Review that it publishes, and because I still have two books to promote. But somehow, this year’s conference wound up feeling like the most productive, the most fruitful in terms of the things I’ve learned and the connections I’ve made and the friendships I’ve nurtured and the times that I’ve enjoyed.

Thank you, Minneapolis. And good night.

Today. Has. Been. EPIC.

My day began with writing exercises and the bookfair and a pretty solid panel on research for creative writing (and a strong shout-out for the indispensable service librarians provide everyone, not just writers and teachers)! And all of that was wonderful.

And then Debra Monroe hugged me.

I was headed to Debra’s panel on the ethics of writing secondary characters in creative nonfiction, but I spotted Debra outside and was delighted to chat with her a bit before the panel. That panel, by the way, was amazing, with a killer talk from Emily Fox Gordon. I learned a lot that I’m eager to share with my students.

Still reeling from that awesomeness, I headed back to the bookfair, where I met a bunch of amazing folks, hung out at the sunnyoutside press table for a while, chatted up my own books, and got some other folks’ books signed (including Excavations by Wendy Ortiz!).

On Twitter, I’ve been trying to tweet bookfair tables I’ve been to as a way to plug them and direct more traffic their way. Today, for a little meta-on-meta fun, I tweeted a photo of the big AWP Twitter jumbotron in the bookfair, and then I took a photo of my tweet on said jumbotron:

I also did a little writing and sent some work out, because even at a conference, writers write. And then I was off to let Joy Harjo and Lidia Yuknavitch melt my brain with their genius.

And holy shit, did they ever.

They even sat next to each other!

I’ve written before about how and why I love Joy Harjo, and about how deliciously quotable she is. So, not to disappoint, here are a couple of the lines I scribbled in my notebook today:

“The book is a body. It’s an energetic form that has life within it.”

The “colonization” and disempowerment of women “is only this much” — (she held her fingers very close together) — “only this much out of a timeline that is endless, yet we’ve allowed that to take over everything.”

Harjo rocks my world. But the panel wasn’t finished. We ended with Lidia Yuknavitch. And y’all, she brought me to tears.

She started by saying she wasn’t there to give a talk, she was there to recruit us all for an army. Then she got us all to our feet. The whole crowded room, standing in front of our chairs:

And then she made us sing.

She told us to sing the word “I” for as long as she held us, until she told us to stop. And she held us a long time. You remember that Bugs Bunny opera cartoon where Bugs plays conductor and has the tenor hold a note and he leaves his glove in the air forever even when his hand leaves it?

Then she told us: we’re taught that autobiography and memoir is about the author, it’s always about the “I.” But it’s not about our individual “I” — it’s about all our different “I”s together, singing in congress. “We are that ‘I’ song,” she said, and I choked up. Then she said, “Help me write new ‘I’ songs,” and I just about lost it.

It was powerful, and transcendent, and most importantly, it was a call to action. (My creative writing students, today was a game-changer. Brace yourselves.)

Then I headed back to the bookfair so Jenny Drai could sign her new poetry collection for me (I previewed her book a while ago and I’m thrilled to finally have a copy!)

I browsed awhile longer and sent some emails and did some more work, and then they shut down the bookfair. As I was being ushered out of the room under the darkened lights, I stumbled across the Zoetic Press and Paper Nautilus Press tables, where I was delighted to find Allie Marini Batts!

I also picked up a shot glass from Zoetic Press, and they were kind enough to fill it with a very decent sipping gin.

Afterward, I spent the first half of my evening with Press 53 at a wonderful reading full of amazing poets and fiction writers, including Liz Prato (whose new book has just released at AWP) and Bonnie ZoBell and Grant Faulkner (the guy who founded NaNoWriMo!).

The second half of my evening I spent in the company of an old, dear friend, my first college professor, my first college writing mentor, my usher into the writing life, my guru, my friend David Breeden.

And of course, we traded books — I gave him a copy of Box Cutters and of Hagridden, in which acknowledgements he’s listed, and he gave me his latest two poetry books. Then we spent the night eating Indian food and drinking beer and talking about art and writing and religion and history and politics and life and all the things I’ve always enjoyed talking about with him. And he’s still teaching me, and I’m still eager to learn.

And now it’s late. But I’m not yet tired. Because gang, after a day like today, all I want to do is sing:

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.

This year, I debated for quite a while about making the trip to Minneapolis for this year’s AWP (a trip I’m on as you read this), because as much as I love AWP and as much as I have always wanted to visit Minneapolis (I hear fabulous things about that city), AWP always takes a tremendous amount of energy and time (and money). But a couple of months ago, I began to see the multitude of announcements in my Facebook feed from friends and authors whose work I love who would be at the conference, presenting or reading or selling brand new books. So AWP became, as usual, irresistible, and I am tremendously excited to get there.

Last year in Seattle, I was promoting my then-new checkbook, Box Cutters, and I spent a lot of time hanging out at the sunnyoutside press table (#128!). I also participated in a few readings to promote the book. This year, I plan to hang out at the sunnyoutside press table again (come find me!), and if you have my chapbook or want to buy a copy, I would love to sign one for you.

My novel Hagridden‘s publisher, Columbus Press, is not at AWP this year, but if you want a copy of Hagridden, I’ll have copies with me — track me down and I’ll sign those too!

Alas, though, all of the readings I’d been invited to have fallen through, for a whole range of understandable logistical reasons. In some ways, this is great news, because it makes me a free agent, available to attend whatever I want, whenever I want. This is a new experience for me, because in the past I’ve almost always been supporting a literary magazine or promoting a book. So I’m looking forward to enjoying this conference in a way that I have never really enjoyed AWP before, including the chance to focus on the panels. And Minneapolis is a tremendously literary city, with a lot of local presses and authors and reading events that I am eager to explore.

(I do love reading, though, so if you’re at AWP and are looking for a reader to join in your fun, contact me!)

I do have a handful of panels that my students have sent me too, and I look forward to attending those and reporting to my classes about what I learned. I’m also planning to attend some panels particular to teaching at two-year colleges (which is where I work), and I have a couple handfuls of panels and readings that include good friends of mine or authors I admire (or even idolize), and I can’t wait to see those people. And of course there is the general camaraderie of AWP, the opportunity to hang out with writers that I know online or used to know when I lived in other states but have not seen in quite awhile.

Still, when I look at how crowded my events calendar is, it’s easier to feel overwhelmed this year. That’s why advice like “Don’t do everything” or “Take it easy” is going to be so useful to me this year. (See yesterday’s post.)

Of course, I will do everything, but I’m looking forward to a year in which “everything” includes time to browse the bookfair, time to have a drink or a dinner with a group of writers, time to enjoy readings. It’s something I started figuring out last year in Seattle, but it took until the last day for me to really understand the importance of that ease. This year, I get to go into the conference with that understanding, and I’m looking forward to enjoying myself.

As I pack my bags and prepare to head out to Minneapolis for AWP 2015, I thought I’d offer y’all a few of the articles I’ve been reading about the conference this year:

• From theMinneapolis Star Tribune: “Huge Writing Conference Will Have Minneapolis Fully Booked,” by Laurie Hertzel.
• From TwinCities.com: “Readers and Writers column: All in for AWP,” by Mary Ann Grossmann.
• From Poetry Foundation: “Instead of Going to AWP,” by Gina Myers.
• From The Review Review: “Making the Most of AWP: Advice from Editors and Writers.”
• From Yemassee, the literary journal of the University of South Carolina: “In Defense of Panels,” by Justin Brouckaert.
• From Entropy magazine: “Entropy’s Guide to #AWP15.”

Everyone who’s going, I’ll see you there! All my students, I’ll see you here, on the blog! Anyone who’s staying home this year, whether by choice or by circumstances, enjoy your free time! I’ll envy your rested bliss when I’m on the other end of this thing. 🙂