Spring is just around the corner. The flowers are starting to push up and bloom, the sun is staying out longer, the weather will start to warm soon.
But don’t worry. Jersey Devil Press has one last blast of cold, eerie darkness for you before your winter ends.
We’re talking book-burning, war, zombies . . . a haunted penis. A Señor Frogs in someone’s closet. Mark Ruffalo living on the street and missing a hand. The horrors abound!
I kid, but seriously, folks, this issue has some of our finest stories. Read that first one and tell me it doesn’t take your breath away.
This is my last AWP post for a long while, I promise.
But one of my favorite things at the conference was meeting people who bought my book, Box Cutters. I like to think that whenever someone reads my book, they’re inviting me into their lives as much as I’m inviting them into mine. It’s a kind of literary friendship, which is why I like to get pictures of people with my book.
I didn’t manage to catch a photo of everyone at AWP who bought my book, but these very cool people — who are also terrific fellow writers — were kind of enough to let me take these pics and share them with you:
Poet Amy Temple HarperWriter Tim HorvathPoet Daniel M. ShapiroWriters Robert P. Kaye and Len KuntzWriter Meg Tuite
So, in my haste to post between events the last couple of days, I’ve had to gloss over some amazing things that happened at AWP. So let me back up briefly before sharing the awesomeness that was the last day.
First, Friday night. This was the Hot Pillow reading hosted by JP Reese and Jen Knox in their hotel room. I posted a couple of photos of the reading the next day, but I haven’t written much about it yet. Folks, this thing was fabulous. I’ve been telling people that it wasn’t so much a reading where people drank as it was a drinking where people read, because the purpose was to have fun and just hang out with fellow writers, and we certainly did enjoy ourselves. But no kidding, the work that people read that night was some of the best work I heard at any reading of the conference, and the environment was so much fun, with people sitting on couches and on the floor, a second hotel room nearby getting commandeered as a kind of staging area/bar, and the hallway a natural extension of the event. At one point a man came down the hall from his room to ask what all the noise was about, and when he found out we were reading our work for each other, he asked to join us and read a piece of his own!
There are no strangers at AWP — not for long. 🙂
On Saturday, I was feeling like I needed to get back to some panels, so I booked a few from the list my students gave me and dragged myself out of bed early (which, after the Hot Pillow reading, was NOT easy). In the end, I only attended two, and both I ducked out of during the Q&A. They both were interesting enough, but I was beginning to feel like I’d heard most of the commentary before — probably at a previous AWP — and the more I looked at my schedule, the more author events I realized I was missing in the bookfair. So I returned to where the action was.
I’m glad I did. In addition to meeting some more writers and chatting up my book at the sunnyoutside table, I also bumped into my friend Mark Russell, author of God Is Disappointed In You, and he invited me out to lunch with a group of other writers: Monique Daviau, Mark Brunke, and Dena Rash Guzman. We just popped across the street for a quick lunch, the resulting conversation — which touched on craft, camaraderie, religion, performance tips for readings, and the importance of bees to the planet — was exhilarating. I’ll be honest, I was starting to feel pretty burned out that Saturday afternoon, but after lunch with this amazing group of writers, I was recharged and ready to finish AWP strong.
Monique Daviau and Dena Rash Guzman at lunch with me, Mark Russell, and Mark Brunke. (Apologies to Mark Russell for stealing his photo from Facebook.)
Me and Dena Rash Guzman at lunch with Monique Daviau, Mark Russell, and Mark Brunke. (Apologies to Mark Russell for stealing his photo from Facebook.)
I returned to the bookfair for a bit and rounded out my haul. Altogether, I picked up twelve new books (eleven of them signed), eight literary magazines, and three trade magazines. It made for heavy hauling on the journey home (though it was easier by train), but it was worth it.
Here are my books (in the order of the stack in the photo):
With my stash secured in my luggage, I hit one last reading downtown, then I made my way south to the Georgetown neighborhood for my own reading.
Folks, this thing was one of my favorite readings of all time. The bar, the Georgetown Liquor Company, was a perfect reading environment: intimate, honest, and friendly, with amazing vegetarian food and a terrific beer list. The emcee for the evening, Mike Young, was hilarious. And the reading roster was simply stunning. Daniel M. Shapiro, Ayshia Stephenson, Adam Robinson, Margaret Bashaar, Chelsea Hodson, John Walker, and Tatiana Ryckman — they just tore the place up with their words. And my reading got a great response, too, probably in part because I read my bar story, “The Voice You Throw, the Blow You Catch.” I was particularly thrilled to meet and hear some new voices last night. And after the reading, despite us all protesting that we were tired and hoped to wrap up early, we wound up hanging around for hours drinking and sharing work. I lost track of some of the gang, but I ended up in a deep and fascinating conversation with John Walker, my pressmate at sunnyoutside; Ayshia Stephenson, whose poetry was so amazing I bought her book; and a friend of Ayisha’s, Jason H. York.
It was, in short, the perfect way to wrap up my return to AWP, and while I’m exhausted and thrilled to be back home in my beloved Portland, I’m also thrilled to have been at what was my most successful AWP ever. I don’t know if I’ll have the energy next year to hit the conference quite as hard as I did this year, but I’m definitely looking forward to trying.
See you in Minneapolis in 2015, writers and readers!
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:
“Write with permission to throw the writing away . . . and write again.”
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:
The Seattle Public Library“Sick books, yo! ;)”
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:
This would ordinarily be a devastating event in my life, but as it happened, I’d finished an older notebook while I was here and picked up a free new notebook from the NEO MFA program, but the only things I’d managed to scribble in the new notebook were panel notes and a couple of story ideas. The story ideas I remember well enough that I haven’t lost them. The rest . . . well, I’m sad to see those notes gone, but, as Vonnegut would say, so it goes.
Besides, I only attended two panels today, neither of which was terribly impressive.
The rest of the time, I was browsing the bookstore and harassing fellow writers or else attending readings.
So here are some photos from both:
The sunnyoutside press table, including my book (that’s me just above the logo and on the right)Rusty Barnes at the Night Train table (Night Train is back!) and Kevin Sampsell at a big mash-up table that includes Sampsell’s press, Future TenseJill Patterson and a horse at the Iron Horse Literary Review tableKato (!!!) handing out flyers to the Enter the Poet reading last nightThe friendly little reading I was part of last night, in the hotel room of JP Reese and Jen KnoxMeg Tuite reading and being awesome
Here I am at AWP, with new photos of people at the conference picking up copies of Box Cutters, and I’m still getting photos from family and friends with the chapbook, too! This is so exciting, gang, that I had to go ahead and share these new photos with you.
From my friend and Oregon librarian, Heather White (and her cat)
From my friend and Oregon librarian, Heather White (and her cat)
From my mom and dad, Julie and Jim Snoek (hi, Mom and Dad!)From poet and pal Brianna Pike
And more (clearer) photos of my brother’s miniature version of my book:
The model bedroom with the miniature bookshelf….… the bookshelf …… closer to the books …From my brother, Jon Snoek
Stay tuned early next week, when I’ll post photos of people with the chapbook at the conference. And later today, I’ll post a new AWP update as well.
I meant to post these links the day before I came to AWP, but I was teaching and prepping for the conference and being lazy, so here’s a late list of advice articles about the conference:
One last thing: I had so many readings on my schedule tonight (8!!!) that, since attending one would mean missing most, I decided to skip them all in favor of the keynote address by Annie Proulx — which, I’ll confess, I was going to attend anyway, because it’s Annie Proulx.
Her address was delightful. Toward the end, there was a wonderful moment when she checked her watch and flipped through her pages and said, “Let me check my time. Hmm. I’ll just cut some of this.” And the crowd began spontaneously shouting out “No! Don’t cut!” Some of us chuckled, and Proulx paused, scanned the audience, and said, “What’s funny?” So we enunciated: “Don’t cut! Keep talking!” Proulx flipped through a few more ages, hemmed and hawed, said, “Hmm. Well? Oh, okay.”
And we cheered. And she kept talking.
I got so caught up in her remarks that I forgot to take detailed notes, but here are two highlights I made sure to write down verbatim:
“Why do we write? We write to communicate. Communicate what and to whom are the better questions.”
And, on the data analysis of reader habits and on formulaic writing:
“To regurgitate the tried and true is to become a producer of product. [. . .] In my opinion, this is not creative writing; it is bottom-feeding.”
I didn’t bring any of her books with me (I’m lugging home enough from the bookfair without bringing my own), so I skipped the VERY long autograph line, but I did stop to charge my phone and draft this post. By the time I’d nearly finished this, the line was gone, but I realized Proulx was still at the table, gathering her things. I walked over to thank her for making the time to speak at our conference; I told her how much I loved her address tonight and that I think her writing is amazing.
She seemed genuinely taken aback, and she smiled and said, “Well thank you. That’s very nice to hear.”
I’m writing this before the big event today — Annie Proulx’s keynote address — because I have no idea what kind of time I’ll have to write it after. And there’s plenty to write about already.
In the “Disrupting Class” panel.
So far today I’ve hit three panels. The first was at 9 am and, miraculously, I made it there on time with only a single cup of coffee in me. I’m glad I did. The panel, “Disrupting Class: Changing Pedagogical Landscapes in the Writing Classroom,” was an invigorating discussion of new ideas for teaching writing, including (or especially) first-year composition. I like to think I have some pretty engaging approaches to teaching comp, and the students always seem to enjoy it as much as learn from it, but lately I’ve been feeling the urge to shake things up, and this panels had all sorts of interesting ideas, including a very impressive course designed around teaching argument through video game design — as in, the students not only write essays but design a video game.
After that I attended a very powerful panel discussion on “Literary Politics: White Guys and Everyone Else.” The panelists were all fantastic, but I have to admit the big draw for me was Roxane Gay, who is one of my favorite contemporary writers on race, gender, and literary culture. Somehow, she is even more amazing in person. Her presence — her wit and her intelligence — is enveloping, and I felt like I was a student in her classroom, in the best possible way. The whole panel was informative, but her comments were inspiring.
The “Literary Politics” panel was standing-room only!
But the panel I took the most notes in today was on “Writing Rules I Break, Presented by The Southampton Review.” To be honest, it wasn’t so much informative (I’m a rule-breaker at heart) as it was reaffirming, and I wound up writing down a ton of fun — and knowingly ironic — rules about breaking rules:
There is only one rule: Within the world of your story, know the rules of that story and adhere to them. (Susan Scarf Merrell)
Rules are a great way to get out of stuckness. Inventing arbitrariness is a great way to rediscover play. (Rachel Pastan)
I write past the end of my fiction so I can safely lop off the last few paragraphs. (Dinah Lenney)
There are no rules, and break them all. (Robert Wrigley)
You break rules for effect. There ought to be a reason. (Robert Wrigley)
Anything that increases the difficulty in what you write is a good idea. (Robert Wrigley)
There is only one rule: We shouldn’t be here, because we should be hidden away somewhere in some dark room putting words on paper. (Robert Wrigley)
In between panels, I’ve been spending time at the bookfair, which is the biggest I’ve ever seen it at AWP. Already I’ve bumped into dozens of friends old and new, met half a dozen new magazines or presses, shaken hands with Nance Van Winkle (one of my favorite poets), and sold — and signed — two chapbooks. And while I was at the sunnyoutside press table selling books, friends came by to see me: Daniel Shapiro, Bud Smith, and Amy Temple Harper stopped by, and I took a quick jaunt across the aisle to shake hands with Rusty Barnes (I’ve been a fan of his for YEARS).
All in all, it’s been an amazing day, and I haven’t even gone to the Kurt Cobain panel or the keynote address yet, to say nothing of the myriad readings happening tonight.
Which is to say, I’m exhausted and exhilerated all at once, the latter of which is going to get me to tomorrow.
I don’t really have much to report from day 1 of AWP, except that Seattle is STUFFED full of writers right now, and we’re not even all here yet.
I do want to backtrack and write a bit about my journey up here from Portland, though, because this was my first train ride in the US (unless you count the tourist train through the Big Thicket in East Texas my grandparents took me on when I was a kid). I’ve been on trains before, mind you, but they were both in Europe (in Austria and The Netherlands), and let’s be honest, one can’t really compare the European rail system to the American one. We’re a shoddy second cousin at best. But actually, the short journey I took on the Amtrak Cascades held up quite well to the short trips I’d taken in Europe, and to tell you the truth, I’m officially addicted to trains. I was only halfway through my journey today when I realized I can’t imagine why anyone would ever opt for planes or road trips when you have a train at your disposal. The security nightmares of air travel don’t exist at all, the terminal was charming and easy to navigate, boarding was swift and well-organized. The seats are bigger, the legroom is bigger, the aisles are bigger, the lavatories are bigger, the windows are bigger (and the views just as breathtaking). You don’t have to wear seatbelts, you can hop up and roam the train any time you want (no seatbelts-fastened signs!), there’s a bistro car where you can grab a beer or a cup of coffee (I opted for the latter) and sit at a table and sip in comfort — and the prices aren’t jacked up (if you’ll pardon this expression) sky-high. I paid two dollars for a cup of coffee, and it was perfectly decent, and the barista (there was a barista!) was so friendly he was singing while he worked.
The bistro car on the Amtrak Cascades.
The bistro car on the Amtrak Cascades.
And the conductor on the train — waistcoat and flat-topped cap and watch on a chain — had thick sideburns straight out of the 1910s. I sorely wish he’d also had a mustache and half-moon glasses with which to read the tickets.
So, in short, I loved the train.
Of course, the best part of the train — by which I mean the extra room to really stretch out and enjoy oneself — was that I was able to set up the laptop and get a lot of writing done. I took an hour break to roam the train and drink some coffee in the bistro car, but the rest of my three hours aboard, I was toiling away at a long story I’ve been wrestling with for years, and I think I made good progress. Or, I got a lot of writing done, whether it was progress or not. Students, take note: I set out to cut as much as 2500 words out of a 7500-word story today, and by the time I’m finished, I’ll have added a thousand words. This is not the way you edit! But it’s the way I edited today.
(PS: Heard about Amtrak’s new writing residency yet? The one where you can ride the train and write full time? I’m totally doing that.)
The other best part was eavesdropping on all the other writers on the train, headed to AWP as well. In fact, one fellow writer discovered from Facebook that we were on the same train and we wound up chatting a bit. The same thing is already happening on the streets and in the restaurants of Seattle: at lunch, my friends and I paused long enough in our conversation about prose poetry and flash fiction to overhear another table’s discussion of James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat.”
After registering at the conference (which is HUGE) and settling in, my friends Hobie Anthony and Amy Foster Myer and I all headed out to Rock Bottom downtown for the Festival of Language reading, a massive opening event with something like 50 readers at the mic, including Meg Tuite and Robert Vaughan, two online friends I met in real life tonight. A lot of people are missing, with flights delayed for hours this afternoon, but already the mood is raucous as the downtown area teems with writers wearing AWP badges.
Tomorrow is a full day, and I’m not sure when I’m going to have time to sit down and record the day, so tomorrow’s post might be short and/or late. But I’ll be here at some point. In the meantime, if you’re reading this from the conference, come find me in the bookfair tomorrow or at the keynote address tomorrow night (Annie Proulx!).
But tonight it’s gotten so late that I just watched a raccoon lope across the street outside my window. (This actually just happened.)
Whenever I’m lucky enough to go to an academic conference, I always have my students assign me homework. I go because I love the intellectual and social exchanges — hearing so many brilliant panels and literary readings, meeting so many fellow writers and finding so many new publications, and drinking with old friends and colleagues: these are among the highlights of any given year. But I also go for my students. These conferences exist (in theory for some but in practice for me) to bring academics and creative types together to share their ideas so we can then bring these ideas back into our classrooms and share them with our students. That’s not exactly the case for everyone at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, of course, but for the many of us who teach writing, it ought to be.
From the AWP conference website.
So I always share the conference schedule with my classes and ask them to pick some panels or events they want to know more about. I add these selections to the panels and events I want to attend myself, and this becomes my itinerary.
The problem with such a scheme is that AWP is such a huge conference (11,000 attendees, according to news making the rounds yesterday!) that all these selections tend to overlap, and of course there’s always the competition with the bookfair, which honestly is one of the main reasons any of us turn up at AWP — it’s where a lot of the connections happen. So I wind up overbooked and have to miss half of what I wanted to see.
Which is to say, if you’re at AWP and you don’t see me at your event, I know you’ll understand. (Thanks to the always-amazing Roxane Gay for permission to skip things: “Don’t try to attend everything,” she writes in her “How to Swim in a Sea of Writers” advice piece at the AWP website. “It’s not possible. Instead, pick a few panels and offsite readings to attend and leave the rest to possibility.”)
See what I mean?
But for anyone paying attention to this blog (and I’ve invited my students to do so), here’s a small list of places I’ll probably be during the conference. I’ll definitely be attending more things than this, but because of the overlap, these are the only ones I’m (fairly) certain to be at:
11 am – 12 pm Bookfair: Sunnyoutside Press table (Q9)
I’ll be hanging out with the publishers of my chapbook, Box Cutters — stop by, say hello!
2 – 3:30 pm Bookfair: Vermont College of Fine Arts table (207)
Nance Van Winkle is doing a booksigning here, and if I can catch her between panels, I’d like to stop by — I love her poetry
4:30 – 5:45 pm Panel R278.: The Literary Legacy of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain
This is a must-see panel that ALL my students insisted I attend, even though I was already planning on it
9 pm – 12 am Some reading somewhere. Seems like half the off-site readings at the conference are happening on this one night. If they’re close enough, I might even reading-hop. Find me somewhere.
Friday, February 28
10 am – 12 pm Bookfair: Curbside Splendor Publishing table (H3)
Ben Tanzer is doing a booksigning. I’ll probably be at a 9 am panel so I might stop by the table closer to 10:30, but it’d be cool to shake Tanzer’s hand. Besides, Curbside Splendor publishes amazing work.
11 am Bookfair: Mammoth Magic Future Genius table (Q24)
Writers doing brunch. I actually don’t know if I’ll get in to the actual brunch (this is just the staging area and space at the brunch location is severely limited), but I know a ton of amazing people who plan to be there, so I’ll at least be lurking in the vicinity of the Mammoth Magic Future Genius table to say hi to folks.
1 – 3 pm Bookfair: a whole mess of signings (these overlap, so I’ll be making the rounds; keep an eye out)
Michael Seidlinger will be at the Lazy Fascist Press / Eraserhead Press table (L16)
Gabriel Blackwell will be right next door, at the Civil Coping Mechanisms / Broken River Books table (L15)
Kevin Sampsell will be at the Tin House table (1704)
Chuck Palahniuk will be at the Norton table (1505)
3 – 4:15 pm Panel F259: When Genres Collide: Teaching Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction
A pet subject of mine, and a panel popular with my creative writing students
6 – 7:15 pm PanelF302: Art School Writing Faculty Caucus
I teach at an art college. Also, one of my colleges there, the author Monica Drake, is on this panel. Colleague support!
7 – 10 pm Reading: Hot Pillow (location is secret)
I’ll be reading fiction at this, but space will be tight at the location, so it’s strictly by word of mouth. Ask around and see if you can find us.
Saturday, March 1
9 – 10:15 am Panel S131: Never Grow Up: Building a Life in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
Assuming I can actually wake up in time to make it to this, I’m looking forward to it
12 – 1:15 pm Panel S168: Strange Families: Domestic Stories Illuminating Social Issues
This was a popular panel among my students, and it had already caught my eye, too
1:30 – 2 pm Bookfair: Civil Coping Mechanisms / Broken River Books table (L15)
Robert Vaughan is doing a booksigning
5 – 6:30 pm Seattle Six-Press Release Reading, Rendezvous/Jewelbox Theater
Six small presses — Sunnyoutside Press, Calamari, Hyacinth Girl Press, Magic Helicopter Press, Mammoth Editions, and Future Tense — are celebrating the release of their new books at AWP. The first press, Sunnyoutside, is the press that published my chapbook, and the first book on their list is Rusty Barnes’s Reckoning, which I’ve been looking forward for a long time.
10 pm – 1 am Sweet Fanny AWP, Georgetown Liquor Company
This reading is all Sunnyoutside Press, and I’m on the list. Come hear me read from Box Cutters and celebrate making it to the end of AWP!
Spring is just around the corner. The flowers are starting to push up and bloom, the sun is staying out longer, the weather will start to warm soon.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 