Last Thursday morning my commuter train arrived in Chicago’s Ogilvie Station, and within a half an hour I was part of a second depot-like configuration—another set of serpentine lines converging into long, orderly rows. But these were not rails but human lines, and they were alphabetized. I was in line to register for the AWP Conference and Bookfair, this year’s meeting of the exponentially growing national creative-writing gathering run by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. (One of my colleagues, upon hearing of my plans earlier in the week, said that “AWP” sounded like a “large multinational corporation that is dumping chemicals in rivers,” but what does he know?) Jeffrey Levine, author and founder of Tupelo Press, described the event in a pre-conference blog as a “simultaneous tragedy of the spirit and comedy of the flesh in the way Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’ was both.”
More precisely, I was picking up materials after registering several months ago, and a good thing, too: I imagine many area writing students, who were counting on rolling in on this first day and registering on site, were disappointed a few weeks ago when AWP abruptly shut down pre-registration. The reason? The conference already had received roughly ten thousand sign-ups, and was close to the Hilton Chicago’s event-hosting capacity. When AWP was in Chicago eight years ago, the attendance of 4,100 was less than half of this year’s. I had also reserved a hotel room several months ago, but, with these crowds, it almost didn’t matter: being told that the hotel was “overbooked” since it had not received the usual number of cancellations that was expected, I was dismayed to learn that I might need to be relocated a few miles away. Apparently those early registrants had experienced no later change of mind, but at least one person decided not to attend, since eventually a room became available. It surprised me that my reservation hadn’t in fact reserved anything, but the hotel’s predicament didn’t surprise me: many writers, young and old, unknown and established, poets and prose writers alike, look ahead all year to these dizzying, crowded, festive, opportunistic three days. Donning my badge, it was time to see what I could see.
At AWP you’re likely to see and hear many a curious thing. Really, it is any anthropologist’s dream. Waiting in the registration line, I noticed a group of MFA students across from me, and each one seemed edgy—excited to be there, but also made nervous by the scene. “If you make eye contact, you’re screwed,” one young woman declared. Her friend: “Yes, I should’ve worn sunglasses!” You’ll encounter, walking from the registration area, people come to a dead stop trying to orient themselves, or cheerier folks walking briskly with a cup of coffee in each hand, running an errand for classmates still waiting in line. On the first floor, a group of young men were engaged in an intense conversation: “I swear I think he thinks I’m gay,” said one. “Well …” Amid this sea of people, I noticed on a couple of different occasions a platinum-haired older woman. She seemed to float through the crowded corridors with a mix of confidence and serenity. Each day, she wore a lavender headband, pure cotton and elaborately braided, like something out of Xanadu. Ah, she made me think, writers are so fun, so funny. Always part shaken, part shazam. She was mainly shazam, in my humble, admiring opinion.
A quick count of the conference sessions yielded a grand if approximate total of four hundred over the three days. This amounted to sixteen or so concurrent panels at the main hotel every two hours or so, with another half-dozen occurring at The Palmer House Hilton, the overflow site nearby. Each night boasted a dozen or so events, too, from receptions sponsored by writing programs to book launches and literary journals’ publication parties, usually including readings by contributors. Margaret Atwood gave Friday night’s keynote address at Roosevelt University’s Auditorium Theatre, and on Saturday night the United States and United Kingdom poets laureate, Philip Levine and Carol Ann Duffy respectively, gave a joint reading. A dance party was held each night, as were collegiate poetry slams and open-mic gatherings. Upon hearing about the dances, my spouse said, “Who? Writers are having a dance party? That’s something I actually would want to see.”
Additionally, AWP host cities for the past five years have seen an increasingly active literary nightlife during the entire week of the conference, as journals and other organizations team up with bars or local theaters to host parties and readings. These offsite events were legion, and took place in diverse Chicago neighborhoods. On the first night of the conference, I attended a reading on Belmont Avenue featuring poets published in the journals Seven Corners and Spoon River Poetry Review, and by Penguin Books. Especially memorable was Jamaal May, a student in Warren Wilson’s MFA program and a Cave Canem Fellow. He recited, or rather performed, a sestina that made the intricate form of repeating end words less predictable than it often sounds when read aloud. Another reading elsewhere, touting “cacophony,” featured multiple authors reading simultaneously. Special events of this sort included a Literary Death Match, featuring writers such as Jane Smiley and Mark Doty and held one block from the hotel at Buddy Guy’s Legends, and a screening of the new film Being Flynn, directed by Paul Weitz and starring Robert DeNiro and Paul Dano. The film is based on Nick Flynn’s intense memoir of fathers and sons and addictions, which was on sale at the book fair, rebranded with the film’s title.
The various sessions at AWP represent quite a mix of approaches and styles. In a similarly massive but more strictly academic conference, such as MLA let’s say, the format is pretty predictable—three twenty-minute papers almost always read from a printed copy, perhaps followed by a respondent’s comments or Q&A open to the audience. At AWP, these panels are more diversified and sometimes more haphazard. (Though, for the record, MLA sessions invite plenty of hazards, too.) At one point I saw a friend who reported that an old classmate of hers was attending her first AWP conference. “How is she doing?” may not be the most natural question to enter your head, but you catch yourself asking it with surprising quickness, as if instinct is the first thing that acknowledges the overwhelming scale of this event. AWP tends to offer writers both positive and negative experiences. This newcomer decided she would attend only sessions that featured authors reading from their work, and my friend and I decided that sounded good: the best part of AWP is to hear good writing in the air.
Categories for these different sessions soon come into focus: pedagogy, professional advancement (on networking, marketability, writing outside of the academy), personal interests or identities (mothers who write, and the group Pen Parentis; literary treatments of adoption; first-book authors over forty), literary organizations and communities, or anniversaries for these organizations or for journals or writing programs, host-city sessions (several this year on Chicago, the Midwest, the Heartland), matters of craft (rhyming, for example, or how point of view can shifts in stories), new genres (graphic narrative, lyric essay), new books (Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability), new technological opportunities (“Phoning It In,” a session on promoting one’s work in the age of the iPhone), and so on. The most creatively titled sessions involved the teaching of writing in prison settings—”Writing form the Inside,” “Prose & Cons.” Finally, many sessions each year are dedicated to a new book by or generally celebrate the work of established authors, some of whom will be present and some not, including (this time around) Alice Munro, Nikki Giovanni, Pat Mora, David Young, Alice Notley, C. K. Williams, Rebecca Skloot, W. S. Merwin, and Carolyn Kizer.
I attended a pair of teaching-related sessions on the first day. “Beyond the Workshop” featured four panelists presenting different ways to approach a writing workshop, a common mode to generate and direct feedback for student authors. The medium-sized conference room was packed, with roughly 125 people seated and another group standing and bunched up at the door at the back of the room. Organizers don’t seem very knowledgeable at predicting which sessions will be heavily attended, and so you’ll find packed rooms such as this one, and then attend a session where twenty or thirty people are dwarfed by the huge ballroom in which they are meeting. Topics included how to make a writing class a community of practice where the instructor resists wielding final authority, and the use of the longstanding emphases of the discipline of rhetoric to teach poetry. One presenter, from a UK program that enrolls many non-traditional students, such as sailors and airmen, offered possibly the best defense of the powerful experiences that workshops can sometimes become: they are places to share writing, yes, but also where “diverse people are being humans together.” Between talks, I glanced at all of the humans in the room. Bald heads, dreadlocks, one young man wearing a hipster’s knit skullcap like the one the guy in Coldplay wears. Another with a grey-haired ponytail, an old teacher who has seen a profession grow up and transform itself.
The second session was “Faith and the Creative Writing Class,” and it represented a welcomed occasion for both presenters and audience members to consider together what it means to encounter and honor students’ spiritual lives in the classroom, whether in religious colleges or public universities. Speakers included Jeff Gundy and Julia Spicher Kasdorf, who cited a 2005 U.S. News & World Report study identifying one-third of Americans as evangelical. There is “no such thing as a secular school,” she said, pushing back against a perceived habit in the broader creative-writing world to keep expressions of faith out of classes, whether because of awkwardness or annoyance. That said, one of her more memorable stories involved her first writing class at the Christian college where she was then teaching, fresh out of graduate school, and the brouhaha that erupted when one student shared with the class a poem that was explicit and even blasphemous. Someone supervising her, her dean or chairperson, advising her that she was no longer in a writing class at NYU. I know, she replied, because NYU students would never write a poem like that. The exchange earned a laugh from the audience, but it made an instructive—because counterintuitive—point about our ongoing preoccupations within religious institutions in higher education.
By the second afternoon I needed of a shift of attention, and so I took advantage of a well-timed offsite alternative. As it happened, the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library was sponsoring a lecture by Zygmunt Baranski, a prominent Dante scholar at Notre Dame. The setting was very different from the bustling, writer-saturated hotel. The Newberry is, after all, a research library, with spare corridors, high ceilings, and quiet spaces. The lecture was a thrilling treatment of Dante’s Vita nuova, an early work (as in his career, but also generally, written likely in 1292-94) of lyric poems connected by a loose, often enigmatic prose narrative. Baranski discussed how this was a highly experimental work in Western literature. Nothing quite like it existed previously, although he argued that scholars today who typically secularize Dante miss obvious biblical sources in the Song of Songs (that “freaky” book, he said!) and Lamentations. Before Dante’s little innovative masterpiece, the Bible was the great prosio-metrical work of the Middle Ages. Early in the Vita nuova, Dante displays himself as four kinds of medieval writer—copyist, compiler, commentator, and author. The poet had discovered a new literary space and was seizing it: “In the 1290s, Dante is already thinking of literature as a system that is not divided up into separate traditions, genres, styles, but as one overall project for varying ways of writing.” From there, Dante was looking ahead to the Commedia, and as for me, I was looking forward to returning to the conference site and meeting up with some friends. I couldn’t wait to tell them about this talk.
Theoretically, Baranski’s focus on innovations in writing, and the origins and influence of a great lyrical work such as Dante’s, should fit in perfectly well at AWP, but in truth there remains a noticeable dearth of interest in these earlier eras. I hasten to add that this does not reflect the coverage and curricular requirements of most MFA programs, where graduate-level study of various literary eras is de rigueur. The interest at AWP, though, is narrower. This year saw a few sessions devoted to 19th-century American authors Thoreau and Dickinson, but little prior to them, and of course the overwhelming focus lies steadily on the contemporary—those established and emerging poets, novelists, and essayists writing today. Speaking of contemporaries and emerging contemporaries, that night I missed out on Margaret Atwood’s keynote talk, but I did enjoy myself at a reception sponsored by the journals Ruminate and Rock & Sling and WordFarm Press. Bryan D. Dietrich read from his latest collection, The Assumption, full of rhyme-rich poems involving science fiction, mythology, and theology. Amy McCann’s poems also demanded notice; they were punningly mischievous one minute, lyrically forceful the next.
I did make it to the paired reading by UK and U.S. poets laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine. This event was held in adjacent International Ballrooms at the Hilton, and the conference masses turned out for it. The space approximated a football field plus half again, with the requisite mirrors, chandeliers, and decorous Roman arches. Duffy, introduced as Britain’s first female and Scottish laureate, to which she added the post’s first gay poet, read a few poems at the end of her time from her latest collection, The Bees, recent winner of the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Award. More reading-friendly, however, were her opening dramatic monologues from The World’s Wife, full of “hidden female voices” such as Mrs. Midas, Mrs. Tiresias, and Mrs. Faustus. Tiresias’ mythic “punishment” (as Duffy wryly said) was to become a woman for seven years, and jokes about the male prophet’s enduring, barely, menstruation would fit well in a new Jennifer Aniston/Paul Rudd magico-romantic comedy. Like many of us, Duffy first learned of Tiresias from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but having Scottish and Irish parents, she said she thought the well-known line about his female “dugs” was somehow talking about how he had dogs.
Philip Levine read next, and was his expected feisty, likeable self. (See Aaron Belz’s piece on Levine in Books & Culture.) He regularly sounded a self-deprecating note, saying he hadn’t brought old poems to read because “they’re so much better than my newer poems,” and describing the historic event of his and Duffy reading together, two laureate poets “side by side in a room, putting lovely young people to sleep.” He described the Packard “we once made,” and then laughed at his use of the “we” that reflected his Detroit background, although these days he splits his time between Fresno and Brooklyn. His poetry remains powerful, as fans of his latest collection well know, and speak to the recessional times. In one poem, dark approaches “filled with the perfume of automobile exhaust and wisteria,” and Levine describes a punch-press operator thus: “grease ate so deeply into her skin, it had become a part of her. The deep lines that work had caused.”
Levine was also charming in a Q&A session that followed. Asked what he does as the 18th poet laureate, he replied, “As little as possible.” Both laureates were asked about their favorite poets, and their answers provide further support for seeing more chronologically broad session topics. Duffy said Shakespeare, and Levine said Chaucer. His answer was met with mild sounds of surprise from the audience, but he reasserted his answer. He and Chaucer, he said, were both narrative poets interested in a wide range of people. Levine, without really trying it seemed, was also responsible for some of the comments that struck me as most useful for a sea of young writers to hear. He was asked about his development: “I wrote a lot of terrible poems,” he said. “I waited a long time.” And he said this when asked about the best part of his career in writing: “Mostly the pleasure is in doing it. I’m very glad I did what I did.” These remarks about a young writer’s patience and a simpler scale for satisfaction are nicely tuned to the uphill environment in the creative-writing world, where it takes great effort to get a first book published, and academic posts are scarce and highly coveted.
On Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of taking part in a group reading of Northwestern University Press authors, an event held in the spectacular reading space of the new Poetry Foundation building, at the corner of Superior and Dearborn. Reading there was a thrill, and hearing others’ poems was wonderful, too. A poet and fellow reader (he’s a great reader) whom I was pleased to meet at this conference was Greg Brownderville, author of the new collection Gust, which chronicles inventively and with verbal exuberance the Pentecostal world he hails from, around Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas, roughly between Little Rock and Memphis. Here is a selection from the eighth section of his poem, “Lord, Make Me a Sheep.” (It’s available in its entirety on the Prairie Schooner website.)
Make me a shoulder-pad popping out of a football player’s jersey,
flapping like a wounded wing when he’s hit.
Make me the sound of Mama Windexing the tabletop—like a dog whimpering.
Make me a team of sundogs
and a mojo in Crawdead’s pocket.
Lord, I want to play Papa Legba opening the gates.
I want to see what it’s like
to be a pouch of possums, dear Lord, Lion of the Tribe of Judah.
Make me a swallow of Dr. Pepper in a sexy woman’s mouth.
Lord, I beg of you, make me a cell phone tower a little girl dreams the Eiffel.
I want to be a wolf, Lord, or a sentence
uttered by a beautiful exchange student from the Czech Republic:
Greg, you never seen girl more messy like me.
Make me a swirl of actual Chinese chewing gum
hard on a pew’s underside in a church meeting illegally.
There are few things at a big writing conference more exciting than discovering new voices, or bringing home new books. The night before it was Amy McCann. Today it was Gust. For all of the ambiguities and confusions and burdens associated with AWP, and these are associations made by the very constituency that supports it and attends its conferences, the bottom line may be that it is a space and occasion where ample voices and books are there for the discovering, and that is no little thing. No small thing indeed.
As for the massive book-fair exhibition hall, comprising four rooms, two of them justly described as vast, where to begin? Nearly six hundred publishers, magazines, writing programs, and literary organizations were present in these spaces. First, in the broader world of publishing, the prospect of booth displays at AWP, where editors and booksellers for three full days meet face to face with many readers, has become an occasion for the announcing of new deals and developments. For example, the fairly new but highly regarded literary journal A Public Space recently announced a partnership with Graywolf, publisher of noted literary titles, and a message sent to subscribers both touted this new arrangement and invited them to stop by their space in the book fair. Displays celebrate various anniveraries, too. Five years for the Ashland University creative-nonfiction MFA, ten years for New England College’s program. Anniversaries of 15, 25, and 35 years for Cortland Review, The Comstock Review and BOA Editions, respectively. Fifty years for the Hollins writing program, which was giving out cool T-shirts the color of pencil lead. Such durability, when you stop and think about it, begins to look sweetly like a little miracle. The celebrations are merited.
So AWP is a key place for journals, presses, and programs to make their announcements, and it is also a place where authors can make their appeals and inquiries. At one point I was visiting with a director at Poets & Writers, comprising an active foundation and a popular writing magazine. He caught my interest when told me he had been involved with the organization since the 1970s. Well, I said, you have certainly seen this thing grow and develop crazily, right? Sure, he said, but he also said certain crucial things have remained ever constant. A lot of writers, he said, just want to find ways to get their work out there. A few days later, in Sunday’s newspaper, I would read about the Internet Archive and its quickly growing collection of material books and runs of journals, too. Not everyone wishes to have her or his work preserved, such as the author who commented on the archive’s website and demanded that it not collect “any of my work in any form whatsoever.” This rather reticent writer would be a lone anti-type among the creative networkers and hustlers at AWP.
I have also read a post-conference blog post or two where attendees lament that so much book-pitching and wheeling-dealing and shop-talking happens at AWP—but what would these bemoaning observers expect, exactly? Sure, too much of this thing can feel a bit dispiriting. I’m reminded of a cartoon in a recent New Yorker where a man in suit and tie sits beside a side-glancing, skeptical-looking Bozo the clown at a dinner party: “I know you probably hear this all the time, but I’ve got a great idea for a balloon animal.” Still, is it really a severe breach of decorum, when ten thousand writers and editors assemble, to take part in conversations about upcoming special topics for journals, submissions desired, book ideas, etc.? It seems to me that this is what writers of all stripes do, and having taken the trouble to reach and attend AWP, most would leave the happier for having had a few such conversations. And for those who do find such talk distasteful, there is plenty of “purer,” casual, and friendly literary community on display during these three days.
Inevitably the book-fair exhibitioners become, well, exhibitionists. One encounters all types of merchandise for sale and diverse manifestations of swag, handed out as post-AWP promotional fare. Personally, it always takes me several days of recovery, if not longer, before I can sensibly go through and organize and cull the heaps of sample journals, submission guidelines, event fliers, free pens, free buttons, free notepads, free yo-yos, free thumb drives, free candy, etc. obtained after a few visits to the book fair. Therefore you tend to remember the odd offerings. One Canadian publisher, running with the convention of the tableside candy bowl, distributed maple-syrup hard candies. (Strange at first, but thumbs up!) One local friend, making her first visit to AWP, described the strangely obsession-inducing qualities of the goodies. “It’s like Halloween candy,” she said. She didn’t realize what a stash she was accumulating as she passed from table to table. As the days pass by, the products and eye-catchers become stranger: a demonstration of stamp art leads to a grown man dressed as a magician, the AWP Swami. (Was he telling aspiring writers where to send their work?)
There was a decidedly bohemian atmosphere in one side of one of the larger rooms, with the booths densely packed and brightly decorated. Here one found letter-press broadsides, zine-makers hawking their photocopied wares, video-literature collaborations, and many varieties of literary movements or communities seeking fellow supporters. Small-press books were on display, including titles such as Barf Manifesto and Forklift, Oreo. I visited this area late in the conference, and was probably prone to misreading—as it turned out, the second title was Forklift, Ohio, which is only slightly less odd, and I still quite like my misread title.
Overall, an air of enthusiasm and festivity spreads across the exhibition halls, and even the crowded aisles during the peak times of day diminished only slightly this vibe of good will. I visited a few times with Greg Wolfe, the author and editor of IMAGE journal, and soon we were joking about the book fair as place to “mainline the love.” Having a bunch of book and literature lovers in one cavernous space is mainly a good thing, even more so when appreciative readers appear before an editor in person. Greg described how one reader recently arrived to thank him and his staff in person, because she had been in a difficult environment abroad, and the journal had helped her get through that season. Lately I had been reading about Dwight MacDonald, whose journal Politics had had a powerful impact throughout Europe in the 1940s, as Czeslaw Milosz later informed him. For any editor, these kinds of revelations must make for a good day.
The last session I attended, in the conference-closing slot on late Saturday afternoon, was sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and featured readings by poets Greg Delanty, David Ferry, and critics Clare Cavanagh and Christopher Ricks. At one point Ricks quoted a sonnet by Norman Mailer (that’s right, a sonnet) that spoke of a “happy delirium,” and at this point in the conference, that phrase could stand as an epitaph for a good many participants, or at least those who hadn’t already departed. Enjoyable to the end, it was time to wrap up and go home. I passed through the largest exhibition space one last time; already many of the booths were abandoned, some holding left-behind fliers for writing contests or sample issues of journals. On the far end, a crew of hotel workers were already stripping and tearing down the first row of booths. The pleated blue decorative draping was unhooked, the white table cloths folded up, and already the bare plywood of several tables was visible. This hall party of print and writing was officially over.
When I later saw my spouse and asked her, after her brief visit onsite, what she had thought of the conference experience, she had one main impression: “I have never seen so many writer-types all assembled in one place like that,” she remarked. “It was quirky. Funny. Academic. Quirky.”
At the end of the three days, tiredly but happily I returned to the commuter station and took my westward, Elburn-bound train home. Mine was a crowded, Saturday night train car, its spike in usual energy level in opposition to my post-event, post-visit fatigue now fully settling within me. Nevertheless, what should have been irritating struck me as improbably uplifting, as if my three days among the literary masses had sharpened a resolve for openness (to experience, to community) and for something resembling good will. I won’t kid with you and, for the sake of a tidy ending here, tell you it was easy.
One very loud and clearly drunken young brunette woman was talking loudly about the painter Frank Stella, whom she thought overrated. “It’s all about the form, yayaya,” she said mockingly, her hard features pulsing. She recalled how she and her art teacher used to have full-blown shouting matches about Stella’s worth. From what little I had heard, I could easily believe her. Her blonde friend beside her nodded at regular intervals, playing a sort of Sancho Panza role. She was drinking a Miller Lite from a can, and the louder one held a larger glass bottle, whose name was obscured by her hand, except for the word “Hops” in large, cartoonish letters.
“Your body’s a temple, and nothing should control your temple,” the brunette said in an almost parental tone, “… unless you allow it.” She next explained how she used to tell her students she was “high on ‘shrooms,” and, according to her, they considered her their favorite teacher, for being so honest.
Across the aisle, two young men, both bearded, were talking with two women, turned to face them, in the seat ahead. The fellow in the corner had a midwestern paunchiness to his face, but his brown fair was combed over to the right with surprising delicacy, and looked baby-soft. I’m not sure why this was so noticeable, but notice it I did. One of the girls, in the corner seat just in front of him, had chestnut hair and pixie features. She had a silver loop in her ear, and a stud higher up at the ear’s tip. They were having a spirited argument about taste. “Don’t dis Christie!” he said to her, in a friendly way but with conviction. “I mean, check out Murder on the Orient Express and tell me she’s not great.” Or, he added, suggesting an easier alternative, watch the BBC version. “You sci-fi/fantasy girls miss out on so much,” he said dramatically. They all laughed.
Soon the two groups were speaking to each other from their opposite seats. David Cronenberg’s films were one topic of conversation, with opinions and confirming or countering opinions flying about which were best, which crap, and so on. The example of Naked Lunch led back to the world of the literary, and to an assessment of William Burroughs. “That film’s great,” said the baby-fine-haired guy, “but as a writer? He’s pathetic.”
“What do you mean??” exclaimed the loud woman across from him. “His writing is glorious,” she said defiantly. She went on to explain how she once told her therapist that she had been reading Naked Lunch and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which understandably caused some concern in the counselor. But those books helped her.
“I think you’re pathetic for saying that,” the loud one’s quieter friend said to the young man across the aisle, playfully but still very much critically. I imagined that it had taken a lot for her to work up this comment, to tell him that, and that it was a grand show of literary camaraderie, a sign of commitment to her loud friend.
And as we left the city behind, passing Oak Park, Maywood, Bellwood, Elmhurst, I thought freshly about what a beautiful city Chicago is, and how literature, and all of the other various arts besides, how they were beautiful, too.
Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. The Garbage Eater, his first collection of poems, was published last year by Northwestern University Press. A new collection, Fall Run Road, recently won Finishing Line Press’s chapbook competition, and is forthcoming.
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