A Little Good News for Amanda, A Newspaper Mention, and How to Bring the Fun at AWP

Amanda Auchter’s The Wishing Tomb, which I reviewed back a few weeks ago here, has won the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. Go tell her congrats!

There was a nice article in my local paper, The Redmond Reporter, about my small contribution to the wonderful anthology I mentioned in my last post, the Like One anthology. http://www.redmond-reporter.com/news/217822101.html

I woke up yesterday with massive stomach flu, which was inconvenient because 1. the in-laws arrived yesterday from Cincinnati, and 2. I was supposed to get a very long and involved hospital test today, which I had to reschedule. I guess there’s a little irony in rescheduling a medical test because you’re too sick to make it. The downside is, I’ll have weird anxiety dreams for another couple of weeks. (My latest one had me standing on top of skyscrapers in New York City talking to my little brother while the buildings crumbled to black dust beneath our feet, with me saying, “I guess all our financial plans will come to nothing.” Yup, that’s my kind of stress dream…) The upside, I lost five pounds and got caught up in my “lying around like a zombie watching Zombieland for the nth” time.

Today the AWP panels were posted. I was really sad that our geek-friendly town’s AWP had hardly any panels for on subjects like speculative writing, geek poetry (and the accompanying fairy tale/comic book-related writing,) etc. I think they had two faintly geeky panels, and they were both all male. Boo hiss. My hometown AWP had let me down! I had a ton of friends on good panels, but still, I felt jilted by Seattle AWP’s lack of interest in the speculative/pop-culture side of writing.  So, what I usually tell people who want the “folks in charge” to do something different is, go out and make your own thing! I don’t know if I have the energy to run my own writer’s conference, but maybe I can do an offsite “party/reading/something awesome. Any of you want to get together and plan something?

And this gets into a larger question – how do you actually have fun at AWP, without stressing out? I find large crowds intimidating and brain-dizzying, although I consider myself kind of an extrovert, AWP is usually exhausting (and really taxes my ability to match names and faces – something I’ve never been great at in the first place and it only gets worse as I get older and know more people) and the “fun” can be sucked out by awkward or rude encounters (because, let’s face it, a lot of writers are not great at socializing gracefully) or just worrying or trying to “network” but let’s face it – why go to these things if not, I don’t know, to celebrate the good parts of being a writer with other writers? How to hold on to that idea at what can sometimes be a sometimes-sordid, booze-filled schmooze-fest? Seattle is a great town for writers and readers, full of coffee shops with smart people inside and good bookstores (Open Books is a must-visit for poets, it will not disappoint) and filled with a kind of a spiky, rainy cool, alternative art and comic shops and robots. How to take advantage of that and really enjoy the city? I recommend, at any AWP, sneaking out to visit the city’s art museum, or zoo, or weird shops or unique dive-y restaurants, because that will be what you remember when you get home, with your stack of lit mags and friends’ and strangers’ books. Please comment and leave your advice about “fun at AWP.”