How to Survive Not Going to AWP DC
How to Survive Not Going to AWP DC
So, for whatever reason, money, health, job, family, you find yourself not going to AWP this year. If you want to cheer yourself up, my advice is to try to simulate the experience as closely as possible. Please include your own suggestions in the comments!
–Throw some dirty snow on yourself. Maybe roll around in it. Stand outside in whatever inclement weather your neighborhood provides. Make sure you’re carrying something heavy, like a bag full of books.
–Make yourself an awesome name tag (you don’t have to use your real name) and try to sell books to passers-by on the street. They don’t even have to be your books!
–If you’re lucky enough to live in Seattle, Boulder, or Boston, go to your local poetry-only bookstore and complain about how you can’t afford to buy everything you want. Pick up several obscure literary magazines you’ve never heard of, just to mix things up. If you have no poetry-only bookstore, any independent bookstore will suffice. Flirt with the person behind the register.
–Pick a bar in your area crowded with weary conventioneers – it doesn’t matter what kind, software sales, concrete machinery, whatever – and try to start your own drunken poetry reading. Bonus points for getting others to join you!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
