To walk any part of the eight miles of skyway that connect much of downtown Minneapolis this past weekend was to hear snatches of dialogue endemic to writers. The forty-ninth annual Associated Writing Programs Conference—the largest gathering of poets, writers, writing students, creative-writing-program faculty, literary-journal editors, arts organizations, small presses, and literary entrepreneurs in the country—was under way, and it was snowing. Outside the glass walls of the cavernous Minneapolis Convention Center, big, fluffy, wet flakes were floating down.
But the fourteen thousand literary folks in attendance weren’t paying much attention to the weather. As a whole, they did not seem to be outdoorsy people. They spend most of their days, after all, staring into the blue glow of their computer screens, or sitting around workshop tables beneath florescent lights, or poring over piles and piles of manuscripts in windowless rooms. Their work, whether writing or reading, necessitates solitude, and they had travelled from all over the country to participate, to network, to party. They were here to be with their people, weather be damned. In the weeks leading up to the four-day conference, the literary community on Twitter swelled with excitement, and #AWP15 began to trend. It did not trend in a Kanye and Kardashian kind of way, obviously. It trended the way literary writers and poets trend, which is to say not very much. (...)
If every industry has its trade show, and if writing can possibly be described as an industry, A.W.P. has become a thriving nexus of all things literary. Founded in 1967, its first conference was held in 1972, at the Library of Congress, with six events and sixteen presenters including George Garrett, Wallace Stegner, and Ralph Ellison. This year’s conference was host to five hundred and fifty events, two thousand presenters, and over seven hundred small presses, journals, and literary organizations. If Book Expo America, or B.E.A., which is held each spring, is the convention for book publishing, then A.W.P. is the convention for the bookish. (...)
In an age-old literary method for managing terror—though arguably one with diminishing returns—the parties around A.W.P. were booze-fests. (A Monday morning tweet: “Are you a writer? My truck driving husband/AWP escort: No, but I drink like one.”) On Friday afternoon, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, and the National Book Foundation hosted an invitation-only liquid lunch—one martini per guest. One Story magazine held a superhero-themed party, at the Walker Museum, where the editors wore colorful Lone Ranger-style masks emblazoned with lightning bolts and the wine flowed freely. At the Sarabande Books booth, every purchase was accompanied by a shot of Jim Beam. Each night during the conference, the bar at the Hilton was packed three-deep with poets, writers, and those who love them. At breakfast, these same writers wore sunglasses and croaked out orders for lattes and dry scrambled eggs before heading off to a morning panel on, say, “The Bump and Grind of Meaning: Intuition and Formal Play in Hybrid Nonfiction.”
But the fourteen thousand literary folks in attendance weren’t paying much attention to the weather. As a whole, they did not seem to be outdoorsy people. They spend most of their days, after all, staring into the blue glow of their computer screens, or sitting around workshop tables beneath florescent lights, or poring over piles and piles of manuscripts in windowless rooms. Their work, whether writing or reading, necessitates solitude, and they had travelled from all over the country to participate, to network, to party. They were here to be with their people, weather be damned. In the weeks leading up to the four-day conference, the literary community on Twitter swelled with excitement, and #AWP15 began to trend. It did not trend in a Kanye and Kardashian kind of way, obviously. It trended the way literary writers and poets trend, which is to say not very much. (...)If every industry has its trade show, and if writing can possibly be described as an industry, A.W.P. has become a thriving nexus of all things literary. Founded in 1967, its first conference was held in 1972, at the Library of Congress, with six events and sixteen presenters including George Garrett, Wallace Stegner, and Ralph Ellison. This year’s conference was host to five hundred and fifty events, two thousand presenters, and over seven hundred small presses, journals, and literary organizations. If Book Expo America, or B.E.A., which is held each spring, is the convention for book publishing, then A.W.P. is the convention for the bookish. (...)
In an age-old literary method for managing terror—though arguably one with diminishing returns—the parties around A.W.P. were booze-fests. (A Monday morning tweet: “Are you a writer? My truck driving husband/AWP escort: No, but I drink like one.”) On Friday afternoon, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, and the National Book Foundation hosted an invitation-only liquid lunch—one martini per guest. One Story magazine held a superhero-themed party, at the Walker Museum, where the editors wore colorful Lone Ranger-style masks emblazoned with lightning bolts and the wine flowed freely. At the Sarabande Books booth, every purchase was accompanied by a shot of Jim Beam. Each night during the conference, the bar at the Hilton was packed three-deep with poets, writers, and those who love them. At breakfast, these same writers wore sunglasses and croaked out orders for lattes and dry scrambled eggs before heading off to a morning panel on, say, “The Bump and Grind of Meaning: Intuition and Formal Play in Hybrid Nonfiction.”
by Dani Shapiro, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: HEEB/LAIF/REDUX
