AWP 2015 is so red

"no ideas but in things" at this annual conference for writers/publishers

My biggest revelation courtesy of AWP 2015: the underworld croak of Ben Percy’s voice. He was among on the panelists on “I Can Change, I Can Change: Transformation on the Page” and whatever the voice said – the content of which was very often awesome – that voice was riveting.

Maybe everyone else knows about Ben Percy’s voice; I got the sense as soon as landing, late, in the airport and herding onto the light rail where already writer folks started magnetizing into clusters, that all 14,000 of them here were pretty keyed into everything in this industry, if one can call it that, noted Dani Shapiro on her apt take on things in the New Yorker. Who’s hot, who’s legend, who’s on what panel when and the whereabouts of the parties afterhours, to all hours, and those marathon readings (I’m sorry, but 12 readers in a standing-room-only apartment is about 9 too many!), book signings, author sightings, is that the Tin House editor guy again, oh my.

I arrived by way of a somewhat lapsed reading/writing life (motherhood, job, etc. had gotten the better of me) and a loving push/free hotel room from my long-standing MFA buddy Sara Lippmann. I happily basked in her lit glow and let her lead me around by the tote bag in the rare seconds when I wasn’t insanely transcribing every golden sentence from every seminar panelist directly into my notebook.

The notebook is dense enough now to keep me going for years. I have enough to read, write, think about until I’m an empty nester – imagine the possibilities then! I kept my tote bag available for snacks; I wasn’t ready for the book expo hall-o-rama because I was too busy in these seminars crafting my shopping list. Too bad, because I’m ready now (and will have to pay full price).

I gravitated to topics that tackled problems in my writing that need solving, like, oh my paralyzing plot-aversion.

Percy said: watch Ginger Snap, the teen werewolf movies, of course. He also said, “’feckless pondering’ is the cardinal sin of literary wankers.”

Samantha Dunn, by his side, said she used to be the girl writing the girl looking out the window longingly at the bakery across the street – “Go buy a damn loaf of bread already!”

Dunn said: the best thing that ever happened for her career was getting her leg nearly trampled off by her horse – and sitting there not reviewing her life but rather realizing, there’s so much blood and this blood is so red.

Edan Lepucki, other end of the long table, said, paraphrasing some other I-can’t-remember-his-name writer, that all writing is comprised of some ratio of Potato & Vodka. You’ve got the extremes – 100% potato (Carver), 100% vodka (Baldwin)  – but the rest of us really require potatoes in order to make vodka. Potatoes are the mass, the objects, the solidity, action; vodka is the exposition, the (feckless) thinking.

“No ideas but in things.” – William Carlos Williams, who was not there, but his quote was.

Percy also brought in the Buddhists, borrowing the Zen expression, “Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water.“

In other words, ideas in things. In other words, get to work.

My work – the work I am attracted to and imagine myself  writing more than I actually do – landed me in panels like “The Uncanny Reader” (Kelly Link! Karen Russell!), “The Broken Body” (old poets), “Extremophilia” (young poets).

The panelists have me looking up Freud’s definition of the uncanny, they have me picturing the short story as the mere tensile tension of one water drop about to fall from the faucet.

They have me thinking that it’s my duty to be brave and bold and brutally honest, even when it’s fiction, it’s fiction, but not a place to hide.

They quoted Wolff,
“Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.”

Russell, the lit-world version of a rock star, Keynote Speaker at the mere age of 33, alligator wrangling heroine under her belt, was in our hotel lobby. Look, there she is on the other side of the open hearth fire place. Ah well, she clearly didn’t see me pretending not to look at her, she couldn’t feel my yearning for some small fraction of that life, that I have that sort of story in me too.

On her panel, she talked about JCO, Joyce Carol Oates, of course, an uncanny woman herself, who honestly, I’ve only read once because I didn’t know how to begin to choose. But Russell talked about how we are all backstory. Our body is a haunted house.  

I do so love containers. The book, the body. That and the uncontainability of these things. The liminal, the betweens.

Magically timed, the Thresholds-themed issue of Sunday Salon NYC magazine came out with my story in it to welcome me back home. But wait, from this AWP brain, it doesn’t work anymore. Where’s the plot.

Oh feck.