MPW Goes to AWP Boston

Last week MPW trekked through snow and ice for 2013 AWP Boston in Back Bay. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference can be a daunting experience with hundreds of panels on every conceivable topic and with over 10,000 attendees from across the country. Fortunately, the MPW contingent braved these wee temperatures and massive hoards with wide-eyed grace and good humor.

For one, Dinah Lenney (right) led a passionate panel on “Why Genre Matters” with panelists Sven Birkerts, Judith Kitchen, David Biespiel, and Scott Nadelson. Do labels like nonfiction and fiction help or inhibit the writer? The arguments for genre’s persuasions were equally as brilliant as those for its perils. While some in the audience clearly had a horse in the race (at one point an “Amen” was uttered), everyone agreed that it was the vital and intelligent discussion about why genre matters that truly mattered.

We asked MPW students to describe their experience at AWP Boston. Here’s what they wrote:

Caron Tate

All I have to say about the AWP experience is: Everybody in the program you HAVE TO go. Find a way. Whatever you want to do with your writing, there are lectures,workshops, and presentations on it, and the discussions, hanging out, and crazy fun with your classmates is the best EVER!\

Trisha Chambers (right)

Had an amazing time with MPW classmates @ AWP! Here are my favorite quotes.
Richard Russo: “Writing is an exercise in empathy. To write is to become more generous.” Benjamin Percy on writing about werewolves and non-werewolves: “All my characters are hairy on the inside.” Cheryl Strayed: “Your book has a birthday. You just don’t know what it is yet.”

 Sharon Sim-Krause

I received a delightful snow confetti welcome the moment I strolled out of the Logan airport. I was transported from familiar LA to refreshing Boston, eagerly taking in jolts of inspiration from writers and muses, and basking in the soothing company of fellow MPWers.   My most memorable quote and reminder on why we write came from Richard Russo: “Writing is an exercise in empathy. To write is to become more generous. To be my best self is to write.” Thank you MPW and AWP for this invaluable opportunity!

Lauren Nelson

AWP is the most useful, enjoyable, and grounding experience I’ve had this year. My favorite panel was “How to get your first university teaching job,” and it was great hearing Don DeLillo speak.

Kelsey Nolan (center)

Knowing that there were over six hundred booths at the AWP book fair was, quite honestly intimidating. How could I ever know what to go see, or who to talk to? Walking in was, all at once, overwhelming and compelling. The buzz made me feel welcome–like I was supposed to be there. I wanted to meet everyone there, submit to every literary journal, and buy every book. I could have spent an entire day in there and still not exhausted it. The whole conference felt that way, really, it was incredible.

Susannah Luthi

Highlights were meeting one of the writers we published in SCR (Erika Wurth). She presented on a panel on Native American writing and came by our booth. Thrilled she sent us her work. Dinner with the MPW crew. Hearing about Connu (my start up) second hand. Figuring out the framing/ending of my novel thanks to Don DeLillo’s panel. Watching Matt in action 87 percent of the time. Connecting with the friends from Skidmore and seeing progress they’ve made–one lit journal, Unstuck, in its second year, a novel done, a few stories published, and a new women’s lit journal started. They are incredible. Ron Carlson’s flash lit panel. Seeing Anne Carson.

Matt Ackels

AWP provided all the twist and turns of a good novel. I met quite a few characters, some wacky, some endearing, and most memorable. I learned things about my life in the broader context of our world, about my place in the greater literary community. Through the countless panels, I gleaned insights into writing and the craft. Of course, there were moments of daunting plot twists (running out of journals too soon), intimidating landscape (the thousand member book fair), and unwitting heroism (free cupcakes from Howard). Ultimately, this experience sharpened me as a writer, thinker, and, most directly, as a citizen of the wider literary community.

And here are those cupcakes!

Where I’m Writing From:

...the view from the bed...

The bed. The California king. In the master bedroom (not grand, but cozy, in the far bottom corner of the house). There’s nothing unseemly about the location; it just happens to be where I work these days—having to do with various developments: like, last winter I slipped on the ice in Vermont and broke my coccyx; like, my desk chair, which I’ve replaced with one of those enormous exercise balls, was lousy to begin with: but who can actually sit on a ball for any length of time (without bouncing—and bouncing isn’t actually conducive to reading or writing or thinking, not for me anyway); like, my college graduate has come home to L.A., so I can’t hole up in her room anymore. Long and short: if I were to open a fortune cookie? If it were to read, “You will finish an essay tomorrow”? Without affect, all joking aside, I’d be able to add in bed. Moreover, it turns out, though my husband is skeptical, this is as fine a place as any to get the job done. (Why is he skeptical? He’s afraid the work will interfere with my sleep, infect my dreams—and if only that were true; that’d be as good a reason as any to work here, right?) On the bed, I can spread out my papers every which way; if my feet get cold, my sock drawer is closeby; it’s quiet down here, and not dark exactly—more like a tree-house than a cave, thanks to the Chinese Elm that grows just outside the sliding glass doors—and the atmosphere, remote and isolated, promotes writerly/readerly immersion. Plus my office—my actual office—is just on the other side of the wall, if I happen to need a file or a book or an extra pencil.

But does it matter where we work? I think it must. It matters to me anyway, especially (though you might suppose it’d be the other way around) once I’m in the throes of whatever it is. This is not to say that whole paragraphs haven’t rushed me in Trader Joe’s, in line at the ATM, even at stoplights (the car is very good place to work, just ask Susan Straight, who’s written nine beautiful books, parked and waiting to pick up her daughters from here and there); goes without saying, of course, we should always carry a notebook, or, if we’re as put together (as dapper!) as New Yorker reporter Gay Talese, we might consider cutting cardboard into pieces to fit the interior breast pockets of our blazers. See and this is the sort of inside information that delights and inspires, right? Why didn’t I think to ask Aimee Bender, who read and spoke about writing to MPW students in Doheny library last Monday night, where exactly she spends that allotted two hours a day: would she be able to write those perfect stories just anywhere, or does she—like Virginia Woolf and me—need a room of her own?

“Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish,” wrote Mark Helprin earlier this week in an essay in The New York Times, celebrating not just his own work space, but the value of serendipity in a writer’s life. And last August Dani Shapiro blogged about “creating a narrative out of puzzle pieces…I have a feeling,” she went on to say, “that those of us who spend our days alone in our rooms working out stories on the page and in our heads obsess about the question of pattern and randomness.” Perhaps it’s because our work is mysterious and confounding in that way, that so many of us need the illusion, at least, of a safe, familiar reality, however impermanent it might turn out to be. And we have to believe, don’t we, that if we show up there with some regularity, we’re more likely to benefit from some wonderful ‘accident.’ Gay Talese says his “bunker,” his “subterranean think tank,” is where he can work “without any distractions.” Give yourself a treat and let him take you on a tour. And for more on where writers live and work, visit A. N. Devers’ wonderful site: http://writershouses.com/.

Like, Like, Like…

The interesting thing: All this grumbling we of a certain generation are doing about social media—Facebook, for instance—so self-righteous are we, so sanctimonious: we can’t quite believe we’re asked, for instance, along with a thousand other people, to hear what you made for dinner last night, or that you stubbed your toe last Friday—and, with the next breath in the very same tone (as if we were, all one thousand of us, your intimates) that your boyfriend dumped you or that your mother is dead. Are we supposed to “like” that? “Unlike” it? Quickly scroll (scurry) away as if to protect your privacy? In the end, aren’t we vaguely embarrassed for each other, isn’t that what we are? And yet. From there it’s a hop and a skip to condemning a whole generation—that’s what we do—for its inability to relate to people in person, face to face; all this false intimacy, we insist, all this posting and texting and sharing in fonts and images, when you might be having a face-to-face, voice-to-voice conversation with somebody who actually cares about you. That’s what we say. As if it were the ‘kids’ fault. But is it? Do they use Facebook this way? Actually, they don’t.

When I was new to Facebook, a colleague and I had an argument about what it’s for. She advocated for the personal: Tell me, she said, about last night’s date and the new curtains in the guest room. Don’t tell me, she said, that you have a new book deal or by-line. When I objected—when I said I’m not about to ask my friends (all 600 of them, which apparently isn’t very many) to read about my dog (neurotic), or my herbs (gone to seed, except for the chives which are flourishing nicely), or my tattoos (don’t have any); but how else to alert my 600 friends to my essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books? -she just sniffed. If I catch you self-promoting online, I’ll unfriend you, she said. But six months later she had a new book to sell, and like that (snap your fingers), she changed her tune: acquired a thousand more friends and started posting reviews. I haven’t asked her how she feels about FB now, though neither of us are on very much except to play Scrabble. And if it’s true that I got on in the first place because I wanted to play the game with my daughter, who had gone away to college—because I wanted to keep tabs on her without keeping tabs (she moves a letter, I know she’s okay)—would you believe me? Well, it’s true, so there. However, Eliza has long since stopped playing with me: And I long ago started posting on FB like everybody else: About my by-line here and there; about my friends’ by-lines here and there; even, four years later, about Eliza’s graduation from college. I succumbed, yes, to celebrating the personal online, and I can’t tell you how gratifying it was. Because, come to find out, if ‘friends’ will dutifully ‘like’ a post about my piece in LARB or HuffPo (thank you, friends!), three times as many of them will let me know it was worth my while to show off my beautiful graduate. Does this mean anything? Is there a lesson here? Undoubtedly.

And also a conundrum: Because, yes, I admit I’ve surrendered, I’m as bad as the rest, I’ve addressed you all as if you were one and the same, approached you on Facebook, answered you on Facebook—as if you were interested, as if you were my ideal reader, which, I’ll insist (as did Kurt Vonnegut), is the way to the best writing; if, that is, one were actually crafting prose for public consumption (a story, an essay); which is, you might argue, exactly what we’re doing on Facebook! So why doesn’t it feel quite right? How is it that I want you, in your essays and stories and books, to fool me into feeling they were written just for me? Why am I certain that’s good for your sentences? Whereas when you’re not trying to fool me at all? When you write just for me (and everyone else) on Facebook? I feel a fool for reading and writing and answering in kind. And, blushing for us both, I want to ask: Isn’t anything sacred, off-limits, or simply too dull to post? Maybe not. Maybe so. Depends on the reader, depends on the writer; I don’t know the answer, I really don’t.

Here’s what I do know: For all our whining and preaching about real communication, it’s we who are abusing the venue, not our children. We of a certain age who would appear to need to over-share; we, wishing each other condolences and happy anniversary online—pretending, with equal emphasis, as if we want or mean to confide in hundreds of people, and care what they think to boot—who might be accused of behaviors that are false, coy, and cloying, and having to do with what? Extreme loneliness and alienation? A desperate effort to keep up? Fear of obsolescence? All of the above?

But why oh why, you might be wondering about now (if you’re still with me, that is) am I going on and on about Facebook?

Because every so often, to my mind anyway, somebody gets it absolutely right, as did author Nicholas Montemarano a week or so ago, when he wrote:

You don’t want to write, you don’t want to, you just don’t want to, no way, not today, not happening, you’re afraid that nothing will come or that nothing good will come, it’s Sunday, the day before a holiday, as good an excuse as any, why not spend the day reading, tomorrow you’ll write, or the day after that, but tomorrow or the day after you’ll still have the same fear of not writing or not writing well, so you make a deal, you’ll get into bed with paper and pencil beside you, and you’ll close your eyes, and whatever happens happens, no promises, and after a half hour of dozing and daydreaming you open your eyes and a sentence comes to you: “The year I was thirteen—unlucky thirteen.” And this sentence leads to another: “The year I let a boy get lucky with unlucky me.” And this sentence leads to more sentences: “Three years older than me, but still a boy. Absolutely a boy. Closer to being a man than any boy I knew, but not even close. My mother’s boyfriends were men.” And these sentences lead to more, and 15 minutes later the page is filled with sentences, and you read them aloud, you pick at them, you like the way they sound, you decide that they have a chance at making the cut when your novel is done, probably years from now, and you quit while you’re ahead, while you’re excited. Hours and hours of doubt and fear, 15 minutes of writing. A day’s work.

O but this was personal, and professional, and authentic, and generous, and inspiring, and comforting, too. What a gift. I liked it. I liked it so much. And I hope you do, too.