News and Events
AWP: Where Writers Meet
By J. L. L. Yates '11
An early morning bleakly greeted the seven of us from Chestertown preparing to travel inward on the continent. We were heading west, towards the largest gathering of writers in the nation. Cold and excited, we departed from our own Literary House to go and share our community with the larger one of writing as a whole.
What a drop in the bucket we were among thousands of people there to man booths and sell their own materials and market their own literary communities, among the uncounted and many hundreds of panelists, students, visitors, poets and authors not directly connected to anything here but floating about—blood vessels in the heart of America's literary community.
From Oxford American to hand-bound chapbooks, a great many modes and forms of writing itself were present, as well as a number of interesting individuals, too. One man at the conference, Goodloe Byron, wrote a book with no direct dialogue, about a strange character in a strange land. But much more interesting is that after he had it published, he purchased 20,000 copies himself, and then wandered the country, giving out copies of his book for free at cafés, bookstores, bars, and indeed, AWP. We all got copies. AWP, at the center of this maelstrom of travelogue exposition, is nominally the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. You'll probably ask yourself, shouldn't the acronym have two W's? Well no, because it's a conference for writers and they don't think it sounds quite right.
But there at AWP were panels covering the interests of both the few and the many: Poets as Oracle, where digital media can take books, radio plays, poetry about superheroes, poetry by gay inhabitants of the Appalachians, how to get published, how to get literary grants, and just a lot of talk by many people who know that writing is what they like, and is how they would like to benefit the world.
There was a keynote speech given by Art Spiegelman, a guy who wrote a biography of his father using comics. Not only that, but it largely deals with his father's time in Nazi Germany and, indeed, in Auschwitz. The Jews were represented by mice to allow for separation from the intensity of the story. And such an intense story, but I digress. His keynote concerned the history of comics as he saw it, a winding up and down compendium, from sheer convenience, to pulp, to existential, or literary. It's been a long journey, but certainly his presence at the conference spoke as loudly to the maturation of comics as any Mad Magazine image he put in his PowerPoint.
The environment of the conference was sprawling and extremely busy, all packed in the warehouse structure beneath the Chicago Hilton and meandering upward through ballrooms, dining halls, conference areas and whatever else could hold both an audience and a speaker with a microphone. Even with this massive concentration of people, hundreds stopped by Rose O'Neill Literary House's booth, many printed their own bookmarks on the tabletop printing press we had brought, many asked who we were, and generally were impressed at the tenacity towards writing possessed by a handful of undergrads.
Very nearly overwhelming, almost certainly over-stimulating, and more things to do in the course of three days than I think any of us had hitherto witnessed, all towards the pursuit of helping craft a better writing community and from that better writers.
J. L. L. Yates '11 and fellow student writers attended the AWP Conference in Chicago with a grant from the Maureen Jacoby Endowment for Editing and Publishing.