writing conferences

Nearly a week has slid by since I waved goodbye to Seattle in the drizzly rain, my drizzly cold wreaking its final revenge as I worked my way through as many in-flight movies as I could en route to London last Sunday night. To clear the decks for reports from the UK, here’s a short and inadequate summary of the end of my AWP.

The last day of the conference was a bit up and down. I had been taking things easy, perhaps too easy — so missed the first session entirely and arrived late to the second – which I left in any case as it was just not what I wanted to hear. And the presenters were following the maddening habit of refusing to stand at the podium, rendering them invisible to all but those in the front row. It’s always hard to pick panels that are what you expect, but this was the first I’d given up on.

However, the last session of the day was very much what I’d been looking for: Phillip Lopate again, and this time in good form on  “Lightening Up the Dark: The Role of Humor in Memoir”. He was entertaining and erudite, quoting from Max Beerbohm here and Charles Lamb there, and in good pedagogical form about the many types of humour (dictional, mock pedantry, self deprecation and more). He read a bit from his own writings before Joe Mackall took his place on the podium, quipping that following Lopate was like being Danny DeVito accompanying Brad Pitt to a singles bar: “they’re not there for you but there’s decent overflow.” Mimi Schwartz brought the house down with an account of her husband’s leavening wit when helping her look for her mislaid breast prosthesis by calling “here titty titty.” And Suzanne Greenberg gave wry insights into how she guides students into using humour to personalize their first person writing, and the power of the “laughter of the truth revealed.”

It was a pretty good panel, though one of the panelists should really have presented his piece instead at the session I’d attended earlier, “Telling it All: Boundaries in Creative Nonfiction” in which the panelists each read pieces they felt crossed a line of some kind, and then talked about what they would and would not say in a piece of writing. It really comes down to your willingness to define and defend what is your story, it seems. One of the panelists maintained that his story had to be told regardless of how the other characters might be revealed in it; others felt a measure of queasiness at shedding poor light on parents and friends, or unfolding uncomfortable details. Emily Fox Gordon observed she’s made a kind of fetish out of being self-savaging – perhaps to show others she’s as hard on herself as they may feel she is on the people she writes about. Ann McCutcheon insists the question “whose story is it” must be respected, but warns that readers may feel that the memoir is the whole and only truth of a story.

And that was about all I could manage to take in for that day.

The very promising evening reading by Sharon Olds and Jane Hirschfield was, by all reports, a stunningly moving event, but I was too tired and sniffly to make it. And I have heard both before so missing it was relatively less irksome. I may have used up the last of my resources in a belated final sweep of the book fair – a boggling affair featuring thousands of exhibitors, most packing up or gone by then. Ah well, I had determined not to weigh my bags down for the onward travels, so just as well. And after a delightful supper (water buffalo burger?!) with a gang of writers, opted to return to the flat and pack up ready for the morrow’s journey.

Entering day 3 of AWP 2014 – and the first overcast day we’ve had. Sun shone on the 12,000 writers toiling up and down the escalators of the Washington State Convention Centre, on their way to windowless rooms and intellectual overload. I’ve been concentrating on panel discussions to do with the less lofty aspects of a writer’s life: preparing book proposals, building audience, marketing strategies, grappling with the onslaught of social and other media that are required tools of the trade nowadays. I’ve been to sessions on creative nonfiction – head’s a whirl with present tense, past tense, first and third person points of view.

So far have barely managed a peek at the book fair – a couple of thousand booths I think – featuring Canada’s own Brick Books, with Kitty Lewis presiding. And made it to only one reading, last night’s, when I had a tough choice to make: Robert Hass, Eva Saulitis, and Gary Snyder or Gretel Ehrlich with Barry Lopez, and opted for the latter as I hadn’t had a chance to hear Lopez before, a good champion of environmental thinking.

Lopez was not the only creative nonfiction superstar here. It was standing room only for Thursday’s The I or the Eye: The Narrator’s Role in Nonfiction, which featured Phillip Lopate, Robert Root, Lia Purpura and Michael Steinberg (Elyssa East had been unable to make it, though the panelists seemed united in their admiration for her book Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town). I was fading at that point – a poorly-timed cold – but Lia’s poet’s sensitivities spoke well to me (be more alert to qualities and increments of thought than focus on which voice is best for telling the story, she advised). The general gist, I suspect, was that the narrative voice depends on the story being told. But it’s always good to have erudite spins on that thought.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time at panels about a writer’s use of new media. The one on Twitter was, ironically, booked into a room with no Wifi access, which hampered the reportage from the resident tweeter. In fact chairs have been set aside in every session for registered Twitter users: check #AWP14 for full coverage. People at the conference have the luxury of a tweet wall which should be flowing with the continuous fullsomeness of what’s been said here, but it was stationary the couple of times I’d passed it. Time enough for all that later. On with the final day’s sessions.