AWP IN MINNEAPOLIS 2015
If you haven’t been to an AWP Conference before,
you must prepare yourself
mentally. It’s like being in a giant Mall the last day
before Christmas. Too many
people,
too much to look at. Sensory
overload. There are more panels than you
could
attend in the length of an average MFA program.
There are more stalls
of
more presses than you ever imagined existed (some 2000 this year).
If
you have attended an AWP Conference before you probably noticed that the
crowds
this year did not seem as pressing, the panels repetitive and (sorry to say,
but)
dull.
Why do I go then? I get to see lost friends, check out the
magazines that have
rejected
my work, check out the magazines that have accepted my work and look for
new
places to send a manuscript to be accepted or rejected. Perhaps I can butter up
an
editor or insult one. It’s fun.
The
most exciting things are what the newbies are doing – Bat Cave handmaking all
their
publications (including my favorite – three buttons with a line of a haiku on
each
one (you have to wear them in sequence).
And many more.
I
took a test at Duotrope and found out the poet I’m most like is D.H. Lawrence
(go
figure). I had my picture taken -- my
head sticking through a cutout above a
bareassed
beauty. D.H. might have liked it.
I
collect pens and notebooks and especially buttons. I come home with a bag filled
with
flyers announcing special editions, contests, new magazines looking for
submissions.
I
faithfully go through the pile separating the wheat from the chaff – possibles,
maybes,
and
impossibles.
I
table sat for Mayapple Press which will publish my new book – The Kingdom Where
No
One
Keeps Time – this fall.
In a pouring
rain I attended a reading and panel discussion by
contributors
to The Widows’ Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival. Lucia
May,
Kristine Shorey, Judy Bebelaar and I read our works from the anthology and
selected
another’s poem to read. The cold and
rainy night matched the
discussions
of grief by those of us who were able to attend.
On
Saturday night Mayapple Press and One Wet Shoe sponsored a reading for poets
and
short
story writers published by their presses.
After a brief argument with the cabbie who
insisted
there was no café on this street we finally arrived at the Segue Café and
enjoyed
readings
by Saul Lemerond author of Kayfabe and OtherStories published by One Wet Shoe
Media;
Betsy Johnson-Miller, author of Fierce this Falling; Devon Moore, author of
Apology of a
Girl
Who Is Told She Is Going to Hell; Deborah Ann Percy, author of Invisible
Traffic; and moi
as
author of one of Mayapple’s first chapbooks, Glimmer Girls and more recently, editor
of
Written
on Water: Writings about the Allegheny River.
Good to see old friends, Francine
Sterle, whose new book What Thread? is just out from Red
Dragonfly Press, winner of the Meadowhawk
Prize; Dennis Maloney who is still publishing
after all these years at White Pine
Press; Jesse Lendine of Salmon Poetry who will be publishing
my manuscript, XX Chromosomes,
soon; Steve Corey and Doug Carlson both former
Cattaraugus County residents now
with Georgia Review; Nancy McCabe colleague from
the University of Pittsburgh at
Bradford. Taylor Mali who will be reading in Olean this week
ended up in the Bloody Hell booth next
to Mayapple's.
One panel which was quite
moving was a tribute to Robert Bly with
Marie Howe, Tony Hoagland among
those speaking and Blue Flower Arts’ Alison Granucci
holding the microphone for Bly who
started to read in a shaky voice but as he continued some
of that old Bly fire crept back
into his voice.
An adventure, a few days out the
usual, a few good meals, kind words with old friends, but
costly for a handful of pens and
buttons. Next year the conference will
be in L.A. Maybe I’ll pass that one up.
