The AWP Conference took downtown Boston
by storm, and during one: the largest gathering ever of its kind took place at
the Hynes Convention Center over the later half of a week in early March, 2013.
In Chicago the year prior, and booked for Seattle in 2014, the Association of
Writers and Writing Programs’ annual gathering was a carnival of meditative
poets, nonfiction essayists who gazed longingly onto the snowy streets of
Boston, and book publishers, both large and small. Mostly, however, the
critical mass of attendees were MFA in Creative Writing programs, their
students and devotees.
Being “pre-MFA” was not, in my circles,
a common social or academic moniker, while I earned my Masters of Fine Arts in
Creative Writing at Goddard College (’04). Competition for perspective creative
writers, childrens’ book authors, and
only the most rarefied online nonfiction bloggers was relegated to the
ad space available in Poets and Writers magazine.
Now, nearly ten years after my adventure in the low-residency study of creative
written expression, almost every major sponsor of this conference bore those
esteemed initials—including the University of Florida at Tampa, whose
admissions strategy consists (in part) of sponsoring the conference name badge
lanyards, that everyone had a chance to be a walking advertisement for a
specific degree program.
Not to be mistaken for an academic
conference, the AWP seeks an audience built of individuals from every side of
the higher ed fence: professors, administrators, and educators are welcome, as
are undergraduate and graduate students, however undeclared, unrequited, or
undecided. Those who dwell far outside of any canonizing academy are warmly
welcome as well: from publishers to small press operators, from purveyors of
representative creative objects to the purposeless and the poetic. The primary
audience of the AWP is intended to be “writers”—those who profess to record,
through acts of written (or maybe not) expression their own, or others’,
experiences. This conception of audience is diluted by the lack of that actual
action: when I saw someone putting words in a sequence, they were usually doing
it virtually, digitally, upon a handheld device. I saw few people jotting
notes, even during the hour-and-a-half sessions; those that were writing by
hand were doing so with their own supplies (attendees received no notebook—not
even a pen—in canvas tote bags upon arrival). Just about all of those that used
mobile devices chose Apple—be it for immediate credit card transactions, or for
checking Facebook during sluggish moments.
In the sea of commerce and promotion
that was the three halls’ worth of Book Fair, one traditional creative writing
journal championed its release of a digital edition and mobile app device,
exclusively for the iOS; I had a good-natured exchange with the press’
representative about the ethics of open-source programming, rallying for the
Android operating system as a less-nefarious alternative than supporting Apple’s
technological monarchy.
My MFA was my last degree completed via
a dial-up Internet connection: transferring data, and mere ‘browsing’ was a
premeditated, intentional condition in my writing process, one that could be
turned off, in every traditional sense. Today, such analog isolation is a rare
condition, treatable: there were, among the hundreds of booths at the Book
Fair, representations of literal basement printing presses and their products,
including limited-edition chapbooks, bookmarks, and printing techniques
unavailable on any common laser printer. In a few conversations, I found
supporters of the New Analog Aesthetic: what drives our need for physical,
printed writing may be all too close to what is driving the new popularity for
vinyl records. I saw no one wearing Google Glass at the AWP Conference, though
its debut was a scant few weeks away, at the South by Southwest Festival in
Austin, Texas; perhaps more remarkable was that the AWP either could not afford
or did not consider creating a mobile device application to accommodate the
volumes of scheduling information and registration materials. Instead, a glossy
book contained as many flashy ads featuring introspective writer-candidates
happily pursuing an advanced degree.
Across over twelve thousand
participants, a spectrum of attention-grabbing and attention-delivering will no
doubt develop: given Boston’s erudite urbanite climate, there were no doubt as
many events, readings, and conversations happening outside of the Hynes as
within. Presses—including Dave Eggers’ McSweeny’s, the New York-based outfit
that has somehow won control of the throttle that steers the ultra-creative,
ultra-cool publishing world—hosted off-site readings; in the evenings, MFA
programs hosted cash-bar receptions inside and outside of the Hynes. While it’s
worth wondering if there is a growing technological solidarity developing
across different populations of writing conference attendees, it’s also worth
noting that a number of individuals roamed the halls and presentations, clearly
outside of any virtual blizzard of tweets, posts, and other time-wasters. Two
members of this latter category were Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney,
superstars from a generation long-removed from the hip and the young at the
AWP. It was majestic to see over ten thousand make it back from dinner and fill
a chasm of an auditorium, in time to hear two poets speak of the noble truths
they’ve discovered, a conversation that, at its best, included Walcott’s
dismissal of monetary gain through pursuit of his craft (“career was an obscene
word I hesitate to use even now”), and at worst, left Heaney describing himself
as more of a classical antique than one might have imagined (Gerard Manley
Hopkins over Eliot; Robert Lowell’s nickname was Cal, short for ‘Caligula’). I
couldn’t help but wonder if there were literary ‘darlings’ driving the
conversation writ large at AWP; this came through finding not only the stark
difference of ego between Richard Russo and Amy Bloom on Friday night, but
through the near-total dismissal of some of my favorite authors: while my
experience was not comprehensive, I saw no mention in any panel or Book Fair
booth, of Ginsberg, Baraka, Williams, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Irving, Patchen,
Whitman, Paley, or Dos Passos. I bought Ferlinghetti’s latest, telling the New
Directions representative “this crowd should be at this man’s feet,” not just
for his poetic accomplishments, but his forging a place for poetry as useful
and lawful political speech. Other terms not overheard at AWP include: interdisciplinary, gun control,
bipartisanship, brinksmanship, environmentalism, song lyrics, economic rights,
50 Shades of Grey, the closing of Borders Books and Music. Next month’s New
York-based ASJA is one of the AWP’s main competitors, and has only two
sponsors: Barnes and Noble and Google, two corporations that seek to unseat
Amazon’s grip on the throttle of word-based web commerce. Apple was not a
sponsor of the AWP, but they should have been, or at least should have sent a
photographer: I saw caught more than a few glimpses of aspiring youthful
hipsters locating themselves in specific dramatic poses, silhouetted by the raging wind and snow
beyond massive windows, looking deeply and with great contemplation, into
either their twelve-pound conference directory or into their high definition
touch screens, to read their email, each other’s blogs, the news, Facebook, or
to book their next flight or ticket to their next non-virtual destination, be
it a secluded residency, meeting of hipster egos, or collaborative poetic
geocache (Kenneth Calhoun: in the future, “programming and storytelling are
going to become inseparable”).
