AWP 2013, Day One

Well, as I feared, the winter weather is upon us.  It arrived late Wednesday and continues as I type this early Friday morning.  While the conference seems perfectly crowded, I have to suspect that many conference goers suffered delays or cancellations of their travel plans.  After all, it's not just Boston that got hit but the whole northeast portion of the United States.  UCA's own inaugural class of MFA students is here, and they are staying two hours away.  Yet so far they have been able to fight through the snow to reach the city and enjoy themselves.  "Enjoy" has included visiting Charles Bukowski's favorite old hang out--not that far from the Convention Center, it turns out--and getting brand new Boston-based tattoos.  They've also been extremely helpful with manning the Toad Suck Review book table in the Book Fair hall.  Thanks, guys.  I must say part of my suspicion about cancelled or delayed travel plans is that the Book Fair itself seems less jammed than usual.  Now, TSR is in the second floor Book Fair hall, whereas about 65% of the other tables are on the ground floor hall, and this might have something to do with the light traffic we were getting on Day One.  But even the ground floor Book Fair hall seemed hardly so no-elbow-room-busy as in years past.  We'll see today.  This state of affairs could change overnight.

Some highlights from Day One: I went to two sessions yesterday, both reasonably interesting.  The first session was one of those classic AWP overly-crowded-into-a-tiny-room affairs, with scores of listeners spilling out into the hallway.  Hey, AWP, somebody wasn't thinking right when they scheduled the room for that session.  The subject?  Fairy tales in adult fiction.  Maybe that seems esoteric, but plenty of writers were eager to hear about it. The panel included, among others, Jane Yolin, Kelly Link, and Kate Bernheimer, a rather star-studded group, to be sure.  I was especially happy to see Kelly Link, a writer whose work I've long admired but who I've never met in person.  In my opinion she was the rock star of the panel, although her manner is anything but.  In fact, she tended to defer to the other panelists, more than I think she should have.  It was a well run session, with lots of time left for audience questions, and there were some smart ones.  One interesting issue, for which no real answer was given, was what to do when you are employing a non-western fairy tale but writing for a western audience.  How can the audience pick up on the multiple levels of meaning and of story that you are embedding by consciously employing such a tale?  The short answer is that they can't, but I don't think that's the kind of fully thought out response that the asker was looking for.  An interesting bit of information that popped out: up until just last year, the National Book Foundation, which awards the prestigious National Book Award every year in various categories had forbidden books based on myths, legends, or fairy tales from being considered for its fiction prize.  What?  I know, a head scratcher.  Apparently, many National Book Award judges were unaware of this prohibition as they had indeed considered and honored various fairy tale/myth based books in the past.  But even so the rule is clearly in violation of the spirit of creative freedom (to say nothing of aesthetic wisdom); yet it was only removed last year and only because of a conscious petitioning effort spearheaded by Kate Bernheimer.

The second panel, cutely named "All the Young Dudes," featured three youngish male writers who had recently published short story collections with small presses.  It was sort of a combination reading/how to session, as in "How did you guys get your short story collections published?"  I must say that the questions that followed their reading were fairly amateurish and even stupid ("What do you do if your girlfriend gets mad at you for writing so much instead of spending time with her?").  And this from MFA grads, no less.  (The obvious answer to the above question, delivered by one of the panelists: "Get a new girlfriend.")  I shouldn't be surprised at my disappointment with the questions.  It's been my experience at AWP that any session that professes to deliver the "secrets" of how to publish tends to be attended by desperate sounding and desperate seeming people.  They tend to be among the more unseemly aspects of any otherwise interesting convention.  The readings were okay--just okay--with one reader and one story clearly shining: a dramatic monologue written by Jared Yates Sexton of Georgia Southern University and included in his new volume An End To All Things (Atticus Press).  It was a smart story and well-performed.   We chatted afterwards.  His department, an independent writing department, is trying to found a MFA program.   Since we just did so, I figured I might be able to offer some information and perspective.

Some more Day 1 highlights: 1) The journal Unstuck, which promotes "surreal, futuristic, and fantastic literature," was running an interesting writing conference-specific writing contest.  On the back of the instruction sheet for the contest one was supposed to write a short story--and only on the back; it could be no longer--and then return the sheet no later than the close of the day today (Friday).  In other words,  you couldn't send them anything you've already written.  You have to do it here.  What's more, the sheet included a list of characters, a list of settings, and a list of items.  One element from each list had to appear in the finished story.  I picked alien invasion, funeral urn, and saloon.  (Believe it or not, it's a serious story.)  I composed it while I sat at our not-terribly-busy TSR book fair table, with some guidance from the folks at the next table on what drinks to choose for my particular protagonist.  It was fun and fairly quick and I hope they like it.  To "win" the contest is simply to have your story selected for inclusion in a special issue of Unstuck.  2)  I visited with the kind folks at the journal Versal.  This is an American-staffed magazine that is housed in Amsterdam.  Created ten years ago by expatriates for the local expatriate community in Amsterdam, it's now an international journal that comes every year to AWP and even sometimes sponsors readings and panels at the conference.  They will be publishing a chapter from my Van Gogh novel in the next issue, and the invited all contributors  to stop by their table for a taste of good Dutch gin.   I'm not a big gin drinker, but I have to admit it was strong and smooth.  3) I ran into Louise Harper, the wife of Graeme Harper, an Australian writer who directs the Great Writing Conference in the UK.  It was good to catch up with her.  She and Graeme kindly hosted us for dinner back in 2006 when Great Writing was in Portsmouth, then Graeme's home university.  I remember fondly taking the hovercraft over to the Isle of Wight and enjoying a beautiful supper and great conversation in their home.  Our kids were with us on the trip, and Louise kindly kept them the next couple days while we attended the conference.  Fantastic to see her again.  As I always tell people, AWP is all about seeing your life as a creative writer flash before your eyes over the course of three days.  It's started happening already.

Novel writing class returns

After a break of two-and-a-half years, Novel Writing Workshop returns to my university this semester.  In the interim period, dozens of students have asked me about the class and scores of oral histories have been told; a few students lobbied my department's Chair hard for its return; and, not insignificantly, our first collection of graduate students matriculated.  In some ways, it's a very different pedagogical landscape now than when I taught the course a couple years ago.  Then, novel writing workshops were still relatively rare and excitingly new, certainly on the undergraduate level, and the idea that the students would not just start but finish a novel in one semester struck me as potentially hazardous: to GPAs; to other course work; to jobs; to relationships; most of all, to sleep schedules. Yet that's what I asked the students to do.  And nearly all of them succeeded.  Now, novel writing workshops are a considerably less unusual phenomenon.  Indeed, sometimes I think they are everywhere.   Still more typical on the graduate as opposed to the undergraduate level--although one of our graduate students, who was an undergrad a year ago, informs that he took a novel writing course in college--they are, in any case, far more characteristic of creative writing degree programs than in the past.  It can't be coincidental that at the AWP conference in Boston this year, a panel will be held on not just on promoting the idea of the novel writing workshop but on the fact of it; that is, the nuts and bolts of how different experienced instructors of the course have taught it.  I think it's even fair to say that novel writing workshops are becoming the cornerstone of progressive fiction writing programs.  And in part this is because in the last three years those who teach the course have been talking to each other about it--Cathy Day's blog The Big Thing has been especially instructive--pushing each other, motivating each other, spreading the gospel.

So I'm glad it's back at my school, and I know the students are too.  But I admit to being a bit nervous.  In the intervening years since last I taught the course, a mythology has developed around it, a retrospective awe.  Students have told me that for years, ever since they selected our major, they have been eagerly anticipating the chance to experience this one course.  Can this semester possibly meet their high expectations?  Yes, it can.  But, here's the scary part: It's all up to them.  More than any other course I teach, in my novel writing class, the students teach themselves and teach each other.  I offer them a platform through which they can learn about novel writing, but they have to take advantage of it, and they have to encourage each other to take advantage of it.  While I do separate the class into small peer review groups, there will be no full class workshopping.  As I emphasized at our first meeting the other night, the course is about production more than anything else.   The last time I taught the course, again to all undergraduates, the room was fully with unusually mature and unusually talented people.  What the course offered was exactly what most of them were looking for: space, opportunity, deadlines.  Almost entirely seniors, they'd workshopped plenty in their college career.  What they wanted from Novel Writing was something else,  and they were eager to take control of it.  There were certainly bumps along the way that semester, but for the most part--with a notable exception or two--a genuine esprit de corps ruled.

I can only hope my current group has the same experience.  It's a fresh batch, with different backgrounds.  For the first time, graduate students are participating along with undergraduates.  That's a new dynamic for me, and for both of those student populations.  And there's another professor sitting in!  Not even from my own department!  Like last time, we will read Chris Baty's No Plot No Problem (for practical motivation) and a couple of short novels (as models for storytelling over a reasonably short space), and we will periodically break off into peer groups.  But mostly we will be writing.  I'll be writing along with them, which actually is going to be more of a challenge for me this time than last.  Mainly because right now I am in the latter stages of a novel I started early last semester.  I had intended on exploring this novel idea through the Novel Workshop, but when the class was delayed from fall until spring I didn't feel like waiting.  Now I will need to hurry to finish my draft, then immediately start another novel--the subject of which I haven't even clarified for myself yet.   Hard to know what the next few months will bring, but I'm sure it will be an adventure.  There will be exhileration and despair.  There will be careful planning and last second inspiration and a great deal of fatigue.  Some will give up; most, I hope and expect, will soldier on.  Some will get pissed at me and at their peer reviewers.  Some will get pissed at the novels we read.  But if they each individually can hold it together, when the finish line comes they will have learned more than from perhaps any other writing course.  And they will have learned it the best possible way: by doing it themselves.

Publication announcement: I'm happy to report that another chapter from my Van Gogh novel will soon appear in print.  The journal Versal, an international literary magazine based in Amsterdam, is publishing a chapter from the section of the book that details Van Gogh's Paris years.  The point of view character is Suzanne Valadon, a post-Impressionist painter who circulated widely among the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and even modeled for a few of them.  During my research for the novel, I read an account she'd written of seeing Van Gogh at a Paris party.  I used some details from that account to construct the chapter.  The issue of Versal will appear in May, accompanied by a launch party in Amsterdam.  Really sorry to have to miss that one.  While I will be in London in June for the Great Writing Conference, there's simply no way for me to make it to Amsterdam in May.  Ah, well.