Where I'm Calling From 04

or; How to Have Fun at a Literary Conference

AWP has once again been attended and it has been survived. This is my second year, and I do think the experience is distinctly different when you attend as a vendor. But I firmly believe the best time you’ll ever have at a conference like AWP is the first time you go, knowing no one, or next to no one. There is tremendous benefit to a sort of ignorance of the Way of Things at an event such as this one…

I believe the ideal experience is to arrive on a Friday, when the event is busy and merch is verdant, to visit the booth of every publisher and program you’ve ever been interested in, heard about, or didn’t hear about. To chat up the booth vendors who, because you aren’t awkwardly trying to determine if you two should know one another, are happy to answer your questions, and to unabashedly request a tote bag, a hat, a mug, a sweatshirt, and end up with only one of those plus a sticker, because the rest require a subscription.

You can take a breather at the University of Iowa booth, which is in fact two booths, and sip coffee and sit on their couch (is it the same couch every year, guys? Who is your cleaner?), watch a little TV, and ask questions about what famous people went to their program, and think it’s pretty cool when someone mentions Flannery O Connor.

The conference food won’t repulse you, and the panel on friendships in literature will seem peculiar in a wonderful way. One tote bag will house seven different tote bags, forthcoming issues of Hot Dog Magazine, and a matchbook from a tired, lipstick-ed woman holding a baby and insisting you take the matchbook.

Offsite readings will be titillating, strange, a bit like the party you’d heard about in the woods while you attended plain ol’ Prom. They’ll happen in furniture stores and outdoor parking lots and abandoned Pullman cars. The next day, at the airport, you’ll spot a few hungover people roughly your age, dirty AWP totes hanging from their luggage handles, and you’ll want to blow them a little kiss. But of course, that’s not appropriate.

To have fun at AWP, you need lightness. Less expectation, less dread, less school-days anxiety. Lightness, and a lot of water.

Plus sunglasses and a hat.

I don’t have a particularly friendly face. This is bad for selling a product or endearing strangers to you. The fluorescent lighting at the convention center did me no favors— I felt vulnerable and overstimulated. “Like you’re in a casino and losing,” I said to someone at the conference, and she agreed. At least I had the excuse of Theo, disappearing to the *Lactation Lounge* to feed him. What constitutes a lounge, I wonder now. Two banquet-style tables with chairs and a fridge. But! It was a (mostly) quiet place where I could whisper silly things to my bear child.

Stony face or no, sincerity carries you through a weekend full of writers. I ran into an old client, bought two incredible books from Saint Lucy Books (based in Baltimore!), met the host of one of my favorite podcasts, and rekindled my love of readings at the Zona Motel offsite event on Saturday night. I also sat beside my husband at our crummy hotel at eleven PM, eating fries and drinking wine from a mug, marveling that we somehow made it all work. Thanks to everyone who managed to drop their aloofness for 72 hours and graciously took a matchbook.