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April 5, 2010

AWP Begins Wednesday

I’m stoked! I’m going to the AWP conference later this week! For those of you who don’t know, AWP stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and it’s one of the biggest writing conferences in the nation.

It’s a more traditional conference with lots of panel discussions and opportunities to network. It’s not like the writers conferences that are put on by Tin House and Bread Loaf and others, in which there are weeklong workshops with writers, as well as panel discussions.

Nope. AWP is for schmoozing, and my used car salesman genes are kicking in! Seriously, what is so great about these conferences is just that you get to meet so many fabulous people. The highest per capita concentration of geeky writer types on the globe.

I am so looking forward to reconnecting with a bunch of friends I know from other conferences. I’m also really looking forward to meeting a bunch of great people in person whom I’ve gotten to know via Facebook and online writers’ groups and online workshops.

So, if you see me in the crowd, please please come up and say hi!

What I’m Reading Today: I finished Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. What a lovely lovely book. I so admire the fact that it’s a quiet and moving read and that he let it be what it was, which is moving and gentle. It felt real, of its period, and surprising. He never went THERE, where you expected it to go just for thrills. No, instead he went for the deeper thing, the real thing, the moving thing. He didn’t take the easy way out. And I love how he ended it. Up until the very end, I wasn’t sure which way it would go. Bravo, Colm.

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