AWP Boston, or the Noise before the Silence

Over half our staff at Booksmith are writers. So many of us were delighted to hear that AWP (the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference) would be held in Boston this year. Convenient, yes, to have over 10,000 writers, readers, agents, lit mags, editors, and publishers converge on one's hometown. But I also found myself slightly disappointed not to be able to use the conference as an excuse to see a new place, to stay in a hotel, in short, to travel.

But attending a conference like AWP is a lot like traveling, even when it takes place on your doorstep. There is nothing so foreign as the landscape of the three gigantic exhibition halls in Hynes Convention Center, crammed with row upon endless row of booths bannered with MFA programs looking for tuition money, lit mags searching for submitters, publishers looking for readers. 

On the exhibition floor.

If the international cuisine of the Prudential Center food court didn't transport you to new lands, you could listen to readers from all over the world at one of the many panels on literature, publishing, and almost any aspect of writing culture imaginable. From essayists discussing the urge toward memoir to a conversation over big versus indie publishers, I found that many of these panels were stimulating in the way that travel is, breaking me out of my habitual ways of thinking about writing and pushing me into new practices and points of view.

Outside, the blizzard blew.

And finally, like travel, a conference introduces you to new people you might otherwise not have had the chance to bump into. People like the Australian woman who bustled into a panel on travel writing and took a seat next to me. She told me she'd never walked through snow before, and I asked if she'd come all the way around the world for AWP.

"No," she laughed, "I heard some young people talking it up on the bus from New York, and I pricked up my ears." Her hostel was full of conference-goers as well, and she followed them to Hynes. "I'm meant to be here," she confided, and told me about the book she had just self-published about her travels around the world. We listened to the panel together, learning how to capture and document that elusive essence of place.

And while a conference, like travel, is exhausting, there were periods of contemplation as well. One evening, after a day of navigating the chaos of the exhibition, I stumbled out of a Grub Street party at a noisy and crowded bar and headed back to Hynes for the keynote speaker. There I found Vets Auditorium full of writers gathered to hear a conversation between poets Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney.

My brain was fried from the day of speakers, my head was woozy with one drink too many, and my ears were ringing with the bar's loud music and the louder sound of writers' networking. I settled into my chair and focused in on the speakers, who were conversing from two armchairs on the stage.

Walcott was saying something about silence, stillness, and serenity, what he called the "prologue before articulation." As I listened, the noise of networking fell away. "Where silence is," Walcott said, "real art arrives."

"Yes," Heaney nodded, "But you have to be able to dwell in the clamor as well--that is the condition we inhabit."

Later Heaney would tell us about reading Virgil when he was a school boy in Sixth Form. The required text was Book Nine, but all he remembers about that course was his teacher continually asserting with regret, "I wish it were Book Six, lads, if only it were Book Six."

Perhaps I had taken in one panel on literary tropes too many, but every word Heaney spoke seemed to hold the potential for metaphor, and now when I think back on the blur that was my trip through the foreign lands of AWP, my sense is that if nothing else, the convention was for me Sixth Form. A conference about art is not art itself, if anything it is the dissonance that distracts us from creation. Yet it is in that chaos that we dwell, and if it is a clamor that points us on to Book Six, to the silence before articulation, then it was a trip worth taking.

Superbowl Sunday: Literary Showdown

Superbowl Sunday! Either you've waited for it all year or you're just in this for the snacks and funny beer commercials. Unless you're me, in which case you completely forgot that football existed until Carl proposed a literary showdown between writers from this year's rival cities (Baltimore and San Francisco, if you've been living under the same rock I was).

Let's see the line-up!

From SAN FRANCISCO:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - The patron saint of indie bookstores and the heart & soul of this ragtag team of miscreants. If they win this thing, he's taking a gatorade shower.
Tobias Wolff - Crowd favorite. Makes short work of the opposition.
Charles Schulz - insists the Charlie Brown football schtick was not a self-portrait. We'll see.
Shirley Jackson - assumes the ceremonial coin flip augurs darker things to come. Doubts anyone will be "going to Disneyworld."
Jack London - thinks Shirley Jackson is optimistic.
Lemony Snicket - thinks Jack London is cheerful.
Allen Ginsberg - will probably streak at half-time.


Aaaaaand east coast! From BALTIMORE:

Edgar Allen Poe - With a team name like the Ravens, this guy's the clear MVP. Has big-name draw but isn't exactly known for his happy endings.

Gertrude Stein - renowned for dizzying duck-and-weave tactics and elaborate touch-down victory dances.

Upton Sinclair - or "Jungle Fever," as his teammates call him. This is a dirty business and he's in it to win.
Emily Post - will tackle you with her pinky out.

Ogden Nash - endears himself to the cheerleaders by improving their rhyme schemes.

John Barth - is all about the mind games. He'll sneak off the field and into the media box to give voice-over commentary. Says Baltimore is winning but we have no way of knowing that's true. Or even that this game is real.
Tom Clancy - his strategy involves a CIA mole, international espionage and the Goodyear blimp.

Holy cow, folks. It's anyone's game. We'll be pulling for Frisco, if only because we've got a huge crush on City Lights.

Gratuitous Cat Pictures!

So sales have been good in the UBC lately (thanks times infinity!) so my original idea for this post--awesome author photos found on the back of books--has to be postponed because all of my favorites have found homes. BUT. Do not despair, because what I have for you is a hybrid of awesome writers (found frequently in the UBC) and CATS.

Observe, culled from the marvelous blog Writers and Kitties:

Camus! (We just got in L'etranger in! En francais!)

Julio Cortazar (you HAVEN'T read Hopscotch yet? Or Blow-Up? There's a short story in it about a guy who can throw up bunnies! We got 'em both in the UBC)

Tove Jansson! Of Moomin fame!

And staff favorite Yukio Mishima! Even samurai can love kitties!

National Poetry Month, or as I like to call it (cut the crap, stop denying yourself)

Do you dislike poetry? Does the word itself induce high school flashbacks to a time when a bulky clip-art speckled text book told you to find the meaning beneath the meaning? Well then your aversion is understandable. *****************But

I dare you to pick up a book of contemporary poetry. The pageant has evolved. Poetry is sick, twisted, weird, violent, moving, readable....magnetic. Flash fiction? please...

Short attention span? strange tastes? What are you doing not reading poetry? It's like porn and painting and applesauce all in one! If you want something chiller that exists too...*********but

Poetry is there for people who hate grammar, and conventions, or people who love them and want to play with them. If what your brain spits out is to disjointed, or too vitriolic for prose....it becomes consumable as poetry.

Mark has done an amazing job bringing in some of the newest most exciting poets out there. We have the standards too. So.....if you want to expand your reading, challenge your narrative, improve your composing, painting, writing, thinking and living....find a cover or title that speaks to you, read a poem....if you hate it put it down (life's too short-juts pick up another) If you love it you will find a never ending supply of that wealth.

Poetry is not what you read in High School, or for that matter college. It is inappropriate, vivid, uncomfortable ENTERTAINING and alive...and the good stuff is very impolite.

You'll be making your significant other/cat listen as you slur your new favorite poem over 3 glasses of wine and tears...I promise.

Here's what I'm reading now:

April Mowing the Lawn

Drunk and barefoot is surprisingly

Meticulous, especially in the corners,

Shoving the old vrooming machine deep

In the knee-high thrushes of weeds and mint

And flush with the giant slate stone steps

Some glacier dumped a millions years ago.

Up and down, back and forth. Why bother?

I yell to her. Why not simply ask all the horses

Over to take the blades down with their teeth?

Hell, let it grow- Like the golden shadow cast

By our growing pile of beer bottles, like

Who cares? She yells back over the motor that

In South Acworth, a lawn's merely all you

Choose to take away from all that's there

To take away.

from collection Drunk by Noon

(by the kickass Jennifer Knox)

Again, with the James Frey-

I'm in white as white can be (on all fronts) Bennington Vermont. I just asked my first question in a lecture. The subject was about responsibility in non-fiction. Poetic license. Truthy-ness. How much has to be true before you can market and sell something as "biography"...this...is something I don't want, or have the GI tract to process again. It's an old conversation. YET

There is real disagreement. What qualifies you to speak for a larger group under the singular? Rigoberta Menchu...I believe her license was true, and the the use of the passive voice, and particular linguistic and oral traditions are far away enough from my own to qualify her for to speak for an idea, a history, some people. James Frey/ his editors co-opting the experience of a disease...doesn't speak for a larger group. I do not believe he has his union card. I think there are addicts out there to write it better, say it better. Give them the cash.

So...
be who you are ... what you are. If it didn't happen to you, but "wouldn't it be cool if it did, what would that look like?" exercise belongs in fiction...and have the brass ones to throw your hat in that arena.

When I give my time and money to someone's work..., there is an unspoken agreement. I take the responsibility of a reader and you take the responsibility of calling a spade a spade. A bio a bio, a novel a novel, an auto ethnography an auto ethnography. Don't cheat.

If a painting is sold as the product of a blind horse with a brush in its mouth, and I found out it was painted by a 43 year old man...I may feel violated.

Or

we can just agree that all writing is half truths...and get rid of those little signs above the books...

Booksellers at the Mic - 9/24/2010

Working backwards,
Ric's wiry words crunched my crowns
and Unrequited bought my breath,
for the length of the poem I was me of evening rehearsals half asleep classes and timing my passage between so that we could be face to face, just for seven steps. I don't remember where her locker was but I remember her profile, chin up brow down, unnecessary tiptoes as she reached for the top.

Emily's spelling bee socks and her bold-on-the-inside girl with a master plan that makes no sense but will probably work if we can only get the rest of the story, you gotta give us the rest of the story, you know I won the school spelling bee two years running. Can't spell arugala.

Kate kills can you tell when you want to laugh, or is that your throat closing up, which is it, don't let on. The silence that is born out of each poem is correct, neighbors not knowing if something is expected of them. Don't let them off the hook, just say the words with your laughter and rage tongueing the air that delivers them.

Eric took the big names and whipped them around the room so we all could take a swipe from our seats, and they swirled for a moment before coming to rest in a three part harmony of kisses first last and promised.

Shoshanna took us up and set out to reframe and turn around, and her day will taste of Smarties while it waits for chocolate, and no question is really quite answered, even when you ask it twice, right? And friends with bad breath are still friends.

Evan's dream was ghostly and lyric, memories flowing mercurial through phone lines and "waist high libraries", wonderful idea, I imagined snow and sadness while he measured his breath a stately pace, planting each word footfall by footfall.



I don't want to sit here and write, but that is what I'll do. This is the juice that should be flowing in the studio, with paper and scissors and a big tray of paint on the floor before a sheet of wood leaning against the wall, where I'll remember my friends tonight, and what it takes for each of them to get up and open up their mouths so the deep down can be heard.
I hope I feel this good when I get home tonight, so I can pour a cup of this juice, mix it up with what I've got and make a cocktail that burns, so I can sing in fire and color.

Women, Whiskey, Per Petterson and Other Sweeping Generalizations.

Today marks the end of my short relationship with Evan Williams brand Whiskey. Last night, the events manager and I got in a "little" debate about Franzen on the cover of Time. At least that's what I think we were arguing about. It may have been about the cable bill ...I can't say for sure but I can say this; women are the driving economic force in the book industry. We run the stores, buy the books, read the books and gift the books. For all the men out there, I acknowledge you and thank you for your presence too, though today I am just giving the ladies a "what what."

I don't want to detract from Franzen, or any other white male novelist, goodness knows I love Raymond Carver. I just want to see all the lady novelists getting equal critical attention. I don't think we are quite there yet.

Name Drop Time:

When I was walking Per Petterson back to his awaiting line of (mostly female) fans, he said to me....this industry is a woman's industry...but men are the ones getting published.... (or something to that effect). When he said that, I nearly planted one on him, but I'm a professional so I restrained myself. I complimented him on how he answered Diane Rehm's question about one of his character's apparent "alcoholism". Rehm was pushing the topic, and I thought it was so typical, how we in the states rush to pathologize ....everything. The character got drunk a few times....and she needed a diagnosis, from Per. Sigh.

I guess it took Per mentioning this gender discrepancy for me to finally have license into feeling the way I did when I rethought the Time cover..."Great American Novelist". I of course note the dissonance in needing a man to agree with me in order to bring this topic up publicly....but I am working on it...and it doesn't hurt my case that Per agrees.

What do I take away from these loosely connected meditations? I love the ladies of Brookline. The women who work here, shop here, and speak here. Sometimes deconstructive literary diagnostics are just reductive, and miss the point.

Also, no more whiskey. It's better to read about.

Ice cream and beets with Donald Hall at Bennington

I was lucky and squirrelled myself next to Donald Hall during dinner. I leaned in close as he told me about Raymond Carver, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Liam Rector and Wendall Berry. I listened as he told me that he couldn't be away from Jane Kenyon when she was dying, so he left Bennington early that year. I had a hard time hearing him over the roar of utensils in the dining room. He ate beets and chicken. He laughed at my weird joke about maple ice cream and peppermint stick ice cream --which i nervously blurted out to fill the space between stories. It was the only thing I could give a man who writes like that...an awkward aside about ice cream flavors. Some of my favorite quotes from that meal and his lecture...

-"Old age is a series of diminishments"

-"executed by the injection of 100 martinis"

-(of poetry read aloud) "Poetry is oral sex, a pleasure of the mouth"

- (of his writing relationship with Jane Kenyon) " We worked hard to be uncompetitive, which in itself is competitive"

-"One is never sure if they are any good or not"

Well life, it has been weird and delicious.

check please.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/264

"...they make billions" she said, as we shook our head over the greed of a certain monolithic octopus online corporation that is threatening to stop selling goods to my homestate's businesses, should the state pass a law that requires that corporation to collect sales tax on goods sold to businesses there.

you know who doesn't make billions?
writers
clowns
comedians
99.9% of actors
poets
painters
sculptors
graffiti artists
chefs
dancers
singers
musicians
99.9% of filmmakers
teachers.

And not one of them, not one of them, who over the course of my life have provided the spark for my laughter, or brought tears to my eyes, or lit a fire of inspiration inside of me, have ever threatened to withhold their services, for any reason.

Buy poetry, as a friend wrote here recently.
And look at paintings, and taste the food you eat,
and listen to the words of the songs you hear.

And don't let anyone tell you that a corporation is a person.