Me at the AWP
Thomas Washington

The Hilton security team wasn’t admitting anyone to the Bookfair exhibition without a badge. The tags were the size of a center square cut of pizza. Mine kept flipping to its blank side, no matter how much I fiddled with the ropes. Writers wore the badge for security purposes, I gathered, but I thought it more fitting to be absolved from the badge attire altogether. We pride ourselves on our otherness after all, on differences that are supposed to be driving our best work back home alone in Iowa and Vermont. During this seventy-two-hour writers fête at least, the badges indicated that writing wasn’t about sitting for a six-hour solo session in one’s room with pen and paper and turning up something sublime such as a solid stanza, an essay, or a prized short story draft. Instead, we had editors, publishers, and writing instructors to badger.

Part of the reason I flew from Washington DC to Atlanta, Georgia for the 2007 Associated Writers Program Conference was to put a face on the receiving end of my most recent spate of 9 x 12 gummed submission envelopes, which Ralph the postman gladly transports to the DC main branch. I wanted to see who’d been scribbling their initials on the rejection slips while packing my 5200-word entries home again. Or, to celebrate more auspicious occasions, however withered, I hoped to shake hands with the kind souls who’d recognized my gem of a work amidst the mire of other entries. I gained a quick sixth sense on the who’s who front without zeroing in on a badge’s nameplate. The writer luminaries—anyone worth knowing as opposed to the two thousand or more in attendance who wanted to be known—possessed that unmistakable glowing aura of accomplishment. The luminaries had style: tight jeans, boots, oversized jackets, and T-shirts that looked fresh off the ironing press. They gathered in cliquish packs between panel discussions with an attendant gathering of writer groupies milling about the circle’s periphery. I envied the luminaries. While they exchanged notes on book contracts, tenure, and the season’s batch of M.F.A. applicants, I was in writer’s Limbo, drumming up my next essay theme and speculating how such threadbare inspiration was ever going to amount to a book-length work, much less a tenured creative writing teaching post in Massachusetts.

My star search didn’t necessarily mean I would approach anyone with a congratulatory remark or hand out a business card. In fact, I was socially paralyzed from the moment I arrived. The one person whom I became most intimately acquainted was the concierge. I consulted him twice, once to find an electronics store for a computer adapter and again for a restaurant recommendation.

The other person I spoke to was a pretty blonde dressed in layers of hemp. We stole glances at each other while queued in the registration line. “How many people do you think are attending this conference, anyway,” she asked? “It feels a bit overwhelming. Everyone seems to know someone else here—everyone except me.”

“I don’t know anyone here either,” I said.

“Where did you come from,” she asked? “Is this your first conference?”

“I flew from Washington DC. I’ve never attended the AWP before this year. ”

“Do you teach writing in Washington?”

“No, I’m a librarian,” I replied.

“I see. That’s probably why you don’t know anyone. It’s because you’re not a writer.”

“And you are,” I asked?

“Yes, I’m a poet,” she said with a trembling smile.

As a school librarian, I’m used to getting shafted. The kids ignore me in the same fashion students have ignored librarians for the last century. But coming from another writer this comment wounded. Did the poet not realize I was her patron saint and intellectual caretaker? Did she not see that it was I who might one day purchase, catalogue, book talk, and display her novel or poetry collection in the library foyer and care for her work of art as a gardener gets on his knees and cultivates the candy tufts and forget-me-nots?

Still, she was probably right. If we define ourselves by how we whittle away the hours each day, then no, I’m not a writer. Writing is not something that consumes my day like a 9-5 desk job. And whatever proceeds I receive from my scribble, they are most certainly not paying the utility bills. But how was the poet paying the rent on her poems, published or otherwise? Did reading and writing poetry drive her each day to the point that it left no doubt in her mind or anyone else’s that she was in fact a poet? Or, like many of us at this year’s AWP Conference, was poetry more a leisured activity, something we did as a hobby, like rock collectors or the entomologist who studies butterflies and pins their wings to his collection board?

I consider myself a quarterly reader devotee, a kind of review groupie, and felt entitled to attending the annual club meeting, despite the poet’s remark. And if whatever semblance of belonging is marred by a ninety-six percent rejection rate among my esteemed peers manning the quarterlies’ helm, or the fact that I don’t proclaim myself a writer (in public), then so be it. Something can be said for being a devoted reader, the literary quarterly’s porter in the wings.

I subscribe to twenty or more journals and rotate the lineup annually. My zealotry is similar to the baseball card collecting I did as a kid. In both arenas I admire from afar. Instead of batting averages or runs batted in, I track who is in and who is out. I follow author publication records, prizes, and awards. Not that I compete in the latter categories, but it’s good to know who’s taking the lion’s share of publicity and tapping into the N.E.A.’s federal coffer. A publication’s rough circulation count intrigues me, so too its variable submission and rejection percentages. I take a special liking for the editorial assistants and “readers” whose names come and go from the masthead each academic term. Sometimes I fantasize that one day a reader and I will hook up like Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard: the eager and idealistic beauty who recognizes the genius in the work and then falls for the seasoned writer, despite his jaded exterior.

Surely, my quarterly fan club ardor must come across as borderline drippy (if not obsessive), but this is part of what we librarians do. We’re fools for mining data and bundling it for a semblance of meaning. And the meaning I take away as a subscriber is this: Amidst the bellow and clamor of information overload (Where do we begin? Blogs, newswires, databases, the Google Universe, talk TV, etc…) the quarterly offers sustained hope for the inviolate printed page, for the reign of the solitary voice sounding life’s pain and ecstasy from Winslow and Tallahassee each winter, spring, summer, and fall. T.S. Eliot said it best in a letter to Ford Maddox Ford in 1923. “A review is not measured by the number of stars and scoops it gets. Good literature is produced by a few queer people in odd corners; the use of a review is not to force talent, but to create a favourable atmosphere.”

The AWP Bookfair exhibition was the corner attraction for me. Three hundred seventy three exhibitors—quarterlies, publishers, M.F.A. program representatives—promoted their goods behind skirted tables within a 40,000 square foot subterranean maze. The ease by which writers combed and worked the hall surprised me. I’d always assumed writers were supposed to keep themselves tucked away in their odd corners, changing the face of the world, one stanza, one essay at a time. Reading the 2007 Conference survey results after returning home, I was slightly bothered to learn that the bookfair ranked as the “most helpful component of the Conference, with networking ranking a close second.”

Networking? The beauty of this writing hobby is that one doesn’t have to leave one’s room. The only networking involved here (I like to think) is with the U.S. Postal Service. I always have a nicety in store for the Washington DC counter clerks, and my postman Ralph receives a generous end-of-the-year tip for handling all those big envelopes.

Watching other writers networking the stalls, I suspected I’d missed out on the purpose for attending the AWP. (One panelists’ discussion for the bashful was titled “Do I Have to Work the Bookfair?: A Look at Art of Self Marketing in the Publishing World.”) If what the survey indicated was true, then clearly my writer cohorts returned home with some real conference booty that I didn’t know existed: agent contacts and book deals perhaps, or a first name basis with the managing editors of the top shelf line of quarterlies whose doors I’ve been knocking on for three years now.

Non-networking is the sort of exclusion that carries its own special ache, if only because I’m sometimes slow on the take. Years ago, for instance, a German public relations company for Philip Morris flew me to Moab, Utah to write Marlboro Adventure Team propaganda. I was in love with the public relations assistant from the American company. We’d already met months before during the logistical meeting in Zurich, Switzerland and a mutual attraction blossomed. She told me she’d starred in Walker Texas Ranger. After this she was cast in the Wonder Years, as Kevin Arnold’s social studies teacher. We had two long weekends alone in the Utah ranch house plus a lot of overnights in the mountains and desert. Time was short, though, and I was married. I never made a move, not because I was married but because she already appeared to be suffering from enough personal head trauma, emotional and otherwise.

As soon as the second Marlboro team arrived with its entourage of outdoor pros—champion repellers, swimmers, and motorcyclists—she climbed in bed with a whitewater champion canoeist. I knew this because the canoeist told me about their affair days afterward. While they were doing it in the ranch hand’s bedroom, I was fishing for rainbow trout just outside the window. The canoeist said they could see me while they were fucking each other.

Put another way, there was no reason for returning home from the writers conference empty-handed any more than there was for being on the wrong side of the window in Moab. What I was supposed to bring home from the conference, I’m not sure. Such events, along with the flourish of M.F.A. writing programs and summer workshops, sometimes have me believing the secret to writing good sentences lies somewhere amidst the chatter and panel discussions in a Hilton Hotel ballroom. The panic of missing out on something always looms. And no matter how many times one attends a panel discussion on “Evolution of a Writer: On Eking, Emerging, and Becoming Established” or “Leading the Double Life,” these topics still appear to hold perennial relevance. What writer, after all, wouldn’t rather listen to (or read about) the challenges in the creative life with its pitfalls and stabs at immortality instead of facing a blank screen? My every day slog over the screen makes me want to believe in a mirage, in Atlanta, or any other meeting spot that’s offering a balm for my lonely efforts.

Many of the hosts seated behind the skirted tables appeared no older than twenty-two, as if the management had left the check out stand to a child—indefinitely. I suspected these table reps were the same front line diaboliques whom I’d entrusted to dispatch my submission up the editorial rungs, literary bouncers who instead spent twenty-nine seconds with my work (after six months in the manuscript bin queue) before sticking the purple editorial slip in the SASE and tossing the manuscript into the recycling bin like so much offal. What did I have to say to them anyway?
Writer reject or not, sweeping through the Hilton’s literary catacombs presented numerous complications in literary quarterly etiquette. Picking up the journal without engaging in small talk would come across as rude. Singing the journal’s praise (as I picked up the display volume) would be toady-like. Presenting myself as a “reading fan?” Geeky. The truth—I’m a writer with five unpublished essays sitting in my pocket JumpDrive, and at least one is suited to your editorial “needs”—would raise too many alarms.
The constructive approach was to visit the select few masthead personnel who had been kind enough to include me in their pages. Again, though, this policy presented dilemmas. If I did assume this tack, again what was there to say? “You published a piece of mine three years ago, and now I would like you to pay me some respect for having my content find its way to the top of all that slush your readers slog through week in and week out. (I’m serious here, I think. At the rate of rejection among these publications, didn’t our inclusion, our .5% elite ranking into the pages signify a grand achievement, enough to warrant a welcoming party?) I wanted these publications to roll out the red carpet for me. I wanted trumpets heralding my arrival while the reader clicked her fingers and summoned the oompah band. I wanted to perform an impromptu public reading in those labyrinthine Bookfair walls with everyone listening.

If a public reading was out of the question, then perhaps my benefactors might permit me to man the booth (and autograph copies) while the editorial assistant grabbed lunch. Or, as a final mention, publishers might establish a “contributor’s corner” of sorts, a tiny area at the side or rear of the booth (where the writer contributor couldn’t bother anybody) for perusing our piece (for the twelfth time). A plate of boxed, assorted cookies and milk might also be a nice touch in this corner.

These bequests didn’t seem like to much to ask of my publishing benefactors, after all. The big fish in the pond—we know who they are—were offering their VIP’s lounge chairs and hors d’oeuvres. These hosts had nonstop literary commotion going on in their corner: 60th anniversary celebratory readings, poetry extravaganzas, writer luminary book signings and interviews, the BookTV crew on the scene with bright lights and make-up artists.

In fact, I did approach two journals where my writing appears. I first introduced myself, partly out of common courtesy, but really to see if my name rang a bell. In both cases my name failed to register, even though one of the quarterlies was displaying an issue with one of my essays inside. I can understand the stray visitor not having read the issue, but shouldn’t a masthead club member have the contributors’ names down cold? After getting past the small talk—the relative state of the slush pile back at editorial headquarters, the editorial assistant’s place within the publication—I inquired about the whereabouts of the editor-in-chief. The answer was the same each time. They were not in attendance.

I can also understand why some editors and publishers opt out of the AWP Conference. There are likely more important jobs for tending in the office. At least they had the courtesy to send one representative for this annual public relations stint, unlike other publications who made a complete no show. On one hand, this comes as no surprise. This is the same elite assembly who refuse advertising their names on NewPages.com and the Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses, allegedly to keep the writing riff raff at bay, but more likely because absence perpetuates an aura of mystique that the rest of us equate with high excellence. After all, you don’t see the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Delillo or J.D. Salinger attending Border’s book signings in San Diego or Chantilly, Virginia. It could be that their best stuff is long behind them (or in Salinger’s case, finished), but who can really say. Their obscurity breeds constant anticipation among readers and groupies that the best is yet to come, a bit like the Harry Potter book mania (Whose author, I gather, will be hinting at another title until she’s dead.). The message these in absentia publications are transmitting is simple enough: If your work is good enough, dear writer, you’ll find us one way or another. Otherwise it’s probably better for both parties that we don’t know each other.

Nonetheless, absence again drives at the question of why any of us were attending the Conference, particularly the Bookfair exhibition. Like most others here, I liked the idea of an annual get together for celebrating our place among the small press literary establishment (or in other cases, our pariah-hood) and taking stock of the printed word. But exactly how did the four hundred or more literary press and magazine offices of management and budget weigh the advantages and cons of attending the 2007 AWP? It’s clear enough what the writers (excluding the writer luminaries) hoped for: some promise, in whatever form, to sustain the muse once we returned to our desks back home..

For the presses themselves, however, the aims are not as immediately apparent. Promoting a publication by signing on new subscribers or simply making one’s presence known by camping out for the 72-hour jamboree behind a table is understandable. If this was in fact a primary reason for attending, then I had an idea of my own.

During my third and final sweep of the hall—a deteriorating, timid series of exchanges rather than a convincing sales approach—I was already thinking ahead to the 2008 AWP Conference in New York City. Why not register my own booth in 2008? My stall would commemorate reading as the booth’s raison d’etre. I envision this space as a complement to my mission as a librarian: increasing the readership ranks while championing the immediate cause of the literary quarterly. Instead of the one-dimensional concept slants I encountered from one booth to the next, i.e., small press displays books and journals on the table and watches the writer hordes pass by (never a winning set up in my school library, by the way), I would host a score of activities.

Before going into detail here, I should first note one of the panelist discussions I attended, one that led to the idea of hosting my own booth. A session titled “Who’s Really Reading This Stuff? Making Literary Work Relevant in a Post “Reading at Risk” used the N.E.A.’s 2004 “Reading at Risk” survey, which documented the significant decline in literary readership (an estimated loss of twenty million potential readers) as a starting point for discussion. And yet, as the workshop description read, “Every year more and more literary publishers, journals, and magazines are present at AWP.” This paradox inspired the subtitle question: “Who’s really reading this stuff?”

Of the dozen or more panelist discussions I attended, this meeting had the lowest turnout. Approximately fifty audience members, a mix of writers, editors, writing teachers, and M.F.A. students, listened to the panelists. They included a handful of literary and mainstream publishers, as well as Dr. Mark Bauerlein, the N.E.A. research analyst and Emory University professor who had conducted the original survey. A sales executive from Random House also provided a humorous anecdote surrounding a recent book title he’d heard of: “How to Make a Shoebox from a Book.”

Halfway through the panelists’ talk, Dr. Bauerlein noted that while the number of English majors in the country is in decline, the number of M.F.A. students is on the rise. “Say what you will about the validity of the growth of M.F.A. programs,” the professor lamented, “but the numbers indicate a lopsided balance between real readers and those who are more interested in contributing their own writing, without much interest in reading the works of others.”

A pair of writing teachers in the audience concurred. “Too many of my M.F.A. students these days are more enthusiastic about submitting their own writing without any regard for surrounding work, much less an historical context of who or what has preceded them.”

Indeed, the issue of too many writers and not enough readers appears more ominous than ever. Just five months after returning from the 2007 AWP Conference, I came across this editor’s note in one of my summer issues:

Three years ago we came very close to taking the drastic step of refusing to consider unsolicited material, or the “slush.” At that point we were overwhelmed with fiction submissions and our readers (all local volunteers) were having a hard time keeping up. . . with the 5000 submissions we receive annually. The alternative to reading the slush was to let it be known to agents and publishers that we would consider publishing only established writers or those who had a book under contract. . . we are always behind (at the moment we are running about three months late in getting back to our authors). . . The expansion of M.F.A. programs (on line and off) has added a new dimension in that there is a growing class of individuals who write professionally and need to publish their work in order to advance their careers.

In fact, this quarterly editorial finishes on the upbeat. The editor says that a “gaggle of new readers came our way and made it possible to continue to have every submission read…” As a result, this particular issue celebrated the so-called unknown writer; the subtitle was “New Faces, New Voices.”
As I wanted to point out to the poet after we introduced ourselves, it’s the reader who matters most in the quarterly culture. A shortage of writers will never run a quarterly’s publishing legacy dry, but an absence of readers surely will. For this reason, and in the true spirit of librarianship, my 2008 booth will (in part) be designed to raise reader awareness in the mode of a quarterly telethon (of sorts) inspired by the likes of Jerry Lewis’s Muscular Dystrophy Association or public television’s canvassing for dollars with the barefoot Dr. Dyer at the helm.

It goes without saying that my own writing will be the main attraction, but I’m offering myriad sub-activities to veil this fact. There will be a writers’ raffle where the 1st place winner receives subscriptions to five quarterlies of his or her own choice. 2nd place earns a Border’s gift certificate for $30; 3rd place a one-semester school library internship. In order to participate in the raffle, visitors will first have to complete a special survey, the results of which I would ask the AWP to post on their website, along with their standard findings on number of people in attendance, number of exhibitors, etcetera.

The survey is disguised as a combination literary trivial pursuit and data gathering tool; really, I’ve fashioned it to measure the level of reader commitment, knowledge, and sophistication within the quarterly publishing industry’s legacy. Sample questions might include something along these lines:
-Identify three quarterlies published in the state of Georgia, our host for the 2007 AWP.
-What is the oldest literary quarterly published in the United States?
-Approximately how many unsolicited submissions does this publication receive in one month?
a) 20 b) 75 c) 300 d) 900 e) too many to count
-Who was the long-time editor (now deceased) of the Paris Review?
-This same review accepts only fiction submissions, true or false?
-List the names of the quarterlies, reviews, or journals to which you subscribe
-Identify one review that closed shop in the past two years.

Readers get the idea.

My stall will have a writers’ venting corner. Here we can exchange stories and our common plight as artists. Suggested topics are still in the works but so far include: “To Follow-Up or Not: Strategies in The Age of Quarterly Writer Overload,” or, “What to Do after the 7-Month Wait”; “Payment in Copies: Coming to Grips with the Real World Writers’ Economy in the 21st Century”; “The Two-Timing Writer: Simultaneous Submissions as the Only Chance in Hell of Posing as a Writer Before Turning Eighty”; “Message in a Bottle: One SASE’s Tales on the High Seas of Slush.” Of course, writers are encouraged to share occasional tiny victories. Complementary cookies and lemonade will be provided to spur discussion.

The stall will of course require a main attraction: my own publications, with the tangential tools and interfaces of the writing trade, e.g., my laptop computer (with my website in default mode), ink cartridges, paper clips, and a collection of my favorite stamps over the years (including 22¢, 25¢, 29¢, 32¢, 33¢, 34¢, 37¢. 39¢, and 41¢). I’m picturing a green tablecloth with traditional white skirting. For special effect, but not to go too much over the top, I’m considering dusting the general collection with an Ultrafine Pearlescent glitter in rainbow colors. Special mentions, publications which I consider high water marks of success and ultimate promise, I will perch on special stands, the same I use for the “new arrivals” section in my high school library. These selections might also include wand-type bookmarkers topped with gold stars. I’m still mulling this possibility.

Additional venue ideas are tentative at best. I’ve thought about scheduling various readings at precise hourly intervals (from my own publications, of course), but given my difficult time mustering the courage to speak with other writers and editors at the 2007 AWP, public readings (even with only three devotees in attendance) appear doubtful.

One way around this vainglorious show is for me to launch an epidemic of press releases to local papers and to the AWP itself, days or perhaps weeks before the 2008 Conference in New York City kicks off. Good writing speaks for itself, of course, but nothing advances the profit potential across the game board for the emerging writer like a journalist plumbing the depths of the writer’s style.

New York City will put me in that writer luminary limelight soon enough.

1 Visit www.thomaswashingon.net and follow the “publications” link for a publishing track record.

2 Again, their reputation precedes them. Quarterly sophisticates will recognize these publications in my author vita. For those still in the dark, please inquire at the booth.

Thomas Washington is a self-proclaimed literary magazine junkie—as well as an author published in Antioch Review and much elsewhere. And, of course, head librarian at the Potomac School. For his website, click here.