Dreams Under Glass at Elliott Bay Book Company; Daughters of the Air, a staff pick at Left Bank Books,; practicing my smize; the traditional book haul on hotel bed picture; signing books at the Lanternfish Press table.

Coming back to Seattle for AWP after having moved away nearly four years ago stirred up all kinds of feelings. I’m glad I decided to make a very specific plan to keep feelings of overwhelm in check. Bright and early on Thursday morning, I started with a panel on medical memoir as I think ahead to expanding my pieces in Newsweek, Healthline, and Catapult into a book (though to be clear, that book would be far in the future).

Health and Illness Narratives: Harnessing Medical Memoir to Impact a Broken System

Featuring: Mary Pan, Emily Maloney, Rana Awdish, Emily Silverman, Suzanne Koven

Each of the panelists at this discussion are both writers and health care practitioners, and each read briefly before the discussion began. Emily Silverman, who runs The Nocturnists, a storytelling community for healthcare workers, read an uplifiting piece from JAMA titled “Comic Relief,” about meeting her idol Kate McKinnon. Emily Maloney read a tense excerpt from her essay collection The Cost of Living, about being a 23-year-old ER tech working at a hospital under the cloud of an enormous debt while carrying her own medical debt from an attempted suicide at age 19. Rana Awdish read a troubling excerpt from her memoir In Shock, about a terrible abdominal surgery done partly without anesthesia and being accused of being a drug addict. Suzanne Koven, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician read “The Doctor’s New Dilemma,” about struggling to ration out her time and emotional energy. Mary Pan read a harrowing memoir of her husband trying to get psychiatric help for paranoia and suicidal ideation and being told he’d have to wait at least a week—until she got on the phone and used her knowledge of the healthcare system to get him an appointment the next day—I still remember the image of him drawing the tip of a pair of scissors on his arm after she returned from nursing their eight-month-old child. What an image.

The panelists talked about the importance of storytelling. Awdish said that during the pandemic, the disbelief in science would have made her less compassionate toward patients who didn’t mask or get vaccinated, if she hadn’t also maintained a practice of storytelling and writing. Koven said the healthcare system dehumanizes patients, caretakers, and families but storytelling rehumanizes them; Easy Beauty is a memoir that helped show physicians they had no training for caring for patients with disabilities. Maloney said that helping healthcare workers tell their stories will help them advocate for improving the healthcare system. Awdish added that flipping between the point of view of patient and physician helped show her systemic problems in the healthcare system. I loved this quote from Suzanne Koven, who wasn’t sure if she read it somewhere or just came up with it: A doctor’s account of illness is a Victorian novel spanning many years but a patient’s account is a Virginia Woolf novel where every moment matters.

They also talked about voices that need to be included in the canon of illness narratives, which seem to be dominated by male physicians. We need to hear more from female physicians, patients, care givers, family members, cafeteria workers, medical helicopter pilots, and so on. An audience member asked about the ethics of patient memoir and whether that is self-exploitative. Maloney, who has a background in bioethics, said there really isn’t the same restriction as with a healthcare practitioner writing about patients; just write something honest and true that supports your experience, and don’t think about whether it is “too much” until after you’ve written. Suzanne Koven quoted Anne Lamott: “Tell the story, we’ll call the lawyers later.” A comment from the audience also brought up medical apartheid; the audience member said she’d been writing poetry but was considering switching to essays to find a broader audience; the panelists recommended Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America and Take My Hand a novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez about the forced sterilization of African-American women. I hope that member of the audience gets their stories out.

This was an excellent panel and I’m glad it was early on in the conference before I got too tired!

The Lyric Essay as Resistance: A Reading and Celebration

Featuring Chloe Garcia Roberts, Chelsea Biondolillo, Molly McCully Brown, Hea-Ream Lee, Michael Torres

This reading celebrated the anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance from Wayne State University Press. As I could have anticipated, I was already tired and did not take as many notes though it was very lovely to listen to each of the readers. I appreciated the panelists defining “resistance” in a number of ways. Lee called it resisting against forms, focusing on images and moving fluidly among timelines. Torres talked about arranging memories non-linearly. Brown asked: what shapes, architectures, bodies are you not seeing on the page—keep the lyric essay wild. Lee mentioned that expansiveness of form allows for invention. This was all reassuring as I bumble around in my lyric essay collection figuring out what feels right for each piece. Onward!

A Very Important Karaoke Party

During the day on Friday, I had a lovely time signing books at the Lanternfish Press table (some pictures above) and it was so nice to meet people who’d read the book or were eager to. Then that night I went to A Very Important Karaoke Party, a night of parody songs around the theme of the writing life at Hugo House. Paulette Perhach organized the event and I was delighted to help write a song based on “Under Pressure” called “Little Green Monster,” all about envy (and forgiving yourself and trying to overcome it). It was fun to see someone else belt it out with a fake Freddie Mercury mustache and very cathartic to sing along with all the songs in the back of the room where no one could hear my individual voice (the only way I will do karaoke!).

I am sure there are many more things I could have mentioned here about trip, but dang if I go on & on. It was great to reconnect with so many folks from my life in Seattle and I hope we can get back sooner than in four years. And I can’t wait to dive into the delicious books we acquired at the book fair (pictured above). If you went to the conference, feel free to share some highlights in the comments!

Will you be at #AWP23 in Seattle? Come by the Lanternfish Press table in the book fair (#432) and say hi! I’ll be signing books on Friday, March 10 from 1-2 pm.

When AWP announced their 2022 conference would be in Philadelphia, I was super excited to go and hang out with my publisher Lanternfish Press in their hometown. During the pandemic, I became a mom, and I'd thought by now perhaps there would be a vaccine for the littlest humans, but as the conference approached it became clear that there would not be one in time. I decided to attend virtually instead. (Fingers crossed for an in-person return to AWP in Seattle in 2023!)

I like to choose a theme for each AWP to narrow down the many options. One year I focused on literary agents. Another year I focused on learning more about the literary magazines I wanted to submit short stories and essays to. This year, I am putting the finishing touches on my third novel, set in the Netherlands in the late medieval/early Renaissance period and in 2016, and I am trying to make progress on my collection of lyric food essays that blend research and memoir, so I am focusing on panels on historic fiction and creative nonfiction.

What follows are some notes from the virtual panels I attended. I hope you find them helpful!

Staying in Key: Recognizing & Avoiding the False Notes of Anachronism

Panelists: Janet Benton, Donna Hemans, Keenan Norris, Jennifer Steil; Moderator: Aimee Liu

Liu invited each author to read a brief excerpt of their work and discuss the challenges they faced writing particular times and places.

Benton read from Lilli De Jong, set in a 19th century alms house in Philadelphia, near a swamp. In this scene, a pressing question for her was: what is the condition of a baby close to death? Her Quaker protagonist meant attending to language, interaction, spiritual belief, and characters' views of the choices they are making in very particular ways. In this time period, Benton noted, Quakers "were not slavish to religion" and "were willing to buck convention," something she wanted to stay cognizant of. At a reading, an octogenarian Quaker asked Benton how she managed to capture the voice of her grandmother, which sounds like quite an accomplishment!

Stiel read from Exile Music, which tells the story of Jewish refugees from Vienna in Boliva in the 1940s. She chose a passage that required a lot of research: what did La Paz look like in the 1940s? How did the refugees communicate, socialize, get help from refugee organizations? What was the effect of altitude on the body? One strategy for writing this book was to make Viennese culture as clear as possible first to demonstrate the sense of loss and disorientation upon arrival in La Paz. As someone who moves to a different country every few years, she now makes sure to take extensive notes upon arrival in each new place, to maintain that perspective.

Liu's novel Glorious Boy is also set in World War II, but on India's Andaman Islands, off the coast of Burma. Researching this novel is what gave Liu the idea for this panel. One question she had as a writer: what is it like to move through a forest that’s never been penetrated and you’re on a spy mission where you can’t leave a trace? The area was used as a penal colony by the British so there were also people from all over India, therefore making it quite a multicultural place. One strategy Liu used was to choose an American protagonist to help avoid anachronisms; she makes mistakes because she is American and then Liu as the author can make those mistakes clear to American readers.

Hemans's novel Tea by the Sea flashes forward to 2010, in Jamaica, where Plum, a young woman born in New York, is in search of the daughter that was taken away from her. As a Jamaican-born author, Hemans had to take care to consider how Plum would see Jamaica. She also needed to take care to depict the landscape of 2010 and not the one she grew up with; for example, a plant disease has ravaged many a coconut farm and there are less cane fields and orange groves than Hemans saw growing up. Hemans also talked about imbuing the landscape of Brooklyn upon Plum's return with a sense of loss.

Norris's novel The Confession of Copeland Cane is set in Oakland from 2020-2030. An important challenge was the need for "fidelity to present tense conditions while looking forward to the future.” For example, COVID emptied out San Francisco in the short term and he had to speculate how that might reverberate over the decade. A special challenge was that he began writing this novel in 2015. Liu remarked that his novel, published in 2021, was the first that showed people grappling with masks. He said, "The desperation of having to rethink my book was a great lesson in the creative risk of writing a book.”

What’s Form Got to Do with It: Finding Shape in Memoir Projects

Panelists: Tyrese Colman, Krys Malcom Belc, Marcos Gonsalez; Moderator: Sarah Fawn Montgomery

I came to this panel thinking about my essay collection but I came out of it also thinking about my one-day memoir of living with a rare chronic illness and choosing to grow my family through adoption.

Tyrese Coleman read from How to Sit, a memoir that is not 100% nonfiction: "Memories are not facts…they contain their own truth regardless of how they’re documented." She recommended David Sedaris's Barrel Fever as an example of a work that mixes fiction and nonfiction in one volume, though the genres are clearly delineated, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street as examples of "memory writing." Her next book will mix historic fiction and memoir (exciting!) and as a memoirist who is not an academic or journalist she encourages others in the same position to provide context before feeling free to offer conclusions, e.g. don't feel obliged to be neutral in your own memoir.

Krys Malcom Belc's The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir in essays that also includes speculative nonfiction, a genre I'd love to learn more about. As he was writing the book, he wondered: was this an essay collection that needed to be diversified or was this a memoir that needed more blending and cohesion? The book's central question: what does it mean to be a transmasculine person who has given birth? Each essay looks at this question but has its own aesthetic and level of research versus personal exploration. Belc spent a lot of time looking at pictures from childhood and legal documents, trying to understand his passage through time, and offers these materials to readers— it’s a visual book. Regarding the question of what research to include and what to exclude, he noted that editors can help point out where there is too much research--the stuff you’re nerding out on that an audience beyond you would not be so interested in.

Marcos Gonsalez wished that before he wrote Pedro’s Theory he'd asked himself “What is the narrative I want the reader to leave with? What are they moments?” The pre-writing process, he advised, should put key moments under a microscope and incorporate the perspectives of others even if it don't align with your own. He also urged the audience to consider: how can you make research reader-friendly and reader-inviting and integrate it into the fabric of the story? How do we include literary criticism or historiography, for example, while still inviting the reader in? Two inviting examples: Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Of course you need to think about your audience when you consider this question. A final important consideration: what painful moments do you want to share with readers and what meaningful moments do you want to share on your own terms, without feeling overexposed?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery spoke to resisting the traditional narrative arc of memoirs of mental illness. She urged the audience: "don't revise your life." She said, "Flirting with the truth" helped her "stay true to madness" in her first memoir Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir. Her intended audience was her family, which did not go to the doctor, so she took medical language and research to show how doctors were overly sedating women or categorizing normal emotions as madness. Her forthcoming lyric memoir, Halfway from Home, blends Montaigneian essays with hermit crab essays and research in “the psychology of mirror and 19th century oil painting and the science of nostalgia" among other super intriguing topics!

That's all for today; hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with more tidbits. If you're attending AWP in person or virtually, what are some pieces of advice you're gleaning that you're finding helpful?

Neither of these are the physical book fair, but they are *both* at the #AWPVirtualbookfair!

Last year around this time, Michael and I traipsed about Portland for AWP, skirting the conference itself, simply enjoying off-site readings and the book fair on Saturday. It was a lovely way to round out our time in the Pacific Northwest.

This year, because of our move, I never had any intentions of going to the conference in San Antonio, but because of the coronavirus, lots of folks, including my publisher Lanternfish Press have cancelled their trips. Because small presses depend on AWP each year for sales, a virtual book fair has been set up as a Google Doc by Trevor Ketner, publisher of Skull + Wind Press, inspired by poets G. Calvocoressi, Dana Levin, and Greg Pardlo. Now folks can browse from afar, and check out the many beautiful books and journals on sale here at #AWPVirtualBookfair. In random scrolling through the virtual book fair, I came across this intriguing book of poetry, Goodbye Wolf, by Nik De Dominic. Most discount codes are good through Sunday. Lanternfish Press is offering 30% off all of their books (including Daughters of the Air); use the code AWP2020.

Another press I love that has cancelled its trip to San Antonio is Fairy Tale Review. Their newest issue, back issues, subscriptions, and the complete set of issues are 20% off. Use code AWP20. The title story of my in-progress story collection, "More Like Home Than Home," is in their Wizard of Oz-themed Emerald Issue. It's set in Brooklyn in the 1980s and is a potpourri of the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Twelve Dancing Princesses.

But what is a book fair without getting to pick up a book and open it at random? Below is random page from Daughters of the Air (you can read the opening over at Tin House). Beneath that, a taste of what all is in FTR's Emerald Issue.

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Stay healthy out there! Enjoy yer book browsing & book reading!

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This past weekend was my sixth time attending the AWP conference. My first was in New York in 2008, an overwhelming affair of 8,000 writers crammed into a couple Midtown hotels. That year, I sat on the floor beside a woman from Texas Tech who thought my plan to wait five years before getting an MFA was absurd. The next thing I knew, I was working as a paralegal to save money for graduate school, and by August 2009, I had a full ride to the University of Washington and Michael and I moved cross-country to Seattle. You could say that AWP changed our life pretty radically.

Over the years, we went to a smattering of conferences, but each year I went to fewer and fewer panels, as they tend to repeat and I learned you can only soak up so much information. In 2015 in Minneapolis, I mostly had lunch and dinner with friends, a most pleasant experience, but I'd realized the conference fee had been a waste. Next time, I resolved, I would go to AWP without going to AWP.

Last year in Tampa, with my novel just out, I didn't get to do that. But *this* year, in Portland, it finally happened, and I highly recommend it to folks who've been around the AWP block. I was more relaxed. More hydrated! I had time to stay on top of my online teaching, so less stressed.

Now for some highlights:

Wednesday night, we started at The Old Portland, a wine bar owned by Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. They only serve old French wine; I misheard the description of the Corsican rosé as "foggy" and enjoyed it very much; Michael enjoyed a ten-year-old red Bordeaux. Then, the very Portland-y (more stoner than twee Portlandia) bartender said, "Yeah, we don't like advertise or anything," and showed us the Odditorium, the band's 10,000-foot "clubhouse," where they rehearse, record, film music videos, and the like. It was cavernous and quiet. Michael, a big Dandy Warhols fan, was in heaven.

"Ice Cream," the mono-print I made at VSC when I was sad that the ice cream shop had closed and there was no ice cream to be had.

Thursday afternoon, we went to the Vermont Studio Center alumni happy hour. I'd finished a first draft of Daughters of the Air there back in 2007. Three former literary staff read poetry from their recent releases. A line from Nandi Comer's American Family: A Syndrome: "If there is blood, the artist has chosen to omit it." Ryan Walsh spoke of the connection between visual art and writing at VSC (I still cherish learning how to make a mono-print there) and vegetable poems. Zayne Turner read from "Her Radioactive Materials."

Most of the other readings I attended featured numerous readers, so, forthwith, more of a collage:

Reading "Cauliflower Tells You"

At Strange Theater: A Fabulist Reading, there were spiders and trousseaus and swans roasted in revenge and Japanese monsters and red rooms and porcine men and tyrants and cauliflower-fueled murder. A doll's head was raffled off, among other trinkets; I offered a rare talisman of Cyndi Lauper's trip to Yemen.

Friday, we went to the PageBoy Magazine Happy Hour, featuring 17-word poems and prose. It was a fun afternoon of zingy one-liners and dreamy experimental works and Gertrude Stein jokes. Then we were off to Literary Bingo with Lilla Lit, a new Portland-based reading series; it was fast and furious with four-minute readings (a loud buzzer ushered off writers going over). Chocolate was pelted at every shout of "bingo!"; I caught a peanut-butter ball overhead with my left hand and won a copy of Jennifer Perrine's In the Human Zoo. I also read a poem and someone won a copy of Daughters of the Air. All readings should have strict word and time limits and buzzers and prizes!

Saturday, we paid $5 to get into the convention center book fair. I had a lovely time chatting with Chicago-based folks in advance of our move (yes! big news tucked away over here; more on that in a future post), signing books at the Lanternfish Press table, and seeing fellow LFP authors Charles J. Eskew (Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark) and Andrew Katz (The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls). It was also super cool meeting Carmen Maria Machado, who signed Her Body and Other Parties and Carmilla, an LFP reprint of a lesbian vampire romance that predates Dracula, with a Borgesian introduction and footnotes by Machado.

Fun!

We also picked up a whole slew of poetry in translation (from Romanian and Hebrew), essays on art, novels, short story collections. I can't wait to read it all! Our last stop was the Northwest Micropress Fair at the Ace Hotel, where I signed copies of Sugar, my chapbook from Chin Music Press, and hung out with regional small presses, which felt like a special little send off before we leave the Pacific Northwest.

I heard that the conference had ballooned to 12,000 (15,000?) attendees. Amazing! Perhaps, perhaps, we'll be in San Antonio next year, and if not San Antonio, Kansas City, and if not Kansas City, Philadelphia...?

In my last post I promised blood. Well, I'll just say I slid my boot off Friday night and it was like I was one of Cinderella's stepsisters. I'm still limping. On to day 3!What is a better breakfast than a leftover Cuban sandwich? Leftover fried oysters. Just kidding! The Cuban sandwich was much better. Day 3 was the best because Michael got a one-day pass and we got to roam the book fair together."The Worst Writing Advice I Ever Got" is an irresistible title, so of course we wrenched ourselves away from the book fair for it. Here, without narrative, a fun grab-bag of quotes:

• "Creative writing aphorisms are as useful as Dr. Phil." -Chris Abani
• "Your book won't save you. It's just something you're going to do because you're nuts." -Min Jin Lee
• "How do I handle writer's block? I don't write." -Ada Limón

I appreciated Limón's story of navigating two groups of people: those who roll their eyes at "abuelita poems" and those who say, "where's your abuelita poem?" And Melissa Stein's remark that dread may be a sign that advice you've been given may not be for you, anxiety might mean it's worth exploring the challenge, and excitement is obviously a good sign. Abani noted that "Craft advice is only important if you're asking questions. What are you trying to do?"We stuck around for a reading and conversation between Min Jin Lee and Sigrid Nunez. Nunez on writing about sex: "The vocabulary is not there. It's either coy, clinical, or filthy, none of which do justice to human sexuality." At the book signing, Lee called Michael and me adorable. So that happened.My attention span went out the door by mid-afternoon, so it was off to the hotel bar for wine and fried calamari! Naturally, someone in panda suit wandered in. Next year in Portland! Maybe Seattleites can get some party buses organized...

The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas,  and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!)  Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.

I'm back home after a whirlwind book tour that ended with AWP in Tampa. Michael and I drove up from Delray Beach through the Everglades, hoping to spot alligators, and though there were none, pelicans abounded.We arrived in time for me to catch one panel Thursday afternoon, "Difficult History: Jewish Fiction in the Alt-Right World," which began with brief readings from each panelist. Emily Barton read from The Book of Esther, an alternate history in which a Turkic Jewish warrior state that disappeared in the Middle Ages existed into August 1942. Simone Zelitch read from her novel Judenstaat, another alternate history, this one set in 1980 in the Jewish sovereign state established in the province of Saxony in 1948. Amy Brill read from Hotel Havana, about Jewish refugees in Havana in the 1930s and '40s, highlighting the fresh pain German Jews felt compared to Polish Jews, since Polish Jews had always been considered Jewish rather than Polish, whereas German Jews had thought of themselves as German. And Irina Reyn read from a work-in-progress ending on this note: "A Russian woman doesn't wait. A Russian woman acts."On the question of what is Jewish fiction, Zelitch quoted a character of hers: "We don't bow down. We cross borders. We remember." Reyn recalled her unhappy Jewish day school experience as a Russian immigrant who never felt she belonged (I totally related to this, being neither a "real" American or Israeli at my elementary school); she said, "Jewish fiction is constant negotiation: where do you belong?" Brill remarked that as a reform Jew who went to Sunday school and never really understood her bat mitzvah asked: how do you handle writing a character that is either less than or more than your own religiosity? Barton said that for The Book of Esther she generated 90 questions and found a rabbi willing to discuss them all with her; then she showed the finished manuscript to another rabbi. She said that after revision and publication she still got things weirdly wrong. Oy! On the question of how much to explicate for the reader, Barton said she wants Christian Americans to know what's like to be a religious minority: "I looked up pentecost; you can look up havdallah."Barton also made a point I feel strongly about (and have written about in Salon and Jewish in Seattle): it is important to revisit history and re-enliven it. Alternate history, she suggested, is one way to get around Holocaust fatigue. Zelitch added, "Judaism has to be more than the Holocaust and Israel," that we should look to the international Jewish experience and the refugee crisis. Reyn then touched on "diasporic anxiety," the need to be more Jewish than you really are in order to connect with Jews in a new place (again, something I totally relate to since moving to Seattle from New York, and touched on in an essay for The Rumpus). Zelitch added that today dystopian fiction seems like a cop out and the challenge is to write engaging utopian fiction, that we need to see powerless people taking power and people need to lose themselves in this kind of story. Before opening up the discussion to audience questions, Brill said: "The arc of justice is not necessarily moving on its own. We need to push it."It was certainly an invigorating panel! One or two more posts to come...

This year, AWP has been schmoozier, in a pleasant way, as I spent more time with readings, receptions, and lunch/coffee/dinner dates and less time with panels and the book fair. We took a break from the conference Friday night to see Mr. Burns at the Gutherie Theater, an apocalyptic play spanning from the near future to 75 years into the future, in which the surviving population tries to retell and recreate episodes from The Simpsons (particularly the "Cape Fear" episode) as a way of coping. Over time, The Simpsons evolves into totally weird, wonderful, and scary mythology. I highly recommend it!The two panels I attended were excellent, and I'm posting my notes right over here:Small is the New Big: Working with Independent Presses to Build a Literary CareerModerator: Michelle Brower, agent at Folio Literary ManagementPanelists: Molly Fuller, Production Editor of Coffee House Press; Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director of Graywolf Press; Erin Harris, agent at Folio Literary Management; and Cal Morgan, Executive Editor of Harper and Editorial Director of Harper Perennial.

• Access to early and frequent publication (such as online) has allowed an enormous amount of creativity. Adventurous small presses are publishing successful works, and big houses are discovering writers earlier as a result.   -Cal Morgan
• Small presses take on books that might not seem readily marketable from a big publisher's perspective, but can maximize those books' audiences.                    -Ethan Nosowsky
• Small presses can facilitate reviews that build the writer's readership.     -Erin Harris
• The reputation and backlist of a small press have cultural capital.                           -Molly Fuller
• Small presses are also an opportunity for seasoned authors to try something new. -Michelle Brower
• Many authors who work with both small and big presses are big supporters of new writers and facilitate connections.                               -Cal Morgan
• It was a relief to hear all the panelists are avid readers of small press books!

Examples of successes:

• Eiomear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, published by Coffee House after the author spent 10 years trying to get it published and being told the publishers loved it but thought readers wouldn't enjoy it. You may already know the book is enormously successful. 
• Erin Harris found short story writer Stacy Tintocalis after reading her collection The Tiki King, published by Swallow Press, an imprint of Ohio University Press, and discovered Brian Furuness, author of The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson (Dzanc) after reading two of his stories in literary magazines.
• Graywolf Press published a 20-year retrospective of Geoff Dyer's essays and was able to do so  successfully based on its backlist of essay collections.
• Cal Morgan discovered Blake Butler after publishing his short stories in the blog Fifty-Two Stories; he went on to publish three books from Butler, and Butler connected him to more authors.

It's a Crime to Skip this Panel: Approaches to Crime Fiction(Nb. The authors on this panel have multiple books out--see the link above for a more expansive list.)Moderator: Michael Kardos, author of Before He Finds Her.Panelists: Joy Castro, author of Hell or High Water; Chris Abani, author of Secret History of Las Vegas; Christopher Coake, author of You Came Back; Lori Rader-Day, author of The Black Hour.

• Much of great literature (Beloved, The Great Gatsby) spins around a crime. -Michael Kardos
• Joy Castro explores the chasm between the ideal of legal justice and its reality. She asks: whose law? To control whose bodies is the law written? Who is permitted to get away with crime? Who isn't? How does the aftermath manifest?
• The best suspense comes from characters: embed them with contradictions and set them loose. Don't choose a main character who knows everything.    -Joy Castro
• Misdirections and clues should all arise from point of view: different characters will pick up on different things. -Lori Rader-Day
• Think of pacing as interval training, alternating between intense, fast-paced, action-packed scenes and more quiet, emotional scenes. -Joy Castro
• Every story is a riddle. Stories trace an outline for the riddle of living. We don't care about characters who are not fucked up.       -Chris Abani
• Good art sets out to do something and does it. That's all there is. There are no genres. -Chris Abani
• Finding the voice of the novel is key to finding the novel. -Joy Castro
• Structure is the skeleton of a book. Voice is its soul, its reason for existence. -Chris Abani
• If you're a surgeon and remove the wrong kidney, that's bad. You have so many opportunities to get your book right.                             -Michael Kardos

On research:

• Read two books then close your eyes. -Christopher Coake
• Write the book before you do research, then research what you need to know. -Lori Rader-Day
• Research a lot then forget it. Don't write with your notes open; the divine details will come to you. -Joy Castro (My preferred approach...I love research and tend to pick stories that require it.)
• The only question you need is "Why?" -Chris Abani

Book Fair Loot!I sprinted through the book fair in the last 45 minutes on Saturday. I managed to get something from every genre, as well something from every "genre" of book fair stuff: freebies, cheapies, full price-ys, a notepad, bookmarks, and even an adorable pinwheel from Pacifica Literary Review, fashioned from pages of poetry.I'm also happy to discover that Twitter *can* work for authors. Shulem Deem, author of the memoir All Who Go Do Not Return (Graywolf Press) followed me on Twitter several months ago; I was intrigued by the premise of his memoir, which is about leaving the Hasidic Jewish community; and his was the first book I bought at the fair. Can't wait to read it.See you in L.A. in 2016!