I’m writing this in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Kansas City at 2am, where writers, football fans, and participants in a local cheerleading competition are still laughing around me. The party spirit has taken hold in this city tonight, and three very different kinds of revelers are out in full force, mingling and jostling at the bar, laughing at very different jokes. Every AWP has that feeling of unexpected kismet; whatever other noble human pursuits are going on, in whatever city we find ourselves, have a way of rubbing up against each other.
I’m here to catch an early plane home after an excellent, abridged trip to the writing conference that I’ve attended most years since this massive traveling circus first rolled up to my hometown of Boston in 2013. I still remember my nervousness that first year, when I knew nobody and nothing, and found myself awed and daunted by the streams of people in the massive convention center, the endless rows of tables at the bookfair, and the thrumming ambition of every person around me. Now AWP is old hat, but it still feels thrilling and a little daunting the first moment I step off an escalator and encounter the crowds and the tables, the rippling blue curtains and the stacks of tote bags. Now, AWP is my yearly chance for reunion. I see writers here every year that I see nowhere else. I have AWP buddies that I walk the bookfair and have lunch and drinks with. Together we look back at the year, comparing, commiserating, cheering each other on.
This year felt particularly important because I’ve just had a baby, and leaving home felt more daunting and impossible than ever. I didn’t initially think I’d make the trip at all. But the literary magazine that had published a short story of mine, the brilliant Ninth Letter, invited me to read at their “Monster Mags of the Midwest” off-site reading. Suddenly I had a reason to go. I was wanted; and I thought it would feel validating, a re-affirmation of my writing self, to make the trip. So I packed a day bag, woke up at 2am for a flight, and I went.
I’m so glad I did. The old friends were here to talk to, including some I haven’t seen in eight or more years. The reading was magical; a series of passionate poets and fiction writers, speaking under old timey nautical artwork and dangling fairy lights to a rapt audience. My people were here, listening attentively, coming up to offer a word of thanks or a compliment for the story afterward. We wonder about the worth of events like these; whether it’s worth it to make the journey, pay the fare, get the hotel. And I say, if you can possibly swing it, to go. The first time you go, you might feel intimidated, awed, overwhelmed. But the second or the third or the eighth time, things start to click; you have friends to meet; the panels remind you of new things to try; the people remind you why you’re doing this after all, how there’s still such exciting work to be done.
Writers think they’re such solitary beasts; at the end of a long day of AWP, you often find people curled up on the floor of the long hallways, resting or de-compressing from so much social interaction. Most of us are introverts, after all. But we still need that occasional jolt of collective meaning. We still need to hear the gossip, to cheer each other on or jostle together at a hotel bar in a new city, talking the talk. We still need to be understood by people like us, once in a while.
My ride is almost here; I’ll be winging my way home soon, to laundry and baby smiles and toddler hugs and all the ways people in my regular life need me. But I’ll have stored up a little more of my writing self for when I most need it.