The elevator door opened on the 16th floor of the Marriott, where I was staying, and there they were: a scraggly bunch, some in oversized wrinkled shirts, some in sparkly black jumpsuits, but all wearing exhaustion and tell-tale name tags around their necks. Just about everyone, including me, hadn't been sleeping well lately or for most of their lives, and it showed. But we were an exceedingly present, if not yet caffeinated-enough bunch with a je-ne-suis-quoi air about us. All of us were attending the Associated Writing Program (AWP) conference right here in downtown Kansas City.
"You're all writers," I said as I got in the elevator.
"You can see by the despair in our eyes," one answered.
"And the wrinkles of continual disappointment," answered another.
When we landed in the lobby I got out first, then turned back to them and called out, "Goodbye, my people!"
Because they are my people, but the place where we were heading a half block away -- a gray steel massive few blocks of a building -- was not exactly our kind of place. For one thing, all the walls are gray and go on forever in height and miles. For another, it's crazy loud in the rivers of hallways, up and down escalators, and especially at the massive book fair of 800 or so vendors where we get our 10,000 steps a day in easily on our treasure hunts for someone -- a publisher, a literary journal, a place to teach -- to love us.
All in all, it was a veritable city of writers with somewhere between 12,000-15,000 from all over the world trying to navigate maps and apps, panels and readings, and especially where to get some coffee and find a hidey-hole for a few minutes. Even if we're not all introverts, we are definitely people who like or need to spend a lot of time alone. We are experts at ruminating on words, pacing in search of plot points, and staring out windows, at walls, into the landscape of our own imaginations where an old oak tree can morph into a panther on a mountain or a lost child in a Thai restaurant. We invent and create, erase and overwrite, clarify and confuse, often times in old sweatpants and a t-shirt from 1989 that even the moths won't eat.
I have only dabbled in past AWP conferences, crashing the 2000 Kansas City AWP to attend a panel and only popping in at the 2015 Minneapolis AWP for events I was doing. While I can enjoy the surf of big crowds, it's not my bag, it's expensive, and I would rather connect with writers wandering the prairie or at intimate conferences in historic houses. Yet this year -- because it was in Kansas City (a mere 45 minutes from my home), my proposal for a panel (6 Kansas poets laureate talk about poetry and politics here) got accepted (a rare thing!), and the Transformative Language Arts Network had a booth I promised to help staff -- I opted for full immersion. Likely, I told myself, this would be my first and last full AWP, so why not leap into the city of writers with abandon?
A city of writers it was! Walking down the street with my friend Joy after hearing the astonishing Jericho Brown, we sidled up to a glorious 50-something New York City poet who grew up gay in a loving Black family in Alabama. Within minutes, we were sharing secrets, promising to look up each others' poetry, and hugging goodbye. Just about every hour or two, I walked right into encounters like this, chumming together with people I just met as if we're old friends. Of course, there were also old friends to speed-hug while run-walking to the escalator for something I was late for and old publishers to shoot the shit with while strategizing on how to stay awake for the rest of the afternoon.
Working at the TLA Network booth at the end of AWP with my friend Cheryl, both of us exhausted (as was everyone by then) and eating some of the popcorn we were handing out, I asked, "Do you feel like we're in some surrealistic dream that just keeps getting weirder?"
"Absolutely," she answered. "And eating popcorn as we watch this makes it seem even more like a dream."
Now that I'm back in my living room working on the couch and watching the relatively quiet sky this bright Wednesday, AWP seems even more like a particularly vivid and confusing dream. I can't remember all of what happened, only that the lanes of the book fair and passages of the conference center went on forever, faces from my past or future popping in to smile or wink at me. What the dream means may be revealed in time but I'm grateful for co-dreaming this with epics of poets, elevators of memoir writers, stairways of mixed-genre high flyers, and everyone else writing because they just have to write. #AWP24
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