Traded for Six and Bought One

AWP has come and gone. It deserves a full update--an amazing weekend, to be sure. That said, exhaustion wins out--so this will be far too short. It was great to encounter po-folks from the blogosphere (Sandy at the bookfair! C. Dale at his signing! Josh working the Grist table! Eduardo in the hotel bar! Professor Plum with a candlestick! Oliver on the plane back to Seattle!). It was great to celebrate Hollins. It was great to see my book into so many folks' hands. It was great to surround myself with wonderful and talented people for three days, but the best to still want to go home at the end. Until next year, blue curtains.

*************

A convention hotel is, to misquote and half-elide a friend of mine, a humorless place. Good Saturday morning to you, then, friends and fans of weather, from the edge of Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, home of this year's beret-and-cheek-kiss festival of penmanship. A writer's conference. This you want no part of. Witness the six quasivirginal boys downstairs wearing semihispter t-shirts staring at the grad school girl who's come down for breakfast barefoot and wearing a tiny tank top and still tinier shorts. And we know who she is already, is the problem: She's the one who's already been in the program a year by the time you get there, the one everybody falls for, the one who leaves a kind of scorched earth in her wake. Students, teachers, teachers' pets—she's equal opportunity. You know better. Everybody does. Doesn't matter. She knows who you are, too: You're the next one she's trying to shock. As another friend said over an eight-dollar hotel bar beer last night: The less people pay attention, the bigger it gets.

Drew Perry elegantly blogs AWP. There's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

***************

Man, oh man.