AWP POST-MORTEM: I go to writing conferences to meet with old friends and to learn new things, not necessarily in that order. Friends and colleagues were in abundance at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Austin, Texas, March 8-11. During my first stroll through the Austin Hilton Thursday evening I ran into poet and one-time Wyoming Arts Council board member Len Edgerly, nature writer Kurt Caswell who deserted Cheyenne last year for a job at Texas Tech, Jason Shinder, poet and YMCA Writer’s Voice guru, Colorado State University colleague Wendy Rawlings who now teaches at Crimson Tide U, and one-time Sheridan resident Aurelie Sheehan, now head of the University of Arizona’s writing program. Sharon Dynak of the Ucross Foundation on hand for a panel about artists’ communities. I could drop some other names into the mix, but you get the idea: lots of people. AWP wasn’t always that way. When the organization last met in Austin in 1987, it conducted 16 events with 35 authors for 300 conferees. Wasn’t much larger when I attended my first conference in Denver in 1990 (or maybe it was ’91). This time, thousands of attendees had a choice of 15 concurrent panels per 90-minute session from 9-to-5 for three straight days. Not to mention the evening readings and the book fair in a cavernous hall at the convention center. The dreaded book fair. All those excellent books and journals, yet such a tiny balance on the credit card. Veteran AWP-goers and book vultures know to hit the book fair at 4 p.m. on closing day to snag as much free swag as can be toted on to Frontier Airlines. While I did this on Saturday, I ended up spending even more, signing up for a two-year subscription of Georgia Review and buying Jon Balaban’s two new books from Copper Canyon. I plunked down ten bucks for a forthcoming anthology of up-and-coming Colorado fiction writers by Boston’s Black Ocean Books. Then I fled to the conference’s final sessions, which included a talk by Tim O’Brien. It was a good enough speech, but made more entertaining by the print version scrolling across a giant screen. Mrs. Malaprop must have been taking dictation, as every tenth word was a mangled version of itself. O’Brien, one of my favorite writers, didn’t even stay around to sign books. An odd thing. For three days, writers were bending over backwards to sign their books (and if you think that’s easy, try it some time). The book fair had dozens of signings, and enterprising readers mercilessly tracked down writers at receptions and even in restrooms to get them to sign books. That night, I waited awhile near the Book People table to see if perchance O’Brien might return and help put books into the hands of his readers. But he didn’t.
