“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering & reordering the chaos of experience.” ~ Sylvia Plath (the unabriged journals)
Author’s Note: I’ve been gifting lifetime subscriptions to fellow writers, so I feel a bit better about putting upcoming posts behind a paywall. This one gets personal—discussing friends & fellow poets who are also real people… So I feel some discretion is called for, even though the only thing I find myself criticizing is the culture of taking money from hopeful writers!
I remember the first AWP I attended (in Chicago, 2009). I went all by myself, stayed with a friend I had a major falling-out with, saw snow fall for the first time, & returned to the news that I’d been accepted into graduate school for poetry... I remember attending a second (in DC, 2011) with cohorts from that same writing program, all starry-eyed to see our professors give their panels.
Both times, I scoured the schedule & circled every event I wanted to attend—so many of them overlapping with each other that I kept falling asleep on the floors in corridors—exhausted, yet full of fresh ideas & poetic inspirations to last me many months. However, I can’t remember either one as vividly as the third & last time I attended the well-known conference (in Minneapolis, 2015).
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