How to use this Page

I didn't have any early panels to attend so I went to book fair first. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Jeanne Leiby, editor of The Florida Review.  I found out she just won the Doris Bawkin Prize from the Carolina Wren Press for her short story collection, Downriver, which will be out this fall.  We had a really nice long talk as she grew up just about 20 minutes south of where I did and found out she'll be back in the fall to read from her new book.  We also talked about The Florida Review, Dzanc Books plans to help literary journals and Roy Kesey.

Right around the corner from her was Stacey Swann and American Short Fiction.  We had a nice discussion about the DBLJ (which will now be the shorthand for Dzanc Books Literary Journal project), about their recent issue with a Roy Kesey story and how it came to be included in the issue, as well as how the journal has resurfaced the past year or so after having gone defunct in 1998.

Next up was Pleiades, and a brief meeting of Wayne Miller, along with a pretty lengthy conversation with new Fiction Editor, Matthew Eck.  Turns out Eck has a book coming out himself later this year, from Milkweed Editions - a novel.  He pointed out how Pleiades reviews lesser known books from smaller presses, and I picked up their latest volume.  While Pleiades is known for their poetry, this one has an excellent story from EWN favorite, Gary Fincke, in it.

Speaking of Milkweed Editions, I wandered down the line to their table and was greeted by their wonderful Director of Publicity and Marketing, Emily S. Cook.  I say wonderful because Emily is one of those publicists that pays attention to details - instead of sending me their full catalogue every six months, she sends out one book that she's sure I'll like based on my past tastes and reviews - she's not been wrong yet.  She also knows who she's sending things out to - while my tag said Dzanc Books, she read the name and immediately said, you're with the Emerging Writers Network.  We talked a bit about their new novel from Anosh Irani which she's very excited about.  And while looking at their catalogue, I noticed that Matthew Eck was being quite humble earlier on as his novel, The Farthest Shore, is Milkweed's 2007 National Fiction Prize winner!

Next up was Gina Frangello at Other Voices.  This was an exciting meeting for me as Gina is somebody I've had great email 'conversations' with over the past few years.  She can also be partially blamed for the Dzanc Books publishing as it came out of conversations in which she heavily suggested I try to get involved in independent publishing. 

I had to run from there up to the Graywolf Press reading panel, but it was a huge disappointment.  Not due to the authors involved, but because of the speaker system.  It was in a very long and narrow room and I was in the back fifth.  We could barely hear back there and people kept getting up to leave.  I listened to Alyson Hagy read from her forthcoming novel, Snow, Ashes, but when Albert Goldbarth got up and started telling jokes, I could barely even tell his lips were moving, and wasn't hearing even the slightest bit of noise.  He was obviously funny though, as the front third of the audience was laughing out loud.

I went back down to the bookfair for a bit and wandered to the far corner of the floorplan, one not visited all that frequently it seemed.  I wandered over to The Seattle Review table - the new issue contains fiction from both Valerie Trublood and Gary Fincke.  They had some flyers for a couple of contests that you have until the end of the month to submit to.

Next to that table was Barrelhouse where I finally got to meet two of their editors, Mike Ingram and Dave Housley.  They had quite the festive table, loaded with army men, rubber balls and other toys.  Their new issue has a story by J. Chris Rock in it!

Right around the corner, in what might have been the worst location in the entire bookfair, was Akashic Books and Johanna Ingalls.  It was nice being able to thank her personally for some of the fine books she's sent my way this past year or two.

I hit one more table before running back up to the next panel and it was a great one - Ballyhoo Stories and Quick Fiction were sharing a table.  Suzanne Pettypiece was representing Ballyhoo Stories, who have a piece from Felicia Sullivan in their most recent issue.  Adam Pieroni was manning the QF portion, and I bought a great deal subscription from them so as to get a copy of issue number 10, which of course is now known as the Aaron Burch issue.

Next up was the panel where last year's five big short story collection award winners read from their work.  First up was Randy Nelson reading from his Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award winner, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men.  He was followed by Jim Tomlinson's read of a story from his Iowa Short Fiction Award winner Things Kept, Things Left Behind.  Greg Downs followed with a story from his own FOC winner, Spit Baths.  Next up was Kevin Moffett and a story from his Iowa winner, Permanent Visitors, and the panel was wrapped up by Todd Pierce reading from his Drue Heinz Award winning Newsworld.  While I'd met Jim Tomlinson the day before in front of The Kenyon Review table and again at the EWN get together, this was my chance to meet Greg Johnson and Kevin Moffett, two EWN members for some time now.

I then attended a panel about having writers as teachers in schoolrooms K-12.  It was very interesting, though I stepped out right before it was over as some of the questions being asked were leading it away from my own interests.  The panelists were all great.

Next up was the Historical Fiction panel and it was another very entertaining one.  It had Tommy Franklin, Mark Winegardner, Justin Cronin and Jennifer Vanderbes.  All of the authors had well thought out beliefs on how to research and utilize information in regards to historical writing.  The panel had some interest added to it as Justin and Mark did not necessarily agree on certain aspects of the usage of information.  The panel was well attended.  I introduced myself to Mark Winegardner afterwards, as he and I have corresponded before and he did an EWN interview.  However, being able to say hello to, and shake hands with, Tommy Franklin and his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, was truly one of the highlights of the week for me.  I've been emailing these two since they year 2000 about their writing, other writers, Mississippi, having kids, jobs, etc. and to finally be able to meet them in person was very cool.

Thursday evening officially started off with the informal EWN Get Together.  Blown away would be the way I'd put the response.  The first few people who arrived were Philip F. Deaver, Jim Tomlinson, and Cliff Garstang.  When Aaron Hamburger also showed up with a friend, we went to a spot and moved three tables together, creating a space for about 20 to 25 people.  As some left, others arrived over the next few hours.  The group of people I consider some of my closest friends from Michigan set up shop over in a corner (Jeff Parker, Aaron Burch, Dwayne Hayes, Jessica Bomarito, Stefan and Sanaz Kiesbye and I believe Jeff's buddy Jonathan Fink).  A mess of people from SIU's MFA program (every student but one in their program came - that's how to represent at AWP - a bunch I only know by first names and some I don't even know at all, but Jason Lee Brown, Andrew Lewellen, Desiree Dighton, Alex (I want to say Lumens), Chris Bryson, Mary Keck, and Kurt were all there for the long haul) were there in force and had a couple of tables of their own.

Ed Falco stopped by with two of his graduate students, David Lynn was in the area, Soniah Kamal stopped by, as did Annie Gilson.  Maryanne Stahl popped in (I think.  It's also possible Maryanne stopped by after my panel this a.m. and I cannot remember when I spoke with her - either time was a bit overwhelming), Kelly Shriver did as well.  Nicole Kelby came by and entertained me with stories for a while.  Hannah Tinti and Maribeth Batcha came by with Pei-Ling Lue, Devin Emke and Katie Sexton from One Story.  The quartet of Kellie Wells, Meg Sefton, Stacy Barton and Rachel Cantor swung on in, had to sit at a separate table and I apologize immensely for never getting over to talk to them until seeing them put their coats back on.  Stacy did come back and hang out once it was just myself and the SIU gang.  Xujun Eberlein stopped in for a bit.  Michael Czyzniejewski popped in for a nice discussion, as did Quinn Dalton, who showed up when many others were wandering, allowing me to have a nice long conversation with one of the longer standing members of the EWN that showed up, which was very nice.

Update:  Please, feel free to mention in the comments that you were there if I've forgotten to name you.  Beyond missing Gayle Brandeis' name (her new book is in stores as of last week), I know I also forgot to mention in an earlier post that I ran into Lee Martin and Eileen Pollack Thursday morning in between panels.

I've also heard that Carolyn "Pinky" Kellogg and Gwenda Bond showed up, walked around the bar unable to find us, and took off for brighter pastures - I hope not too many others did, it's not like anybody knew wtf I looked like before this week.  My apologies for not keeping my head up at all times and noticing you.

To those who did show up - huge appreciations from this end - it was truly a much larger congregation than I had ever imagined would wander on in.

Afterwards, the SIU contingent and I left the sports bar and bumped back into the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti/Pensacola (FL) contingent just getting back from a party.  We all headed over to the Hilton Lobby Bar to join the nightly throng.  Here I bumped into Carolyn Kellogg, and met Gwenda Bond for the first time, as well as her husband Christopher Rowe, Gavin Grant (Small Beer Press), Kelly Link, Jeff Vandermeer, Anne Vandermeer, and Jedediah Berry.  I also had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Ervin, writer of both fiction and many great book reviews.  This would be the first of many, many times I got to bump into, and chat with, Andrew, to my own good fortune.  Andrew is also an Assistant Editor for Ninth Letter.  With Andrew were Cory Holding and Juan Sanchez, both Editorial Assistants for the journal, and Russ, whose title, and last name, I missed hearing over the week.

I perhaps foolishly went right from the first two panels of the day right down to the bookfair, which was held in two joined large rooms in the basement of the Hilton.  With over 300 tables involved, things were cramped.  Most will probably agree that's putting it nicely.  Apparently this is especially true if you attended AWP in Austin, TX last year where things were quite spacious.

I had a chance to meet and/or have discussions with Fred Ramey and Greg Michalson of Unbridled Books.  Met Rusty Barnes of Night Train when I was by the Absinthe/Hobart table.  I had Nancy Zafris, fiction editor of The Kenyon Review stop me and take my picture - I then saw her again with Editor David Lynn and Managing Editor, Meg Galipault, over at the KR table.  I also found C.M. Mayo at the Tameme table, where she was kind enough to a) hand me a copy of An Avocado from Michoacan by Agustin Cadena, translated by herself - a lovely looking bilingual chapbook Tameme has released, as well as introduce me to Francisco Aragon, who handed me another fine looking chapbook - The Night Tito Trinidad KO'ed Ricardo Mayorga - poems by Kevin A Gonzalez.  The cover is made to look like a boxing poster, which goes nicely with the title.

I also met Kristin at the Macadam/Cage table who was kind enough to pass along a galley of Pia Z. Ehrardt's forthcoming story collection, Famous Fathers.  I ran into John McNally who had a table for his new anthology, When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, which I picked up.  This had some great work in it, all solicited for the anthology (Maud Newton, Tod Goldberg, and Julianna Baggott are some I've already read and enjoyed, and there are many more great authors involved).

I also popped in on John Gallaher and subscribed to The Laurel Review - a bargain at the AWP rate of $5.  There was also the interesting Geri Taran, who had a table set up for her organization:  In the Company of Good Writers, which sets up online writing seminars.

The number of journals and presses that were there that I've never heard of before amazed me.  And I'm talking about publishers with a table full of new books, and journals on issue 16 or 17, not brand new entities to the industry.  After about an hour and a half of this, I was pretty overwhelmed and decided to head out to fresh air, ending the day around 2 p.m. or so, wandering around a bit longer and then heading out to get an early bite to eat.

There was a reception Wednesday night with some free alcohol - hard to believe some writers might be interested in that.  By this time, Jeff Parker had arrived in Atlanta, as had Dwayne Hayes and Jessica Bomarito of Absinthe:  New European Writing - all three of them from Michigan.  After hanging around a bit before the reception, we wandered on up.

If you want to meet some authors at AWP, hang around with Jeff Parker.  If you want to meet anybody who has translated any writing from a European language to English, hang around with Dwayne and Jessica.  We hadn't made it five feet into the room when Parker was introducing us to Sean Thomas Dougherty, which led to an introduction to Peter Conners (BOA Editions, and a fine writer as well), whom I've had the pleasure of emailing and even speaking with via phone, but never had met in person.

Not much later Dwayne was introducing us to Adam Sorkin, an amazing translator.  It was shortly after this that the free alcohol was pulled from the room and the bulk of the party wandered downstairs to the Hilton Lobby Bar (While I'm sure it really had a name, the Hilton Lobby Bar is how it was generally being referred to as).  It was down there that I had the pleasure of meeting many great practitioners of flash fiction:  Kim Chinquee, Kathy Fish, Darlin' Neal, Girija Tropp, Claudia Smith, Jeff Landon, as well as soon to be M/C published, Pia Z. Erhardt.

The combination of 2 hours and 45 minutes sleep over Monday and Tuesday night, with the 13 hour drive had me turning in early at about 2 a.m. (huge props to Aaron Burch, who had probably only slept an hour more than I had those past 60 hours and yet hung until sometime beginning with a 4).

Having eaten a ton of crap in the car Wednesday, I was not hungry at all when we all gathered to eat at 7 or so, and went to bed starving, so Thursday was the one day I ate breakfast.  I did not do so again, partially because I was smart enough to not go to bed starving again, and partially because the restaurant at the hotel allowed me to drop a twenty on a fried egg sandwich, some bad hash browns, and a glass of orange juice.

Was on the first panel listed in the AWP book, from Emerging to Established Writer - Traversing the Path, or some such hyperbole.  They had us in one of the smaller rooms, which seemed pretty appropriate at ten minutes to 9, when it was only about 1/3 full.  Somehow in the next ten minutes it filled to capacity and then some, with about 40 to 50 people sitting alongside the walls to our left and right, as well as behind us and some standing outside the door in the hallway.  We'll attribute this to Matt Roberts, who put the panel together, Steven Church, and Adam Braver - three truly nice guys I feel fortunate to have stepped onto a podium stage with.

We decided to introduce ourselves and turn the panel more into a questions and answers session which was FANTASTIC for me as all but one of the questions was geared more towards finding an agent, getting published, how to interpret letters from literary journals, etc. and so, I got to sit back and swim in the wisdom of Matt, Steven and Adam - and they had some really great things to say, I hope the nearly 1/3 of the audience that are currently in MFA programs were paying attention and taking notes. 

Afterwards some nice people came up to say hi - Ann Gilson and Meg Sefton (whoops - had to retype both names, was going too fast earlier), both EWN members, to let me know they were there (and I'd see them both again a couple of times, including when Meg took some long ago offered advice and came and ordered a two year subscription to Hobart Saturday afternoon); some people asking if they could send review copies to the EWN; and Jana Martin, who was kind enough to hand me a copy of Russian Lover and Other Stories, her new collection of stories that Yeti has put out - I peeked at the first story later that night and it was really good.  This may also be where Cliff Garstang and I first bumped into each other, but thankfully, as we did many other times over the week, I don't recall for sure.  His trip down to Atlanta sucked, and I'm really glad it turned around for him and I was able to spend some time with him.

Next up was a panel about writing adolescent female characters with Judy Doenges, Kellie Wells, Mary O'Connell, and Margaret Lazarus Dean.  Each woman prepared an essay about a certain aspect of this overall topic.  Doenges discussed how seemingly no matter what, when you write about adolescent females, sexuality comes into play, even if not overtly.  Wells discussed how she uses language to try to convey to her readers that young women should not be held into small boxes - recalling how she, herself, had been forced to take Home Economics and Shorthand when in high school.  A comment she frequently heard was that the fifteen year old she was writing about wouldn't talk like that, wouldn't act like she had written her.  She explained how she was using such language to combat this pigeonholing.  Mary O'Connell talked about how friendship finds importance where adolescent females are involved.  Margaret Lazarus Dean discussed how books with such characters, or those written by women, are marketed directly to females in their 30's, whereas coming of age books by men, or about male characters, rarely get marketed specifically to males.

All in all it was a pretty interesting panel.

I did attend one other panel - the Flash Fiction panel moderated by Kim Chinquee, which also had fellow hot pants members Claudia Smith, Jeff Landon, Kathy Fish, Liesl Jobson, Darlin' Neal and Girija Tropp.  They are members of a Zoetrope room that between them have taken the flash fiction publishing industry by storm over the past year or so and they each discussed one aspect of how such a room has helped them with their writing, and then read a piece of their own work.  It was interesting to hear how the interactions online worked for them, and one note, a common worry about such types of groups, that the work will become somewhat uniform, eliminating the originalities of each member, was not seen at all in the various stories they read.

Next up - the Bookfair

AWP for me started at 5 a.m. Wednesday a.m. (well, that's a lie, it actually started at 3:30 a.m. when I got up, a mere, and let me be clear, very foolish, 1.5 hours after I had gone to bed) when I arrived at the home of Stefan Kiesbye, and his wife Sanaz.  They had arranged to rent an SUV, and the three of us went to pick up Aaron Burch of Hobart and take off for Atlanta - an eventual 13 hour ride.  The best early a.m. news?  Hobart issue 7 was hot off the presses and as soon as the freaking sun came up, I'd be able to read it!!!  There will be a post about this much later, but this issue kicks some serious ass - dial up Aaron and subscribe now - get this issue and the next one for a cheap price.

We actually sort of enjoyed the ride down - stopping for breakfast at a Waffle House in Ohio (at 2.5 hours into the trip, we were still only at a time that Aaron would have been "pissed if I were awake at home right now."  We had lunch at the Kentucky Artisan Center and at least two of our members HIGHLY recommend the bread pudding with Jim Beam sauce.

We rolled into the Marriott (which was just across the street from the Hilton where AWP would be held) at about 6 p.m.

Things I'm pretty sure were consumed in the vehicle:

- a 2 lb bag of cheddar and cracker combos

- a bag of ritz cheese sandwiches

- a bad of Swedish Fish

- a partial bag of Goldfish

- much water

- coffee from a newly purchase 64 oz "travel" mug