Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025

First of a three-part series.

It took me a roundtrip of four days and 1700 miles of driving, but this year’s AWP, held at the LA Convention Center, was worth every minute. The rainbow of humanity flowing in and out of the conference rooms was, all by itself, an uplifting experience. Add decent weather (cloudy, moderate, with a bit of rain), an enormous Bookfair, and panels that more than satisfied my need for artistic stimulation, and I was in a three-day fog of happiness.

Being in LaLa Land brought back childhood memories: I spent the first six years of my life in Los Angeles, and I retain happy, hazy impressions of palm trees, warm sand, freeways, and the smell of my grandparents’ house, a blend of cigarette smoke, Folger’s coffee, and the Crisco my grandmother fried just about everything in.

I started the conference with “You Call That a Book Review?!: On Poetry Criticism and / as Creative Process” (Nanya Jhingran, Cristina Correa, Summer Farah, Esther Lin, Dujie Tahat). The panel consisted of members of Poetry Northwest’s Critics at Large program. The goal of this program is to “bring the book into the world,” which also happens to be my goal when writing book reviews. Some takeaways from my notes: critics should engage in what one panelist called “responsible curiosity,” examining their blind spots by looking closer into the literature. The poem is a critical “place,” and the role of the critic is to understand a work in its context. In a good book review, the voice of the critic harmonizes with the voice of the poet.

Here’s an idea that made me sit up: why don’t we read reviews out loud? I’ll have to ponder that! And, with the exception of Roger Ebert, there are no statues of critics. Sigh… 

The next panel I attended was titled “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges” (Shinelle L. Espaillat, Rashaun Allen, Keith O’Neill, Gail Upchurch-Mills). Here I learned about the efforts of humanities professors to “fight the commodification of higher education,” as well as the process of students being turned into “clients.” All of us are inherent writers, the panelists told us, and should be allowed to “dream on the page” without anyone’s permission. We write ourselves into existence, and communities only function when everyone participates. One of the problems all the panelists shared was how to instill a love of reading in students whose attention was being diverted, constantly and shamelessly, from exploring their potential as writers.

My third panel on the first day was the extremely enjoyable “Craft for Crafters: How Fiber Arts, Book Arts, and More Shape Our Writing” (Meg Cass, Felicia Rose Chavez, Emrys Donaldson, Genevieve Kaplan, Sarah Minor, Doug Van Gundy). As a person who enjoys sewing and crafting as hobbies, I was intrigued to learn how the panel would connect those activities to writing. It was an unexpected pleasure to see poet Genevieve Kaplan, whose book Aviary I reviewed in the December 6, 2021 issue of Sticks & Stones. Some takeaways from this panel: sewing is like writing—cropping, darning and weaving; crafting is like poetry—language is “bits of things” we move around to create other things; crafts connect to writing, playing, revisioning, re-seeing. I enjoyed Doug Van Gundy’s story of how his sewing practice began by making pencil cases because he couldn’t find any decent ones. That grew into journal covers and messenger bags. He also revealed that sewing calms him down, allowing him some much-needed relief from an over-active brain. Doug is also the MFA director at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a 7^th-generation West Virginian.

In this panel, we made paper quilt squares. Here’s mine:

I’ll end this post with the fourth panel of Day 1, “From Satire to Dad Jokes: How Humor Can Be Literary, Political and Funny” (Kathryn Fay, Kristen Arnett, Z. Hanna, Alana Saab, K-Ming Chang). Humor is a kind of attention, and a “foot in the door” for readers. And yes, humor is hard. It’s very subjective. It can also be like horror, as there is a fine line between what’s scary and what’s funny. The participants on this panel were A-list writers, all with recently published novels and memoirs. They regaled us with various readings, from Kristen Arnett’s New York Times Bestseller, Mostly Dead Things, a “darkly funny family portrait,” to Alana Saab’s debut novel, Please Stop Trying to Leave Me, a portrait of one woman’s struggle with mental illness. Yes, it’s funny, strange, and disturbing—the elements that keep me reading. 

Next post: Surrealism, Ekphrasis, Nocturnes, and the Memoir in Essays.