This is self’s entry for the Macro Monday challenge. Jez Braithwaite’s Funghi and Moss post is wonderful.
She just finished attending the AWP 2022 Conference and Book Fair, the first in-person AWP conference since 2019. This year’s was held in Philadelphia. It was a bit overwhelming, but she loves the city. The Reading Terminal Market and Tattooed Mom, where Drue Heinz Prize winner Caroline Kim read, were fabulous. She even got to pay a quick visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, her first visit in decades.
At the Book Fair, in addition to discovering some wonderful new presses, she was able to add to her button collection! Feelings, indeed!
Your topic this week is March Spring or Autumn Season. In the southern hemisphere Autumn has just started and in the northern hemisphere Spring is coming into full swing most places. Feel free to post either season.
Self created a collage of photos where the color green (color of spring!) appears. Most were taken at the just concluded AWP annual conference, the first in-person conference since 2019:
The annual AWP Conference was held in Philadelphia this year. Self spent two days browsing the AWP Bookfair: she uncovered a whole treasure trove of quirky literary magazines and small presses.
From her novel Blue Water, Distant Shores, which she is re-naming Camarote de Marinero: Voyages
(Also, self is considering not going to AWP, for it would be such a distraction. No kidding. All she would end up doing is hole up in her hotel room, writing. Which she can very well do at home. But ooops, she’ll be charged a penalty. Aargh)
Trigger Warning: Run-On Sentence
To Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth I
From Martin de Rasa, Viceroy of New Spain
June the 8th, 1579
A Relation of the Circumstances of the Loss of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion
80 pounds of gold, 26 pounds of silver, 13 chests of silver coins, and jewels (pearls, jades, rubies, and other precious stones) for which the residents of Manila demand restitution. For that cargo was intended for the Audiencia, and other vital instruments of government in these Islands. And now the soldiers must go unpaid, and are close to mutiny.
But, truly, Viceroy of New Spain, why should Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth I care if Spanish soldiers are close to mutiny? lol
Self has just introduced SIR FRANCIS DRAKE into her narrative.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is HAPPY. Self started looking through her archives and decided on a set of pictures she took during the most recent AWP conference, a month ago, in Tampa.
2018 AWP Bookfair, Tampa, FL
She mostly hung out at the Bookfair. One of the highlights of her trip was getting to meet the editors of the Bellingham Review! They published her (dystopian fantasy) story “Ice” in their annual on-line issue, up now. It stays up till November.
SO HAPPY to meet the Editors of the Bellingham Review at the AWP 2018 Bookfair!
Thank you for making self so HAPPY, Bellingham Review!
Among the Featured Presenters are some very familiar names:
Rick Barot
Jeffrey Eugenides
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Claire Messud
Aimee Nezhukumatahil
Sigrid Nuñez
Mary Ruefle
Karen Tei Yamashita
She has loved George Saunders ever since Civilwarland in Bad Decline. She remembers ugly crying after reading one story, the one about the wavemaker. She has not yet read Lincoln in the Bardo but it is definitely on her list. (Which, at the rate she’s been reading these days, means she probably won’t get to it until next year. At the soonest.)
Self will be frank: the only reason she’s going to Tampa next year is the Bookfair.
Oh, wait! There’s another reason: George Saunders is the keynote speaker.
But okay, back to the Bookfair. It’s huge and exhausting. Here is the floor plan.
There have been past AWPs (notably, one in Chicago) where self was so buzzed she did not sleep for 48 hours.
Several years ago, she remembers walking down aisle after aisle of the Bookfair (2015? 2014?) and she had new stories in a number of journals and it felt GLORIOUS. Empowering. And, she should have known: it was an experience never to be repeated. (Aw, shucks!)
She didn’t even go to the AWP last year, even though she had many, many good friends who were booksigning. Even though she was in DC! And participated in an off-site reading (for Quarterly West).
Here’s a selective list of 2018 AWP Bookfair exhibitors:
Akashic * American Short Fiction * Bellingham Review * Blue Mesa Review * Bread Loaf Writers Conferences * Electric Literature * The Florida Review * Fourteen Hills * Grove/Atlantic * Indiana Review * The Journal * Juked * Miami University Press * Mid-American Review * Mississippi Review * New Letters * New Ohio Review * Nimrod * Old Dominion University * The Paris Review * Poets & Writers * Potomac Review * Prairie Schooner * Puerto del Sol * RHINO * Santa Fe Writers Project * Sarabande Books * Small Press Distribution * Submittable * The New York Review of Books * Tin House * University of Arizona Creative Writing * University of Missouri Creative Writing Program * Veterans Writing Project * War, Literature & the Arts * Wings Press * Witness/UNLV English Dept * Women’s Review of Books
A Chihuly: Lobby of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London
Below: the controlled chaos of the Annual AWP Book Fair. This year’s was in Los Angeles. Seated: Keith Tuma of Miami University Press.
There have been AWP conferences where self is so buzzed by being surrounded by so many authors and literary panels that she has gone as long as 48 hours with absolutely no sleep.
AWP Book Fair, Los Angeles, April 2016
Finally: self did a lot of lonely walking in Manhattan last December. The city never ceases to amaze. New York is a grrrreat city for insomniacs!
Kanlaon 