AWP links

Above:  Meryl DePasquale moderates panel Get Ahold of Your Writing: Book Arts in the Classroom.

I couldn't go.  I was too busy healing from this wonderful surgery I had.  So instead, I'm going to bring a few AWP blog highlights, just for imaginary recap.  And for the record, if I could go, there are a million things I would have done, which would primarily have been attending the above panel that my very dear friend and one of my favorite people moderated, but also finally meet some of these wonderful folks on the [Poet Moms] listserv, and attend a gazillion panels and readings that would have made my brain burst in the best of ways.  I love especially the panels that feel like essays, the ones that really get dirty up-to-the-elbows in discussion of poetry.  I want nuggets to carry me through the winter.

- Hope Springs Eternal at the AWP Conference: by Steve Almond (short story writer and essayist) on the exhaustion of AWP expectations, though I feel more akin to his description of undergraduate and first year MFA students who are thrilled at simply being in a community of writers.

- AWP:  Why the absence of mainstream publishing industry matters by Julianna Baggott (fiction writer and poet)  "I talk about storming the gates of genre to find the beautiful architectures on which to drape poetry. (And how the compression of description in commercial fiction actually encourages more spare and arresting -- and therefore poetic -- imagery.)"

- Ploughshares AWP Highlights:  Readings, panels on collaborative writing and the problematic phrase 'post black,' zombies and small presses, etc.  Blips from the various folks at Ploughshares.  

 - There Were Highlights and Humiliations by Roxane Gay (fiction writer and co-editor of PANK):  Some charming admissions and embarrassments of Gay's experiences at the gauntlet. 

- The Quest Part II:  on the Poetry Pilgrim.  On having poetry partners and bumblebee costumes.

- Ada Limon (poet)'s AWP memories.