AWP19: Highs and Lows

Let’s talk a little about attending the 2019 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference for the first time. The last weekend in March, a gathering of writers, writing programs, and publishers just so happened to be taking place in Oregon this year, where I live. I found out about the conference with a week to spare and signed up with the student price, score!

Three days, twelve panels, and eighteen pages of handwritten notes later, I find myself in the aftermath of one of the most significant experiences of alignment and community I have felt in a long time.

I spent most of my conference time at panels. I visited around a dozen tables at the book fair, mostly tables for MFA programs in Creative Non-Fiction, staying as far away as possible from the possibility of spending gobs of money on books.

I know many writers and avid readers who have to show a lot of restraint at book fairs and book stores. But, I have never enjoyed spending money. At any given moment, my library card has four or more books checked out. I did buy one book, an eco-justice poetry anthology called Ghost Fishing, edited by Melissa Tuckey (see photos).

I spent several hours before the conference planning out a schedule and organizing what I wanted to get out of the event. A list of the categories I chose to focus on is listed below:

Environmental/Nature Writing

  • Ghost Fishing (a poetry anthology reading)*

  • What is Found in Nature

  • Untangling Environmental Stories*

Non-Fiction Craft

  • Writing the Body

  • How to Talk About Yourself in Non-Fiction

  • You Can’t Go Home Again (writing about home)*

Pedagogy

  • Game On: Teaching Writing for Video Games*

  • Teaching Alternative Writing Workshop Models

Publishing Knowledge

  • Contracts

  • I Sold It, Now What (optimizing the year before a book comes out)

  • Finding and Working with Agent*
    Other

  • Tarot for Writers*

*top picks for favorite panels

True to a long-standing introversion coupled with the newness of my appearance to the academic writing scene, I met and talked to only a few handfuls of folk. Being alone amongst 12,000 attendees, knowing almost no one in the writing community yet (especially in Oregon, a place I have called home for the past two years) felt both humbling and exhilarating. I wielded a small power in my anonymity, unbound by social obligation, to float from panel to panel, to take it all in. Each day, I scanned thousands of faces for recognition and found nearly every one a stranger.  

I originally wanted to publish this blog post just a few days after the conference. If I’m being completely honest (and as a creative non-fiction writer I must be), I beat myself up a considerable amount over my inability to quickly summarize the event. Especially given my wallflower perspective on the conference, I kept thinking to myself that I *should* be a skilled enough writer by now to synthesize my thoughts and observations to the page.

While at the conference, I felt so aligned and fulfilled and yet held such an anxiety in the back of my mind, like nearing the top of a roller coaster. It is a distinct feeling I’ve felt many times in my life when I’ve found myself in beautiful and freeing scenarios. Nagging and intrusive thoughts began to surface about the upcoming free fall. I swallowed the thoughts best I could during the conference. But a few days later, as expected, after the “high” of the event wore off, I found myself in the depths of despair.

Being surrounded, engulfed, by the vastness of creation at the conference and coming home to my own (comparatively empty) writing life shocked and disgusted me. The disparity between where I am and where I want to be overwhelmed every part of my brain, now unoccupied or distracted by the chock-full schedule of the conference. Struggling with comparison and self-loathing, depression took hold.

The fire I felt at the conference was now only ashes in my hands.

Climbing back out again took a hell of a lot of effort and dedication in shifting thoughts. It took crying when I felt like I had no ability to do so. It took sleeping and giving in to the sadness. Thankfully, this particular spell of depression was relatively short-lived, only two or three days long. On the worst night of it, I walked through the grocery store like a zombie with my husband. I decided upon getting home that I needed to confide in him about the intrusive thoughts, about my inadequacies, about the loss of hope I was feeling about writing and life in general. His response?

“I think you just need to write.”

That was it. It was all he said, nay whispered, as he was leaving the room where I had positioned myself on the bed, ready to disappear into it, and let the cloud of depression take over. Even though I knew he was right, I wanted more from him. That was it? That was all he had to give me in this dark hour?

But those seven words were everything I needed to flip the switch in my mind. To get back on the other side of hope.

And here I am.