Highlights and a slide show*:
1. 6am flight with Tom shouting: ‘First time flyer!’ and alternately, ‘We’re going to crash!’
2. Brunch at Maison Bistro: server came up with the tab. Someone asked if it could be split and her head just started spinning around on her neck. That same server later yelled at us about tipping. The tirade started, ‘HERE IN NEW YORK, WE…’ but then we shook it off and ran over to Al Roker to scream hi to our mothers.
3. A panel wherein writers got competitive over who had had the MOST INCESTUOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR FATHER and who was the most compulsive sex addict. Panelist A explained the genesis of her nonfiction career as follows: ‘I wanted to write about things you couldn’t talk about at cocktail parties… And you can’t exactly say at a cocktail party, I’ve been having sex with my dad for the last four years.’ Not to be outdone, Panelist B said desperately, ‘The only good thing my parents ever did for me was die.’ I blame Laura for that one.
4. Getting hit on by some guy who said he was signing his second book with Knopf. He didn’t know about AWP, so I felt he was lying about everything. And his hair was sort of creepy. All wavy and cartoonish. Definitely he was lying. About Yale. Johns Hopkins. Studying in Bologna. Being multi-lingual. Putting on Middle Eastern art shows to benefit Iraqi citizens. His ideas re. energy and violence. The whole time, I was like, ‘Yeah, sure’ and signaling Laura and Kimi that we had to go b/c he was crazy. So when he tried to kiss me goodbye, I ran out with my coat somehow catching on my bar stool so it went bumping along behind me. I googled him yesterday. Turns out he’s some guy who’s publishing his second book with Knopf, is transferring from Yale grad school to Johns Hopkins, and in his spare time makes headlines with charity art shows.
6. Jut being in New York with these people. Not a big trip, but totally blissful despite SEVERE SWELLING OF THE FACE (see below) due to an unending plague. I look like a marmot. This summer, it’s on. I’ve become very interested warm and lovely places as a reaction to the freezing rain of past weekend. Sardinia. Turks and Caicos. Somewhere, Mamie's shouting about Portland and San Francisco. Maybe we can agree on south of France.
*Pls note that I apparently went to a different conference than Tom and Mel did, as there were no glamorous shots to be organized into an epileptic slide show in the end. That last night is probably making the Cancuners envious.
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12 comments:
oh man, AWP. i don't know whether to be envious or haughty.
in any case, i need to become a writer again.
was panelist "A" kathryn harrison? i read 'the kiss' my sophomore year of college for a nonfiction seminar... and have never been the same.
i still think he was lying about everything.
God, am I really that pale? Is my head really shaped like that? Jesus. I'm like a ghost. An out-of-style ghost.
fix me.
i thought abt it. but then decided it would look sort of control freakish. and i like going for a dumb nonchalance. a careless bravado. yech. am so sick and marmotlike.
also, i'm missing number 5. i go from 4 to 6.
also, i need a manicure.
james patterson books are half off at barnes and noble.
Holy good Lord, I am so jealous of your AWPness, and so pierced with missing my peeps! I'm glad to see you had a good time, though I'm a little upset about missing the incest panel. A lot upset. I would've totally recorded it and put it in YouTube forever.
emmerest, you would have dug the horror of it. oh, and one of the panelists that was not kathryn harrison (i read it too, stevie, and felt icky) called out a professor we know. in front of 500 people. named her and her institution. awkward.
also, steves, pls don't start saying things like 'i need to be a writer again'--this is how it all started with mamie.
i'm sorry.
i think there's a picture of mark cox getting off an airplane.
but it can't be. because, you know, there isn't a gaggle of young women waving theses from ground level.
huh.
also, in every picture y'all look happy in the way that someone with a pick ax in her backpack looks happy.
whatever laura, you're totally radiant and photogenic. did you see me as marmot??! here's to pedicabs and parentheticals.
mame, i think there's a career for me as mfa paparazzo.
Part of me is TOTALLY jealous I missed AWP, and then another part of me realizes I am the girl who spent her weekend jumping off the picnic table into 6 ft snow drifts - in her bikini - and that it's probably best I am far, far away from all the smart people in my life.
Either way: I miss y'all and wish I could've been there. You know, b/c someone has to dance on the bar at those things.
"also, in every picture y'all look happy in the way that someone with a pick ax in her backpack looks happy."
Too funny. I nearly shot diet coke out of my nose reading Mamie's comment. So true.
I'm still not seeing any evidence, here or on t's blog, that any of you actually went to any part of AWP, wtf?
OMG, awkward? What makes AWP such a bastion of awkwardness? Is it the fact that, during panels, everyone remembers that they drank eight $15 beers the night before?
i second eric's comment about mamie's comment.
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