Michael Goroff writes fiction and Nick Sturm writes poetry. They lost their AWP virginity the week before last in Washington, D.C. They feel a little used, like trees. They feel a little on fire. They feel like they love their cats very much and hope you do too. They feel like they want to tell you about their experiences at the largest gathering of writers and publishers in North America.
These are their stories.
POETRY
Nick Sturm
Instead of the standard coffee maker, our hotel room in Washington, D.C. housed an espresso machine. The thing was so intimidating we didn’t touch it until Sunday morning. At one point I just wanted to make some hot water, which is so easy with the normal coffee maker. But this espresso machine, with its sleek corners, silver accents, and built-in espresso cup housing-unit, totally threw me off. I ended up pouring water into the wrong place in the machine, which spilled out all over the counter onto our food. What I’m trying to say is that, at this, my first AWP, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. You show up and you’re like, Yeah, I know how to make coffee. Then there’s an espresso machine, a whole new level of coffee, and you’re sitting there fumbling with what you know, feeling a little out of place, and suddenly you’re drinking espresso, and these people, these writers you so look up to, are talking to you about their day, their lives, their writing, your writing. The espresso machine makes total sense.
Not that I was crawling around in the dark at AWP. I had the opportunity to help with the NEOMFA and the University of Akron Press/Barn Owl Review tables, tables with bright blue skirts that looked amazingly similar to other tables with bright blue skirts and banners that said things like Wave Books and Black Ocean, so that to the untrained eye I looked just like these other extremely awesome people. As it turns out, those people are just as awesome I expected, even more awesome than that.
Awesome means spectacularly generous, kind, inspiring, humble, and hopelessly in love with what they do. I’d like to pay particular respect to the Table-X section, the home of the small presses. I’m still giddy just thinking about it: Octopus Books, Factory Hollow Press, Letter Machine Editions, Pilot Books, Forklift, Ohio, h_ngm_n, Poor Claudia, Ugly Duckling Presse, Barrelhouse, Futurepoem. There should have been a deal where you could buy every book from every one of these tables. Who cares how much it costs. I’ll stitch bindings for you for the next ten years. And to be honest, this is where I felt most at home at AWP. Yes, many of us shared an interest in good flannel and, in general, weren’t more than 35 years old, but it was more than that. Unlike anywhere else in the monstrous literary assemblage that is the AWP bookfair, Table-X felt like a community. And I mean that in every sense of the word; that these are writers who share similar intents, beliefs, resources, and risks, that these are people interested in participating in their art in a way that is continually innovative, and always, always, always completely hands-on. Nowhere else was the book as object more evident than at these tables with all of the hand-made chapbooks, gorgeous small press books, and DIY journals of all shapes, sizes, and textures. Ask me where I want to be in ten years, I’ll tell you sitting behind a table selling books of poetry that look like Birds, LLC, Flying Guillotine, and Immaculate Disciples. Let the age of the small poetry press begin, if it hasn’t already.
I don’t know how it is for people in other genres, but for poets, the off-site readings at AWP are a festival. Most off-sites I went to had at least 10, if not 30, poets on the line-up, and all of the events were spectacular. Yeah, you’ve got to cram 200 people into the upstairs of a long, skinny bar with not that great sound, but it’s a hell of a lot better than listening to some marquee poet read to a few thousand people in a theater. And unlike in Ohio, you can get Yuengling on tap everywhere in D.C., which is always a good thing for poetry. Healthy amounts of beer also contributed to me indulging in cab rides from reading to reading over the whole weekend, usually with about fifteen minutes to spare between the last reader in one and the first reader in another. But the mania was always worth it. Literature Party at The Black Cat, the dance extravaganza of AWP, was sick. Just sick. Amelia Gray is spectacular. She’ll eat your face. She’ll have your baby. That’s a threat.
Though I can’t say I had any epiphanies at AWP, I definitely came out of it knowing that, at least for myself, I’m in the right place doing the right thing. Just working at the NEOMFA table and talking to people about our program made me feel like I was really part of something in a way that I didn’t have access to before. Selling copies of The Monkey and the Wrench to complete strangers, a book of essays that I helped bring into creation, offered a kind of satisfaction that felt comparable to giving birth, or selling home-grown produce, or something like that. It just felt right. It felt like I already knew how to use the espresso machine. It felt like I had the opportunity to buy my body weight in books. So I did.
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FICTION
Michael Goroff
What makes Washington, D.C. so incredibly difficult to automotively navigate for doe-eyed Midwestern outsiders such as myself is the pattern of the city’s street layout. Unlike, say, New York or Chicago, D.C. isn’t organized in a manageable grid pattern but rather a series of funky roadway starbursts. Check out a map of D.C. and you might find yourself staring into a webby horrorshow, a massively confusing network of traffic circles whose limbs of streets stretch out to other circles, and so on, etc., a series of streets populated by bumper-to-bumper buses and taxis, and yuppies, ambassadors, and politicians in Lexuses and Priuses. To drive in D.C., I found myself adopting an antagonistically primal instinct, butting in with my diminutive Corolla as if offering my opinions in a debate, cutting off the Circulators and shadowy town cars, swerving at the last minute to avoid running over that poor scarf-wearing, Starbucks-sipping congressional intern. I became mean. I became spiteful. I scorned my underappreciated loyal car as a burden. But when I finally reached my destination, despite knowing that the chances of my receiving a parking ticket were probably pretty high, the sense of accomplishment was overwhelming.
This, in a way, was how I felt about my first AWP experience overall. I had difficulties navigating the lushly exorbitant but kindly welcoming Marriott where the conference was held. When I wanted to go up, the stairs and escalators only went down. When I wanted to leave, the doors spit me out onto the wrong side of the building. When I wanted to enter, masses of other writers utterly congested every elevator and hallway. And yet, when I finally reached the bookfair, the beating heart of AWP, I completely forgot any of the frustrations that came with traversing the chaos.
Writing about the bookfair is kind of like being at the bookfair: it’s hard to know where to begin. If I could have bought something at every press and journal table, I would have. Here was a utopian bookstore, filled with books and magazines I actually want to read, as opposed to the oppressively dull chain bookstores that are basically the sole literary depositories in northeast Ohio. Not only that, but the people responsible for these beautiful objects were actually in attendance, hocking the books themselves. It was a pleasure to meet some of the peeps from Hobart, One Story, the Cincinnati Review, and other such favorites. I got to meet Collagist editor and overall great guy Matt Bell. To get to say hi to the people who create the things I love to read and consume was one of the utmost pleasures of AWP, not to mention my Hobart flask, which after purchasing I carried around proudly in my jacket’s inner breast pocket, right against my heart, for the duration of my stay.
Spend enough time in the bookfair, however, and you might start to lose your sense of focus—of reality. At some point this AWP weekend, I experienced what I’ve been describing to anyone who will suffer listening to me as an existential crisis.
Let me be clear: I love most any kind of book thing, most any kind of writing. I love the weird. I love the real. I love the experimental. I will consume just about any kind of writing, as long as it punches me in the heart, as long as it leaves me reeling and momentarily disabled. A good book—or story, or poem, or whatever—leaves me feeling like I’m staring into the humming, glowing face of Truth. This is my main criteria. Any other label—traditional, experimental, etc.—is basically for lazy critics.
I realized a lot of things at AWP. The hardest realization I had at AWP was the realization that I like too much, maybe, that I want to do everything, and not only that, but that, as a young student in an MFA program, I’ve been trying to write stories that are probably not my stories to write; that I didn’t actually know what I wanted to write. I want to write stories that editors of speculative fiction magazines will like, and I want to write stories that more experimental editors would want to publish, and I want to write stories that fit into the same aesthetic as . . . well, you get the point. I realized with horror at AWP, upon seeing on display all the different journals I love to read, that I’ve been writing stories that will fit in one way or the other with the aesthetics of these infinitely diversely aesthetic magazines, and I haven’t been writing stories that actually mean much of anything to me when everything’s said and done. Simply put, my favorite stories are those that in some way affect me physically—that is, beyond emotion and intellectualism, to that most searing and wounded part of our souls. And I realized that I wasn’t writing those stories. I realized I had some tough decisions to make, not just what was I going to write, but did I even want to bother writing at all. I thought, Maybe I should just give up this whole writing thing, just be a reader not a writer “slash” reader. To be only a reader, without the egocentric ulterior motive of reading to help my writing, is, after all, the more noble pursuit, and didn’t I want to be noble, and didn’t I want to be good and true and just to the books I so deeply care about? If I couldn’t move myself with my own writing, who could I possibly hope to move?
I wandered around D.C. for most of Friday afternoon in a stupor. I was embarrassed for myself and my writing. I didn’t even know what I was doing at AWP. I had no right to be there. I was the worst kind of sham—I was lying to myself. By Friday evening, I wanted nothing more than to escape D.C., so I took the Metro out of the District and into Virginia to stay with a good friend of mine who fed me beer and let me unravel my brain within the safe confines of the small, cozy home he shares with his girlfriend. We stayed up and talked for a while. The talking helped. The being outside of the District and the manic energy of AWP helped. The buzzing in my brain settled down to a whimper. I gained perspective. The solution to my problem was to simply stop lying to myself. It’s okay to like different kinds of writing, but it’s not okay to write in the vein of writers who, while they might be great writers who I admire deeply and who are tapping into certain contemporary literary trends, are not me, are not even close to who I am. I was going to have to start over, this time around being more honest with myself. But that, I realized, was okay.
Saturday was much better for me. I got to see Benjamin Percy, Jennifer Egan, Rick Moody, and Joshua Ferris—the author of one of my favorite novels of all time, Then We Came to the End—read in the Marriott ballroom. I ran into Michael Kimball, who is easily one of the kindest and most generous writers I have ever met. Just talking to Michael made me feel better. I had a better sense of purpose. Sure, I was going to be, in essence, completely starting over from scratch—but so what? What’s the rush?
A funny thing happened that day. I felt okay about having failed. Writing isn’t a race, even as much as the failing print industry and the dwindling literacy statistics may claim and make writers think otherwise. On Saturday, I got in a line, holding another bought copy of Then We Came to the End so that I could have Joshua Ferris sign it for my girlfriend. I was actually nervous to talk to this writer whose book had affected me so physically. When I got to the front of the line and saw Joshua Ferris sitting there with his wild hair, I handed him my copy of his book and told him that his book truly moved me. He seemed touched by that. I asked him if he could make it out to my girlfriend and told him how we had sort of bonded over his book, that it really brought us together, and he told me in his soft voice that that was a sweet story, and that he would hold onto it.
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