AWP? Meh.

may make some people angry with this post.

During the orientation session that UIC held for it’s incoming graduate students last fall, one of the first things out of the program director’s mouth was, “We have AWP in Chicago this year, which is, of course, something that you’ll all be going to.” But then he never explained what the hell AWP actually is, so I placed it in my mental list of Things to Google and left it at that. Turns out that The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) is an enormous organization that sponsors a massive conference each year for publishers and writers. This year, 2009, the conference is in Chicago.

I was somewhat excited and intrigued by this, so this afternoon I headed down to AWP to check it out. The conference is at the Hilton on Michigan Avenue, and runs from Thursday through Saturday. I expected it to be enormous from the panel discussion I attended this Wednesday about how to get the most out of your AWP experience. At this panel was Gina Frangello, executive editor of OV Books; Chris Fink, editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal; Tasha Fouts, editor of Packingtown Review; Ravi Shankar, editor of Drunken Boat; Michael G Czyzniejewski, editor of Mid-American Review, and S.L. Wisenberg, nonfiction editor for Another Chicago Magazine. Tasha Fouts was the only person I knew of on the panel. She’s kind of a spunky spritely woman who is a PhD at UIC in poetry. She runs the literary journal that’s based at UIC too, and she was the youngest person on the panel, and honestly, the most well spoken and professional of the bunch, I thought.

The panel was held in the darkly lit conference room at Barbara’s Bookstore on Halsted. It was my first time in the store and I found the atmosphere quite enjoyable. Here’s what I found out largely about AWP: it’s basically all about free alcohol. The panel opened with a story from each panelist about AWP that was kind of silly/benign, but quickly devolved into a discussion on how to end up in a hot tub with a famous author. I was mildly surprised.

But then again, I wasn’t. The panel had been supplied with free wine (in plastic cups) before the meeting, which they sipped as they talked. One man in the audience said that at a previous AWP conference he had been walking around the book fair, attempting to talk to various publishers, and they were all mostly ignoring him. The response from the panel? He was probably trying to talk to people who were busy visiting with other publishers that they hadn’t seen in some time.

I began to feel like AWP was a giant frat party for the literary world.

To cut the panel a little slack, they also said that AWP is a great place to network, to buy and peruse various literary journals and books, and to hear interesting panels. Though, in their words, for every nine crappy panels, there is one good one. This didn’t leave me with a lot of hope.

Flash forward to today. I arrive at the Hilton and maneuver my way through a particularly large cloud of smokers to enter the Hilton. I am immediately struck by how everyone looks exactly the same. Everyone is dressed somewhat trendy with a slight hipster edge. I see lots of dreadlocks, lots of black plastic rimmed glasses, lots of people walking around with I’m-very-artsy-and-smug looks on their faces.

After hunting down the registration booth and receiving my rather ugly AWP tote bag and hefty, novel-sized program I make my way over to the book fair. The program tells me that there are approximately one billion panels being held throughout the labyrinth that is the Chicago Hilton at 1:30 pm. The book fair itself is a grid as far as the eye can see of publishers and University MFA programs. I’m beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed by all of this.

After wandering around the book fair for only maybe ten minutes, I begin to realize that AWP has nothing particularly substantial to offer me.

AWP is good for people who are looking to buy a bunch of literary magazines and books right from the source. It’s good if you’re a publisher trying to get people to subscribe to your magazine. It’s even possibly good if you’re interested in listening to people who aren’t necessarily qualified to be on panels speaking on panels.

But this isn’t me and I’m guessing it wasn’t half the people there. AWP is the underground literary world’s attempt to be hip, interesting, and cutting edge. Unfortunately it’s full of bored hipsters who want to pretend they’re writers.

What I’m trying to say is this: going to AWP is not going to make you a good writer. Going to the after parties at AWP and getting drunk and possibly even hot-tubing with famous authors is not going to make you a good writer. It’s not going to get you published.

I almost attended this afternoon’s panel on magic realism until I realized that I didn’t recognize a single name on the panel, and that I could probably learn much more about magic realism simply by reading actual scholarship on it and reading actual books using it as a literary device. I’ve often found that when attending panels and discussions mostly what one hears is not the most interesting or intelligent voice, but rather the loudest. I’ve experienced more than enough of this already in my college classes, so I decided that the panels weren’t for me, especially since I’d already heard that 9/10 weren’t that great anyway.

And just who is it that actually goes to AWP? It’s probably not people with jobs outside the university or publishing, since the majority of the conference happens during the work week. Also, the prohibitively expensive cost of attending AWP if you’re not a student, affiliated with a publisher or a member of the organization ($205.00) will keep away almost anyone who is not already affiliated with the event. So you end up with a bunch of students wanting to get their work published, and a bunch of publishers wanting people without money to subscribe to their magazines. Quite frankly it is annoying.

The publishing industry in general has shown a frustrating lack of desire to emerge into the 21st century and begin using technology to their advantage. A conference such as AWP isn’t the best place for small publishers to make a name for themselves. The Internet is the place for that. Being accessible is one of the most important things that publishers need to emphasize at this point, and huddling together in an exclusive conference such as AWP is not the way to do it. But my rant on online publishing will wait for another post.

This post is dedicated to why AWP is mostly a waste of time. If publishers and MFA students want to have a dance party, then they can have a dance party, but they shouldn’t pass it off as a serious event that’s making any kind of headway in the literary world. I am a writer, and nothing I experienced at AWP left an impression on me that I found inspiring or even interesting. I thought momentarily that if I had attended a reading I might have been more inspired, and this may be true, but I wouldn’t have been any more inspired than if I had just read the book that author wrote on my own. I don’t usually appreciate spoken work nearly as much as I appreciate written work, and I’m guessing that 95% of writers would benefit much more from actually reading an analyzing some texts than from hearing a few bits of a book read by an author as a publicity event.

On my walk home I noticed that The Art Institute of Chicago has free admission for all of February, which I will be taking advantage of to find some real inspiration, beauty, and art.