The Association of Writers & Writing Programs came to my city this past weekend, by which i mean to say, 14,000+ writerly folks descended on portland to take over beloved venues and talk about doughnuts on twitter. i was lucky enough to take some much-needed time off of my day job to attend talks, panels, and readings, and overall engulf myself in writerly and creative speculation.

on thursday evening, listening to spoken word and poetry felt uncomfortable, like the way watching a foreign film has that brief adjustment period where you have to train your mind to read the subtitles in conjunction with the visuals. but by sunday, i had doodled pages and pages of notes and quotes, brought home dozens of books, and stubbed out a shadow of a book project.

for me, AWP was a much-needed revival of a true love--writing, being writerly, being around writers, being around books, talking about publishing. it also brought to town two of my favorite humans (who are also writers) and some favorite writers (who are also, i suppose, humans).

PANELS I ATTENDED

• Expats, Migrants, Nomads: Rethinking the Immigrant Narrative in the 21st Century with Mieke Eerkens, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Huan Hsu, Reyna Grande. a terrific panel that discussed the duality of moving between cultures. each panelist talked about how to write in a way that embraces the non-linear; that a desire to fragment your story helps to express the burden of representation of two opposing cultures. i learned about the ways in which mixed cultural backgrounds can create what was referred to as "third culture kids," those whom have more in common with one another (by proxy of having roots in two different heritages) than they might with peers of one of their heritages.

• Obsession in the Archives: The Art of Research in Fiction and Poetry with Valerie Vogrin, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Nicky Beer, Jasmin Darznik, Silas Hansen. these panelists talked about the role of research, archives, packrat-ism, and how deep rabbit-hole of google searches can sometimes lead you to unlikely discoveries and happy developments in your creative narrative. this also includes granting yourself permission to imagine what could have been possible/probable (with research, information) without painstakingly having to validate it with shatterproof evidence. thanks to Nicky Beer for transcribing these quotes as examples:

• Swamps, Forests, & Borders: Literature of Place & Displace with Emily Fridlund, Karen Russell, Luis Alberto Urrea. three writers read from their novels and expand into conversation to ponder "place" and how it's used in their work. more specifically, the notion that place can be geographic, but setting is the outline of the creation: the landscape as a character ("topography of thought"), often (actively) an antagonist or protagonist to the story.

• You Can't Go Home Again: Writing About Where We're From with Jesse Donaldson, Justin St. Germain, Jenny Forrester, June Melby, Jeremy Jones. five writers talked about how their nonfiction works sent them "back home" to examine places with a refreshed perspective. this included: Jeremy Jones looking to paint an accurate portrait of his home in Appalachia and considered the "why" behind the story; June Melby about putting herself into the story despite her hesitation (a memoir about her family's mini-golf course); Jesse Donaldson on using the framework of Kentucky's 120 counties to write about his home state and ponder the meaning of homesickness; Justin St. Germain addressing the idea of myth in telling a family story from growing up in tombstone, AZ (and the decision to entangle wyatt earp's history into it as a way to address masculinity and violence into his memoir).

• Back to Basics: Untangling Environmental Stories with Ana Maria Spagna, Sharman Apt Russell, Stephany Wilkes, Marlenia Myers. non-fiction writers consider how environmentalism and climate change both shape their narratives. this panel examined how memoir-driven nonfiction and is one of many ways to document and educate the realities around us. Stephany Wilkes reminded us that "conversion is not requisite" if it ends in the same outcome (e.g., rural farmers working to put more carbon in the soil without also having to "believe in" human-caused climate change), and that this truth (plus the 4 per 1,000 initiative) both give her hope. Sharman Apt Russell admitted that a personal genealogy story morphed into an expose about pollution in Winfield, Louisiana, and that sometimes your job as a writer is to "decide how big the story is." Sharman Apt Russell reminded us that an environmentalist in a developed country might be (appropriately) concerned with the welfare of animals and plants, whereas in a country of hunger, the focus must start with human beings, because their suffering is directly a result of our carbon footprints.

• Listening To The Art: Committing To Your Book No Matter How Long It Takes with Cara Benson, Susan Ito, Foster Rudy, and Some PSU Grad Student Who Sunk This Panel. Loved Cara Benson and her insights on how to stay focused on long-term projects (link); Loved Foster Rudy's well-prepared remarks (link). Everything else I could have told you myself.

• Crafting Narrative Identity with Unreliable Memories with Wendy Fontaine, Tanya Ward Goodman, Leslie Schwartz, Hope Edelman. Four women discussed how to work with unreliable brains, changing truths, family hand-me-down stories, grief, and trauma. Each described their efforts to suss out an authentic narrative despite how we revise our own memories. Tanya Ward Goodman talked about alzheimer's. Wendy Fontaine addressed family misremembrance (read her essay, Angie & Betty & Me). Leslie Schwartz explained her process for recreating a year of lost memories as means to understand her mistakes made under the influence. Hope Edelman asked, "What is identity but a story we tell ourselves about ourselves?"

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in addition to panels at AWP, i attended several fantastic readings. in an effort to distill all the things i heard, the following is a shortlist of poets i encountered.

POETS

• Ali Liebegott's poem "crying season"

• George Abraham's poem “Ode to Mennel Ibtissam Singing Hallelujah on The Voice (France), Translated in Arabic” (about this)

• Katherine Fallon, "Disgusting Bird" & others

• Kathryn Leland's poem "grave clothes"

• Kay Ulanday Barrett's poem "rhythm is a dancer, again" for orlando

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and of course, no book conference would be complete without

BOOKS NOW ON MY WISHLIST

• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

• Huan Hsu's The Porcelain Thief Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China (NPR)

• Cooper Lee Bombardier's book when it comes out next year (!)

• Karen Russell's Swamplandia & St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

• June Melby's My Family and Other Hazards: A Memoir

• Justin St. Germain's Son of a Gun: A Memoir

• Stephany Wilkes' Raw Material: Working Wool in the West

• Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind

xo
rhienna

postscript 1: a challenge: send me, a list of recent google searches (the more random the better) you feel like sharing, and I'll do the same.

postscript 2: if you like this tiny letter installment, feel free to forward it on to someone you think might enjoy it as well. <3