“It can make us physically well, or horribly ill.” – David Byrne, ‘How Music Works’
Real quick: I am reading poems TONIGHT, 3/11, at The Whistler. That’s right, two weeks after making my Whistler debut and the week after AWP, I am reading at The Whistler again. This time, it’s the Test Literary Series, run by Nick Kirwen and Zach Kocanda. Poetry, like basketball, never stops. Doors are at 6, readings at 6:30, and I am going first, so be on time, my fellow degenerates.
See previous AWP Blogs: 2024 in Kansas City | 2025 in Los Angeles
Writing is a solitary endeavor. Solitary doesn’t always mean lonely, but it certainly can. Ideally, you’re writing for yourself and your best reader. If you’re anything like me, though, a little feedback and community every now and again is vital. That, to me, is what AWP is all about. When else are “all of us” in the same city, going to the same bars or university conference rooms or converted mansions or abandoned Wurlitzer factories1 to hear each other read? It means something for us to get together in physical space. We sustain each other. Every sentence and line we sweat over, all of the interminable imposter syndrome, the endless rejection letters, the bullshit that comes with being broke writers, the bullshit that comes with living in the United States in 2026—for a few days, we get to be writers who hang out together. You get to be around other people who have probably read the thing you’ve recently read and are excited about. Hear enough people read poetry, and you’re reminded that not everyone in the United States is a warmongering freak who makes excuses for racism and pedophilia. There are, in fact, people in this country who can read. Many of them even believe in revolution.
For these reasons, it’s hard to imagine missing an AWP. For these reasons, it’s relatively easy to overlook negatives.
Obviously this comes with a caveat: I don’t have a book to promote. Lazy & Entitled has not started its press imprint yet. I do not have a dean to answer to about my experience or what I learned. AWP is expensive. A huge expense—conference, hotel, books—that you’re probably not going to recoup. I’m lucky in the sense that I can “afford”2 to go and can “afford” to focus on being Goodtime Stoner The Shipwrecked Sailor, Here To Effusively Praise You And Possibly Invite You On My Podcast Because I Just Bought Your Book.
About that affordability—I did something different this year. Since my in-laws live in Baltimore, I didn’t pay for the conference. We arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday, and I went to two offsite readings Wednesday night. On Thursday and Friday, I went to two offsites in the evening. None of these days had a book fair visit or panel, but all featured me getting breakfast and dinner made for me while I relaxed with my family. Fair trade.
I love the idea of a gonzo, blow-by-blow account of every offsite. I don’t quite have that in me right now, though, and I’m very afraid of forgetting someone important. Suffice to say that the people I talked to and heard read and the venues I went to were diverse and sick as hell. The one hotel bar was very fancy. The corner tavern reading was raucous (two floors, two different readings). I was drowning in Phony Negronis and NA Guinness, one bar even made me an NA cocktail in a coupe glass. The readings in a college conference room were warm and lovely and also fiery and radical. I had so many genuinely wonderful conversations with old friends and new this weekend. I got compliments that gave me the courage to submit more. But again, I don’t want to shout out every person I kicked it with, because forgetting even one would be the regret of the year. I will shoutout two specific things:
First, Steven Leyva and Baltimore College. Steven is a poet (a goddamn Cave Canem fellow, at that) and professor at the University of Baltimore. Two offsites I attended, the Blair/River River Books reading and the Game Over Books/Garden Party Collective reading, were in the same room at U Baltimore, and Steven played host. Talk about a welcoming presence and a wonderful ambassador of the city of Baltimore. I’ve probably talked about this before, but I was born in Baltimore. We only spent six months there, so all of my memories are from a couple of visits my parents took us on—until Mallory and I started dating, of course. Anyway, I’ve always felt a pull to Baltimore, and appreciate anyone who will go to bat for the city. That’s not all Steven did, though. He also, on both nights, asserted that University of Baltimore is a working class university. As such, could we please pick up our own trash, so as to make things easy on Housekeeping? More people should consider the service workers. More universities should identify as working class, and do so in a serious, practical way.
Second, at an offsite put on by Action Books, Black Ocean, Black Sun Lit, Changes, and Wendy’s Subway, Black Ocean founder Janaka Stucky told a story. I won’t recount every detail, but it boils down to a mid-20s Janaka not really knowing what he wanted to do after grad school, but knowing he wanted to start a press. He needed a $10,000 loan that banks wouldn’t give him until he figured out how to properly file paperwork.3 One of the first books they published ended up being the only non-Big Five book on a couple massive year-end booklists. Suddenly, Janaka finds himself at cocktail parties with big-time publishers, getting recognized in spaces he never dreamed would have him. I’m not telling this story to say “start that indie press! Who knows, the third book you publish might be Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit!” That’s a ridiculous thing to say4. Instead, I’ll bring up something my friend and founder of Pizamas Press, Ben Niespodziany, said: there are not enough indie presses. So many of us have good manuscripts languishing. All the evidence you need is in Pizamas’s first book, Disintegration Made Plain and Easy by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi. Kiik had basically given up on that book before showing it to Ben. Ben started the press basically to publish that book. Now, it and two others exist in the world. The incomparable Han VanderHart and Amorak Huey at River River Books started by promising to publish two books a year. This year, they put out nine, I wanna say? And them books sold at AWP. Idk man, I keep getting more and more disillusioned with the internet, and more and more interested in physical things—let’s just say there won’t be a Lazy & Entitled Books before 2028, but.
Speaking of books! By Saturday, I was anxious to buy some books. I paid by $25 Saturday-only fee and walked into the convention center with an empty backpack. Still, I was going into the book fair with a plan and some rules. There were presses I wanted to buy things from for specific reasons, there were presses I wanted to simply scope out and buy whatever the spirit moved me to buy. In terms of book buying, I left with an overstuffed backpack. There are more books than I will finish before next AWP, just as there are books from 2025 I haven’t gotten to yet. Have I gotten to all of 2024? Possibly. If not, it’s like one or two. There’s a plan for the TBR pile, and you’re reading it right here at lazy and entitled dot org. I am more than satisfied with what I purchased this year.
The issue with cramming all of the book fair into one day—one morning, really, because I knew that I was going to the Game Over Books/Garden Party Collective offsite that night, and didn’t want to abandon my wife and child from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.—is that I then had to cram a lot of socializing into not a lot of time. There are people I wanted to see this year and did not get the chance. There are people with whom I only got to exchange the briefest of what ups. Something Bob and I realized independently of one another but vigorously nodded our heads and said exaaaactly to each other as we talked about it is this idea that often the most you can hope for with a person is this: 1) saying what’s up, 2) having a five-minute conversation, 3) making plans for later that don’t get kept, and 4) leaving the conference thinking, “damn, it was great to see that person.” So I have a message for four types of people at AWP. Again, not naming names because I am afraid of forgetting someone.
Friends Who I Got To Spend More Than Five Minutes With: I had such a blast with you, and I genuinely do mean all of you. It was soul-refreshing to talk to you and/or hear you read.
Online Friends Whom I Met For The First Time: genuinely lovely to meet you in person, and I mean it. I’m so glad we talked, and hope to see you next year.
Friends Whose Schedules Didn’t Align: I’m sorry we missed each other this year, or only spoke for a minute. It really bums me out, and I hope we’ll get time together soon.
People Whom I Did Not Know Before But Now Do: it was thrilling to meet you, and I genuinely do mean all of you. I can’t wait to dive into your work.
Would I do the conference this way again? Next year is Chicago, it feels worth it to pay for Chicago. Say AWP is in, I don’t know, Seattle or Buffalo or Durham or San Diego. Would I spend my days exploring the city alone, my nights hitting up offsites, and my Saturday cramming in all socializing/book buying? Maybe. I do like exploring places I haven’t been before. I do feel good about how much money I didn’t spend on books. That said, I feel like there was some missed hang out time this year. I don’t know. Something to consider.
Unfortunately, Bob and I were not able to record an in-person The Line Break this year. Nor did we get to eat street burritos in a shared hotel bed before passing out to Escape From New York. We will have an episode up soon, though.
Here’s to being community—real, physical community—with one another. I love writers. Especially poets.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- I have been to readings in all of these locations. Not all this weekend. ↩︎
- really stretching the definition of the term here but whatever ↩︎
- read: be really, really optimistic about the press’s financial future, in a way that banks could understand ↩︎
- I probably would’ve said this exact thing as recently as like three years ago ↩︎