River of Play

Ten Years of Anthologizing

The first week of April was the official rollout of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize 10th Anniversary Reader. The good people at the journal met with the good people of the University of Nebraska Press to have a lovely celebration.

At least, I’m told it was lovely. Alaska’s a long commute. And expensive.

But there’s a story here about university publishing that might be useful.

The lovely cover

While we were in the midst of the 8th book prize contest, I emailed an editor at UNP, Kristen Elias Rowley. We met for coffee at The Mill and discussed what might need to happen to make an anniversary edition work. What was important to the Press was timing. And I had come to them at the right time: two years was a good lead time. Still is.

I put together a proposal. They accepted it. I started to put the book together and then got a job offer in Alaska. Could I keep both ‘askas happy? My replacement at Prairie Schooner

took up the rest of the task by narrowing selections from the most recent books, and we had a short conversation to confirm our choices.

So the two years timeline is good, but we had an advantage in the fact that UNP had published the books and had permissions and digital files all lined up.

Here’s the “too long, didn’t read” version: publishing takes time. Plan for it!

The Annual Barbaric AWP

AWP season never ends. They start taking proposals about a week after the conference ends, then book fair reservations start, and then the hotels open. A wearying ouroboros.

But also quite fun.

The Seattle AWP will be my tenth, but I have friends who remember when under a hundred people were getting together for the conference. Can that be right?

There’s a flurry of activity up here for panel organization. We are finally part of the regional interest. And we’re interested in being interested. I know because pretty much every writer I know here is planning on attending.

Of course, plans and actual attendance are two different things. Because even though Seattle is the next airport south of Anchorage (actually, that would be Hawaii, but work with me), it’s still over two thousand miles away. We think about that a lot.

Book Fair at Boston

 

Before we moved up here, we told friends and colleagues that moving to Alaska in the 21^st century isn’t like moving to Alaska in the 20^th century. And we’ve been right about that. We have serviceable internet, so that makes up for a lot of distance. Skype, cell phones, Amazon, moose, lynx, wolves—we’ve got it all, baby.

But we’re still a long, long way from the Lower 48.

Mostly, that fact is easy to ignore. We go on our own strange way and ignore the rest of the country. But we do try to be part of the conversation, which is where AWP comes in. We have this feeling that we’re easy to ignore even as reality television programming keeps adding Alaska content. So we’ll wave our hands and see who stops by to listen.

And remember: proposals are due by May 1.

Organizer tip: Read the proposal book and successful descriptions
!

Book Drinking Culture

Some great spaces for two great activities that go great together.

 

Ruh Ro Retro

Or something like that.

So the albums are great, but would you read the book?