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.
Before we moved up here, we told friends and colleagues that moving to Alaska in the 21st century isn’t like moving to Alaska in the 20th 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!
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