Notable panels from AWP
As a note, I also attended Trans Lit Now, an online panel, but had so much trouble understanding what the speakers were saying on Zoom, that I don’t honestly have much I can say about it, other than I agree with them that there ought to be more trans voices in literary criticism.
Queer new weird
I briefly attended the Queer New Weird panel, though I only made it part of the way into it before the fire marshal kicked about half the audience out for capacity concerns. Thankfully, they also distributed their notes, both in paper and digital form. This worked well to provide an overview both of the (meta) genre and the queer takes on it. Notable points that stuck out to me:
- A lot of queer narratives lack a refusal/resistance stage. Many queer characters are okay with the idea of tackling difficulties within the framework of the plot, which fits in nicely with the idea of new weird, where such difficulties are those things which both demand and resist understanding. The panelists describe this as a parallel to the queer experience of pushing away from the known and normal inherent in queerness and toward the unknown identity. They suggested that this specifically bucks the idea of anything like a hero’s journey narrative.
- Autonomy plays a role in both queer lives and new weird literature, where the engagement with both queerness and the unknown takes on an almost talismanic flavor, deeply personal to the characters, and instructions to conform to an expected mindset come off as a violation of boundaries (from my own experience, cf. both the biologist’s and Control’s interaction with Area X in the Southern Reach books, where attempts to push them into interacting with the area are met with almost revulsion).
- The comparison with poetry was made several times, as new weird literature often focuses on the use of language to both evoke the unknown in the difficulties within the plot as well as the interiority of the characters’ narratives (cf. my own goals of using language, both flower and sparse, with intentionality).
- Several of the presenters mentioned the fact that both new weird and queer writing, as meta-genres that sit alongside or above specific genres such as science fiction or urban fantasy, invite playfulness when engaging with genre tropes, language, and form.
- Finally, the idea that queerness as problem/queer interactions as a difficulty in and of themselves that need to be overcome seems to be falling by the wayside with the rise of new queer weird which consciously avoids the idea of being queer being the weird part.
Publishing, Editing, and Technology (multimodal writing and publishing)
Boy howdy I wanted to like this project way more than I did. I’ve spent a lot of time reading, writing, and engaging with authors of interactive fiction. People are doing a whole lot of interesting things with tools like Inform, Twine, RenPy, and RPGMaker, not to mention coding their own interactive stuff. I’ve worked on a Twine story and a few hand-coded interactive pieces, finding ways to make the act of reading a part of the story itself.
However, a lot of this panel felt incredibly behind the times.
Hosted by a few editors of literary magazines and poetry houses, a lot of the discussion focused on the idea of interactive writing, particularly in the realm of poetry. In particular, this seemed to come down to the idea of multimedia poetry, with examples being based around poetry readings involving projection and music, and a poetry book that used QR codes to link to illustrations (which were already in the book) on a webpage, each of which linked to other poems in the same book.
I don’t mean to talk down on it too much, but it felt particularly out of touch with a thriving community of authors. I did manage to ask a question about using the tools I mentioned above, but the presenters latched onto the ‘game’ part of game engine and it spurred a discussion about ‘gamification’ (as someone who worked in software, I loathe this word) rather than new takes on multimodal writing. However, talking with some other attendees afterword, we did share fond memories of 17776/20020 and one of them told me about The Boat, which is on my TBR list.
Writers Centers, Conferences, and Retreats: Write, Teach, and Work after the MFA
This was a really interesting panel about what to do after the MFA and gave me a lot of ideas. The presenters talked about various avenues for teaching that weren’t specifically moving into academia. This was particularly interesting to me, given that I live in the middle of nowhere and getting to a college or university to teach would be a heck of a chore.
I was particularly interested in the ideas of teaching writing workshops at conferences and writing centers. The two stand-out mentions were Clarion — a science fiction workshop that invites teachers to help both as mentors and to give classes — and Hugo house — a writing center in Seattle. It inspired me to look up means of hosting my own workshops, both through Hugo House (which pays alright, at around $15 per student per hour) and through Catapult, an online service which has unfortunately stopped accepting new submissions for workshops.
Not Lazy and Stupid: Atypical Minds Fighting for Space on the Page
This was another panel I had to leave early due to space constraints, but I very much enjoyed what I was able to hear. Several of the presenters talked about their difficulties early on in writing, and while I’ve always done pretty well in the subject all the way back into middle school, the issues that I’ve dealt with in the interim have certainly played a role. In particular, their discussion about using neurodivergence as both an inspiration and topic for writing felt very important to me, given all the times I’ve wound up writing about my own path.
The bookfair
The book fair was honestly staggering. I’ve been to a lot of conventions in the past, but never one this big. I had to split my time at the fair up into several visits without getting overwhelmed, even with earplugs in. I was surprised at the number of tables advertising MFA programs, though I imagine that this basically comes down to inexperience on my part. An MFA degree feels like a relatively rare thing to me, but I also come from a background in software. The publishers were a healthy mix between friendly and quiet, and aloof and rude. The standout exception was Littlepuss, trans publisher with two trans women behind it. On seeing me, one of them called out quite loudly, “You look like the type of person that would 100% visit our table and buy our books.” Which, to be fair, I did.
Books purchased
- Kelly Hoffer — Undershore: Poems
- Katherine Indemaur — I|I
- Seneca Review — We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay
- Cecilia Gentili — Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist
- Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett (editors) — Meanwhile, Elsewhere
- Littlepuss — Littlepuss! Literary! Collation!
- I’ve misplaced it, but a copy of one edition of the Sugar House Review — they gave it to me for free on the condition that I submit to them in the future, since I helped them out so much with getting Zoom working for their multimodal publishing panel. I considered submitting Seasons, but it’s too long by far.