Wow, I have so much to share. I had the most wonderful time in Colorado this weekend! The conference was amazing, more uplifting than the last two years, and shockingly educational. I picked up an armload of free journals and kept some of the best poems and pieces, which I might be sharing on here. I also thought I might post some of my notes from the best panels and, when possible, link to the folks who gave them. Is there anything wrong with putting a poem you love up on your blog, when it's been published in print? Maybe I'll try linking to them instead. I'll do these bit by bit, and that way I'll have material for quite a while. Non-writers, do stay tuned, because you never know what other awesomeness I'll come up with, and plenty of the conference material could apply to you in surprising ways.
The general overview is that I love writers and writing more than ever. Maybe I'm being preemptively nostalgic, knowing I'm about to leave the particular community of writers I'm part of and probably not be part of one at all for a while. Maybe I came into it at a sparkly-eyed time when I want to hug the world. Or maybe this conference was more full of joy and laughter than the 2008 and 2009 incarnations, not that those were dull or morose. But Michael Chabon did an amazing keynote address, which I hope I can get a copy of somehow, and George Saunders is much younger than I expected and peppy and does voices, which is perfect for settings like AWP where everyone is exhausted and prone to sleeping. Reading with him was Etgar Keret, who is new to me and whom I thought was Edgar Caret until just now. I'm definitely going to be reading him. One of his stories was about a beautiful woman who turns into a big fat hairy man at night, and her husband becomes friends with him. They go out on the town every night. He introduced it by saying something like, "My wife said, 'You write stories for all of your friends and family, but you've never written a story for me.' So I did, and I called it 'Fatso.'" Wow, did I have fun.
Outside the conference, I hit the Tattered Cover bookstore and yearned after almost everything there. I realized that it wasn't the books themselves I wanted so much as the time to read them. I also went to the Garden of the Gods and had a nice time exploring Manitou Springs, a very cute little town which, in the on-season, is probably overrun with tourists to the point of nausea. The Garden of the Gods is a series of rock formations that are indescribable. I get, a little bit, what people are talking about when they say Uluru/Ayers Rock in Australia has a primal pull. Felt it a little at the G of the G. Definitely recommend it if you're ever out that way.
Well, I plan to parcel out the AWP goodness for quite a while, so check back for more. Everything else is going great.
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