On AWP, Listening, and Discovering
Dear Nancy:
I’ve had the hardest time sitting down this week and writing you. There’s been the week itself of course. Flight back from Seattle and AWP. Delayed flight (a security check! A knife found on board! disembarkation!). Then my drive back to Virginia, where I’m working this semester, and catching up– with work, with rest, with some quiet. As you say so well, “We are a noisy society, and the noise is increasing and magnifying and growing.”
It’s no wonder I’m having trouble locating the center of my week, the center of this letter to you about the writing life.
So I guess I’ll tell you about AWP. Those few days in the Northwest, with 13,000 other writers.
It didn’t start that way. The first day was walking in the market district, just a handful of us. Seeing stalls of fish and shrimp, giant crabs. Wall hangings and flowers. Street gospel music. Riding a giant Ferris wheel beside Puget Sound and photographing the faces of my friends as we rode our three circles up and back into the light and sky. I bought a framed photograph of a graveyard and Nicholas, patron saint of all travelers. I laughed with these few friends, ate chocolates and desserts, had my fortune told for seventy five cents by an automatic vendor who dropped out a red card that told me I talked too much and needed to listen more.
Those next three days were about listening as the crowds arrived. I had told myself, ahead of time, that what I’d do was pace myself. Carefully write down all the panels and readings and signings I most wanted to attend and do just those. And I tried. Reading in celebration of the new issue of a journal. Panel on innovative teaching strategies. Panel on the lyric essay. I’d circled and underlined in my big, fat book of events. I’d underscored and drawn lines and arrows on my map of the book fair’s two huge rooms. But even with the best laid plans, I found myself standing at the top of the escalator, between up to level four and back down to level one and wondering what I ought to do and see and listen to, after all. The noise didn’t exactly increase and magnify and grow, since the conference center was enormous and the 13,000 voices seemed reasonably dispersed, as reasonably as they could over a few days. But I ran around, as my grandmother would have said, like a headless chicken and somehow missed the important readings, panels, sessions, signings. That conference seemed to pass me by this time around. The one I’d planned on from the big, fat AWP Program. Smart would have been, as you say, saying yes and no. Choosing what I went to, what I didn’t, more wisely. I didn’t choose too well this time around in the crowds, where events were concerned. I pretty much failed at sleight of hand.
And yet, somehow, I learned a valuable lesson during those days. The lesson began before I even registered for the conference, booked my ticket, flew the miles. It began because I’d been, simply put, fearful of going in the first place. Not just, as you might think, because of the crowds, the web of hotels, the halls and conference rooms. But because I had and have, over the last two years, lost a good deal of myself. My confidence in myself as teacher, writer, self in the world of other teachers and writers. I left a job I’d worked hard for. I chose a new life outside the perimeters. I took a big risk. Leapt off the metaphoric cliff and chose family over job, what I hope is a more balanced life over what had become untenable for me. And just who, I asked myself as I stood on the threshold of AWP and its 13,000, did I think I was now?
The AWP I discovered this year was in moments. Joy Harjo’s clear voice telling me poems above the sounds of a hundred voices from the book fair. The dishes going by on a conveyor belt at a sushi place as I sat with friends I hadn’t seen for way too long. The wrong door taken out of a building and, suddenly, a quiet garden and its stone sculptures, then a bar less frequented for a drink with a new friend whose laughter I could listen to all day long. An afternoon nap in our room, one of my roommates playing soft music and the three of us sleeping like children, exhausted and safe. The discovery of a poet I didn’t know, reminding me of how to look at the world right there in front me. Describe what you would have seen had the roosters woken you closer to dawn. How to describe sitting at dinner with a friend I love as she told me about the last days of her mother’s life, her mother’s fear of leaving this world? Oh, and that moment. A huge screen. Two writers talking about their lives. The quiet hours, he said. The times I get up in the night to simply sit there, waiting for words.
What I discovered this time in the crowds of writers and ideas and words was memory. I remembered why it is I love the writing world. The hands that hold pens, reach for books. The mouths that speak and speak. I held my head down, often, in the crowds. I tried to not talk as much as listen. And it was there, if I did listen. A murmuring of sorts. A quieter sound, like water running under ground. A love. A connection. Heart. I had leapt from a cliff, left behind who I was, the job, the life, the place. And I found hands reaching out, ready to take my own hands. Tell me I am okay again. Smart is an observer, you say. Smart is the artist finding her own process, and treating that process as sacred. I let myself feel welcome, even in the largeness.
My letter to you this week, dear Nancy. Tired still. But words rising to the surface of another busy week.
Love,
Karen
