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This past weekend was my sixth time attending the AWP conference. My first was in New York in 2008, an overwhelming affair of 8,000 writers crammed into a couple Midtown hotels. That year, I sat on the floor beside a woman from Texas Tech who thought my plan to wait five years before getting an MFA was absurd. The next thing I knew, I was working as a paralegal to save money for graduate school, and by August 2009, I had a full ride to the University of Washington and Michael and I moved cross-country to Seattle. You could say that AWP changed our life pretty radically.

Over the years, we went to a smattering of conferences, but each year I went to fewer and fewer panels, as they tend to repeat and I learned you can only soak up so much information. In 2015 in Minneapolis, I mostly had lunch and dinner with friends, a most pleasant experience, but I'd realized the conference fee had been a waste. Next time, I resolved, I would go to AWP without going to AWP.

Last year in Tampa, with my novel just out, I didn't get to do that. But *this* year, in Portland, it finally happened, and I highly recommend it to folks who've been around the AWP block. I was more relaxed. More hydrated! I had time to stay on top of my online teaching, so less stressed.

Now for some highlights:

Wednesday night, we started at The Old Portland, a wine bar owned by Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. They only serve old French wine; I misheard the description of the Corsican rosé as "foggy" and enjoyed it very much; Michael enjoyed a ten-year-old red Bordeaux. Then, the very Portland-y (more stoner than twee Portlandia) bartender said, "Yeah, we don't like advertise or anything," and showed us the Odditorium, the band's 10,000-foot "clubhouse," where they rehearse, record, film music videos, and the like. It was cavernous and quiet. Michael, a big Dandy Warhols fan, was in heaven.

"Ice Cream," the mono-print I made at VSC when I was sad that the ice cream shop had closed and there was no ice cream to be had.

Thursday afternoon, we went to the Vermont Studio Center alumni happy hour. I'd finished a first draft of Daughters of the Air there back in 2007. Three former literary staff read poetry from their recent releases. A line from Nandi Comer's American Family: A Syndrome: "If there is blood, the artist has chosen to omit it." Ryan Walsh spoke of the connection between visual art and writing at VSC (I still cherish learning how to make a mono-print there) and vegetable poems. Zayne Turner read from "Her Radioactive Materials."

Most of the other readings I attended featured numerous readers, so, forthwith, more of a collage:

Reading "Cauliflower Tells You"

At Strange Theater: A Fabulist Reading, there were spiders and trousseaus and swans roasted in revenge and Japanese monsters and red rooms and porcine men and tyrants and cauliflower-fueled murder. A doll's head was raffled off, among other trinkets; I offered a rare talisman of Cyndi Lauper's trip to Yemen.

Friday, we went to the PageBoy Magazine Happy Hour, featuring 17-word poems and prose. It was a fun afternoon of zingy one-liners and dreamy experimental works and Gertrude Stein jokes. Then we were off to Literary Bingo with Lilla Lit, a new Portland-based reading series; it was fast and furious with four-minute readings (a loud buzzer ushered off writers going over). Chocolate was pelted at every shout of "bingo!"; I caught a peanut-butter ball overhead with my left hand and won a copy of Jennifer Perrine's In the Human Zoo. I also read a poem and someone won a copy of Daughters of the Air. All readings should have strict word and time limits and buzzers and prizes!

Saturday, we paid $5 to get into the convention center book fair. I had a lovely time chatting with Chicago-based folks in advance of our move (yes! big news tucked away over here; more on that in a future post), signing books at the Lanternfish Press table, and seeing fellow LFP authors Charles J. Eskew (Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark) and Andrew Katz (The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls). It was also super cool meeting Carmen Maria Machado, who signed Her Body and Other Parties and Carmilla, an LFP reprint of a lesbian vampire romance that predates Dracula, with a Borgesian introduction and footnotes by Machado.

Fun!

We also picked up a whole slew of poetry in translation (from Romanian and Hebrew), essays on art, novels, short story collections. I can't wait to read it all! Our last stop was the Northwest Micropress Fair at the Ace Hotel, where I signed copies of Sugar, my chapbook from Chin Music Press, and hung out with regional small presses, which felt like a special little send off before we leave the Pacific Northwest.

I heard that the conference had ballooned to 12,000 (15,000?) attendees. Amazing! Perhaps, perhaps, we'll be in San Antonio next year, and if not San Antonio, Kansas City, and if not Kansas City, Philadelphia...?

The Friday of AWP is always the best day. The nervous energy of Thursday has dissipated, and the inevitable Saturday flu epidemic has not yet emerged. I woke early to respond to student stories and breakfasted on a leftover Cuban sandwich, wondering if it would make me barf later. Reader, it did not! A fortifying start.Alan Sincic, the fantastic Orlando-based writer who was The Furnace's Writer-in-Residence, was on a 9 am panel on the lyric sentence. I'm a fan of Sincic's prose *and* mad presentation skills, so the early start was well worth it. The moderator, Pearl Abraham, kicked off the discussion with this advice: "If the voice doesn't work, write better sentences." Then Sincic woke up the crowd with a call-and-response activity, that gradually built up to us chanting together: "I am an individual and will not surrender my voice to the crowd." He said, "A sentence is less like the beam of a house and more like the branch of a tree," that a sentence has ghost limbs lost in the editing process. He proceeded to take apart this Mark Twain sentence, examining each word choice and its placement as a way of generating suspense and delight: "Is a tail absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog?"Baylea Jones analyzed a sentence from Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, graphing sounds and letters, including patterns of consonant use, and internal rhymes: "Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth's matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars." Wow! I had fun retyping that.I ducked out early to get to my book signing at the Lanternfish Press table, where I got to hang out with my editor Christine Neulieb and publisher Amanda Thomas,  and connect with new readers and old friends, including Julia Mascoli, who was in my Tin House workshop in 2013 and who is Deputy Director of Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop doing great work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in Washington, D.C. (Seattle-area folks, you can donate books to prisons and other under-served communities via Seattle7Writers Pocket Libraries program.)Later, I chilled at the Cambridge Writer's Workshop table, celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, which includes my "Summer-Inspired Writing Prompts." Co-editor Rita Banerjee was there with her mythic poetry collection Echo in Four Beats, as was Maya Sonenberg, whose new chapbook After the Death of Shostakovich Père is out from PANK Books.That night, the celebration continued at the Helen Gordon Davis Center for Women, a beautiful old mansion a mile away from the convention center. There were many, many readings. One was from Women in the Literary Landscape; crowds whooped in appreciation for Anne Bradstreet, Virginia Kirkus, and the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. (I am a rube for not remember which biographer was mentioned, so here are five of them!)  Nell Painter, author of A History of White People, read from her forthcoming memoir Old in Art School, Diana Norma Szokolayi read her poem "Sarajevo," Sonenberg read an anti-plot manifesto, and I read an excerpt from Daughters of the Air in which Pluta has committed arson in Brooklyn and found refuge in an abandoned Times Square theater. Fun! There is so much more to write...! I'll wrap things up in one more post. Sneak preview: there will be blood.

It's my birthday, and I'm home in Brooklyn. Today is full of treats. Mimosas and chocolate croissants with my family (and bagels, but I've been gorging on bagels since Saturday and have nearly reached my bagel limit), a stroll by Prospect Park, and a reading from Daughters of the Air at WORD Brooklyn at 7 pm. If you're in town and free, I hope you'll come! There will be wine and treats.Over on the Submittable blog, I have a craft essay on poetry's effect on my prose. Here's how it begins:

Poems are tuning forks. When I am lost in the darkness of a novel-in-progress, fumbling through and then and then and then, they key me back into the precise and intimate. They pull me closer to the unknowable.  continue reading

After tonight I have two more stops on my east-of-the-Mississippi tour, in Chicago on Saturday, March 3 at The Book Cellar, with Gint Aras, and then three events at AWP in Tampa: Strange Theater: A Menagerie of Fabulists (Thursday, 3/8, 7 pm); a book signing at Lanternfish Press's table at the book fair Friday (3/9) from 10-11:30 am; and Spontaneous Reading Party by C & R Press Friday (3/9, 7 pm), celebrating the release of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Source Book For Creative Writing. Then I'm back on the West Coast for the next little while, with a full docket of events you can see here. Huzzah!

Today is the big day! Daughters of the Air is out in the world. I'm excited that after so many years this is really, really real. Really. It is out of my hands and readers are reading. Whoa. I am especially excited to share that Tin House has published an excerpt on their blog today, which you can read right here.If you'd like to help me get the word out, there are a few things you can do:Join me at the launch party tonight at 7:30 pm at the Hotel Sorrento. Elliott Bay Book Company will be selling books there. Or join me at one of my upcoming events around the country. Bring friends! Buying the book at bookstores show booksellers there's enthusiasm for it. And it supports all the good work booksellers do. And, um, in general buying the book helps me pay the bills and write my next book.Review the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, Powell's, your personal blog...Let people know your thoughts.Let your friends know if you think they might like a novel that is dark, fabulist, lyrical, political. Or if they're into cities like New York, Buenos Aires, Manaus, or Rome. Or if they're into myth and fairy tale. Or if you really like my sentences and think they'd really like my sentences too!Request your local library carry it. Have I told you lately how much I love libraries? Here is a very old blog post about one of my favorite toys.If you're part of a book club, suggest it to the group. I'm happy to meet with groups in person in the Seattle area, or while on book tour, or by Skype.Let me know if you'd like me to read at your reading series or come talk to your students or would like to adopt the book for a course. I love to give readings and talks. Daughters of the Air will be taught in a human rights class in the fall and would be a great fit with other classes too, such as contemporary fairy tales, Jewish studies, Latin American studies, and small press publishing.Send me photos of you with the book and I will post it on Instagram! Or tag me, and I will happily repost.Of course, these are all good things to do for any and all books out in the world that you wish to support. Thank you so much for championing literature!

For The Los Angeles Review, I wrote about the debut fabulist novel Minnow, winner of the 2014 South Carolina First Novel Prize and published by Hub City Press. Here's how the review begins:

Landscape reigns in Minnow, the fabulist debut novel by James McTeer II. Set in South Carolina Lowcountry, the story follows a small boy, Minnow, on his quest to find medicine for his dying father. A pharmacist sends him to a witch doctor who in turn sends the boy off on an impossible journey. In exchange for Dr. Crow’s medicine, he must penetrate wild marshlands, swamps, and pine jungles in search of the grave of Sorry George—a witch doctor who once cursed fifty-two men with a fatal, grisly fever, and “[e]ach one of them coughed up some bloody thing, like a little thing that might have been alive once.”continue reading