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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Search results for: why I go to AWP

Aesthetic Drift #10: Why I Go to AWP

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Aesthetic Drift, AWP

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Aesthetic Drift #10 by Shawn McKee

Why I Go to AWP

Los Angeles is a metropolis unlike any other. After I got kicked out of a bar for allegedly being too drunk, I could have been back home in Orlando for all I knew. But I wasn’t in Orlando, I was somewhere else—a magical land of endless towering skyscrapers and a dazzling array of massive, glowing advertisement screens like something out of Blade Runner, on a smaller scale. Five days in L.A. for the AWP 2016 conference felt like one tightly-confined day with minimal sleep in-between hours.

AWP Skyline

After all the panels, readings, dinners, Ubers, and miles walked back and forth from the hotel to the convention center, I’m faced with the question of why I go to AWP in the first place.

Aside from being the premiere literary conference for writers all over the country, AWP is, for me, I guess, like the cabin in the Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, where old friends periodically reunite to catch up on their lives, loves, and passions. Now that I think of it, that’s not at all like The Big Chill. I’m thinking more of Alan Alda’s The Four Seasons. I need to get my annoying 1980s baby boomer drama allusions right.

Theoretically, AWP is as much about absorbing as many panels as you can endure in one day as it is as test to see how many tweets you can emit ending in #AWP16. Of course, non-writers on Twitter may wonder just what in the hell #AWP16 means and why it’s trending, if at all, but that’s beside the point in this gargantuan whirlwind of an experience that, if anything, always turns out to be memorable in the three years that I’ve attended.

It’s February 2014, and I’m at my first AWP conference in Seattle as a MFA grad student from the University of Central Florida. I’m diligent in my approach to selecting panels. I take note of which ones seem the most useful and who I want to see the most and what notes I can take back home on my college ruled notebook in handwriting so sloppy, you’d think I’d suffered a stroke.

I’m excited to see Phillip Lopate, Chuck Palahniuk, Roxane Gay, Stephen Elliott, Sherman Alexie, and many other writers I may or may not be familiar with. But they’re here—and for an hour or so—they’re willing to share elements of their craft with me—a veritable nobody. I’m exhausted by the end of the day, but I still go out and have fun with my talented colleagues and take in all that Seattle has to offer. It rains a lot of Seattle rain, and my shoes are always soaked. I share a hotel room with four other guys, but the situation totally works. I absorb copious amounts of  drink as though the government will be reinstating prohibition in a matter of days. By the end of the conference, I don’t know what the hell happened. All I have are my notes that the NSA couldn’t transcribe if they wanted to.

It’s March 2016, and I’m in L.A. for my third AWP conference. (I may have blacked out last year.) By the time I check into my hotel room by mid-afternoon, all I want to do is register and take a nap. Maybe this premature exhaustion’s due to the fact that I have a full-time job now—and a part time job that feels like a full-time job, but that’s another story. I can’t believe that it’s already March and that I’m in Los Angeles. I hope that I didn’t forget my toothbrush.

AWP Group

My friends and I meet up, all MFA graduates like myself. Many of them are enrolled in or pursing PhD programs. Meanwhile, I’m still working on thesis revisions. Time flies like a premature nuke launched from communist North Korea where the missile spins around like a pin wheel and explodes to the sound of that Price is Right losing horn. Uber is every bit important in L.A. as it is in Orlando. That’s just how I look at it. Their stupid rates keep jacking up around certain “fare times.”

We walk, for the most part, to the convention center. We Uber to West Hollywood where the diverse mountainous landscape can be seen beyond the sprawling strips of a city that looks a tad more faded and less glamorous than I had imagined. We drink margaritas and each nachos. We visit the “Museum of Death” where I reconnect with my morbid fascination with serial killers, cult leaders, and mass murdering tyrants.

Shawn McKee

Perhaps I should have went into investigative journalism. There’s still hope. It’s essentially a house with different rooms decked out in grotesque photos, themes, and video involving some of the most heinous people that the 20th century had to offer. Oddly enough, many of them are from California. Joan Didion was definitely onto something with The White Album.

The aesthetic of L.A.—which I’m including as Hollywood—is similar to any major city: noisy streets, hordes of people waiting at cross walks, massive tarps covering buildings mid-construction, benches, and variants of wandering or sleeping homeless—but I don’t recall seeing roads blocked off for filming last time I went to Washington D.C., or San Francisco, for that matter. I watch uniformed police officers rush the street and shoot a bad guy full of lead as cameras film. It looks almost like a street performance, but apparently it’s a television show called Training Day.

As I walk the streets, at a cool seventy six degrees, I notice that drivers in L.A. love to honk—probably more than they enjoy Starbucks. But don’t get me wrong, every person I run into is nice, almost suspiciously nice, especially bartenders and servers. It’s when I look at my extensive collection of receipts that I realize why. It’s very expensive to do anything out here. I ask my Uber driver if it’s expensive to live out here. He tells me, “very.” A few more days in L.A. and I’d be wandering the streets and sleeping on benches broke as the day I was born—I was born in Yuma Arizona, if you were wondering.

LA

So back to the conference: I know there’s a lot that I’m leaving out. I have to mention first that many of the people I met in L.A. were from somewhere else, sort of like a magnified version of Orlando multiplied by one hundred stars on the “Hollywood Walk of Fame” (I’m sticking with that math analogy). Everyone out here, well most of everyone, is from somewhere else. And many of them, not all, but many, are aspiring actors. This should come as no surprise. The cliché is as evident as the fact that L.A. often substitutes as other major American cities in movies and television shows. It really could be a state all of its own. I’m wandering off topic again.

Most of my time at the 49th annual AWP is spent at the book fair. The physical layout is fantastic and well-spaced.

Book Fair

Gone is the squeezing through tight aisles to perennially glance at the most interesting booths. The experience is initially overwhelming, but that’s why you peruse in intervals. I spend a few hours at the book fair each day and pick up my fair share of flyers, buttons, books, journals, bookmarks, stickers, shirts, and mugs—enough to reach a satisfactory weight in my tote bag. Of course, I don’t gather near as much booty as I did my first AWP go-around. This time everything is “AWP lite.” I’m older and less inclined to take a bunch of shit back home.

I attend three, maybe four panels at the most. I have work to do back in the hotel room. I’m getting text messages from work reminding me of this fact. I go to the AWP dance party, but I don’t dance. The participants are all the more lucky. I miss the panel on book to film adaptation with Brett Easton Ellis. I don’t remember why. I always wanted to meet him. I see Cheryl Strayed in the hotel bar lobby and I ask my friends if I should get a selfie or a “groupie” with her, as the kids call them.

I’m advised multiple times against it.

I attend a panel on Comics in Literary Journals and there are multiple walkouts. I’ve rarely ever walked out on anything. Many years back, I ran out of the theater during Meet Wally Sparks, but that’s another story. An esteemed professor tells me that she gives panels upwards of ten minutes, and if they don’t deliver, she’s gone. I admire that. Maybe I need a few more AWPs under my belt before doing so. I don’t go to many panels this time, but writing is never far from my mind. There’s probably a story to write for each day. A week after the event, I realize that there are about a hundred other things to write about. If I ever needed a reason to explain why I go in the first place, that’s a start.

_______

Shawn McKee

Shawn McKee (Episodes 179 and 184), despite still working on his thesis edits, is doing just fine.

21st Century Brontë #16: On Deciding to Pursue an MFA in Creative Writing

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in 21st Century Bronte

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21st Century Brontë #16 by Brontë Bettencourt

On Deciding to Pursue an MFA in Creative Writing

So for AWP 2016 I had one serious goal in mind: research grad schools. In the past I’ve spent my time darting between panels with a quiver of pens and a notebook bought just for that convention.

But after reading an interesting article at The Review Review on how to make the most of AWP, I focused instead on the book fair. Considering that there were over 700 booths hosted by publishers, colleges, and writers (and one, somehow, for the perfume of dead authors), this task was incredibly daunting.

Armed with my canvas bag, fresh haircut, and attire with a modest amount of personality, I strutted into the fair … to immediately scuttle over to a familiar booth, the first of many more to investigate: Hamline University.

Hamline

I initially heard about this university at AWP 2015. Many of the faculty members were on panels that I attended because I was keen on the panel topics, before I noticed the same names involved. The subjects of Magical Realism, strong female characters, and people of color in YA fiction were hosted by individuals who took the convention atmosphere and transformed it into a thought-provoking, comfortable space.

This year, when I arrived at the Hamline table, I was greeted by this same mood: I didn’t feel pressured to buy into anything. I was then invited to dinner, where I met many more of its students and faculty members. I’m sure I sweated off all my deodorant due to internal anxiety. But, eventually, over dinner, I became comfortable in my own skin as well.

Long ago, my editor told me that not all MFA programs are the same, which should’ve been obvious. But I didn’t realize that I could forge my own path until after I earned my Bachelor’s degree.

By high school, I knew I wanted to pursue creative writing, but my advisor explained that I wouldn’t get far without a Bachelor’s Degree. Applying to universities in Florida made sense because of the simultaneous newness and familiarity. Driving home to friends and family only took a few hours. Looking back, not a tremendous amount of thought went to applying to undergraduate programs because I felt like I just needed a degree.

One bachelor’s degree later, graduate school seemed like the next step for many of my peers. As for me, I had no idea which out of the hundreds of countrywide programs to apply to.

But then a bigger question dawned on me: is graduate school even an important option for me?

I want to be able to earn a living through my writing, preferably through YA fantasy novels, or YA fantasy cartoons. Or any cartoons. I’ve always been attracted to stories with a large, diverse cast of characters who the audience identifies with before plot conflicts confront them (characters and readers and viewers) with heavier topics. I love when a story can meaningfully combine the whimsical and the serious.

The question of whether I would need an MFA weighed heavily on my mind since I finished my undergraduate work. In university curricula, there seemed to be a divide between literary (academically approved) and genre (don’t waste our time, please) fiction. I understood that the character should be the focus of the story, and that juggling character depth as well as other concepts such as magical or alternate-realm settings could be too much pressure to place on novice writers. But literary fiction isn’t my passion. If that was all an MFA could provide, then maybe this wasn’t the right direction to take no matter how much I love an academic life.

Which is exactly why I’m drawn to Hamline’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. This is a Low Residency program. After meeting with my mentors and peers for ten days, I’d return home to work on my writing on my own time. Such a set-up seems to resemble the writer/editor correspondence that I’ll hopefully partake of with my occupation. With a low-residency program, that one-on-one relationship between professor and student is still enforced.

Because there’s only ten days of in person instruction, there’s an urgency to not waste time. The rigor would feel like an elongated AWP.

The University of Vermont also offers a program like this one, except older (the oldest low-residency program that teaches writing for children and young adults in the US).

These programs focus on the various sub-genres of writing for younger readers, such as picture books, graphic novels, or comics, with semesters designated to focus on a different category. Students will also focus on writing for different age brackets such as early reading, middle-grade, and young-adult fiction. Although students will have to hone in on a particular sub-genre, experimentation in the others are encouraged. And students are also explicitly taught how to navigate the literary marketplace, from the writing life itself to publication.

Considering both the faculty and their works (such as Swati Avasthi’s Chasing Shadows, William Alexander’s Nomad), genre is encouraged.

And there are other programs that I’m interested in as well, such as Antioch University and Chapman University. Antioch has a low-residency program with multi-genre focuses on writing for videogames, films, stage productions, and television writing. Chapman isn’t low-residency, but there’s a dual MA/MFA Degree geared especially for students who want to teach English and creative writing at the college level. The degree would take three years to complete, with requirements to fulfill in both the MA and MFA degree. That honestly sounds really awesome to me as well as intense, granting me a completed year of work toward a Doctorate degree. I’m not for certain if genre fiction is encouraged, but considering that James Paul Blaylock (one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre of science fiction) is a professor at Chapman, there’s definitely promise. At the very least I’ll research the other faculty members.

In my canvas bag are business cards, pamphlets, brochures, and swag (pens, notepads, and even matches) from an even wider array of MFA programs.

I am at the end of a year off of my education to see if the writing life was truly what I wanted. This time consisted mainly of reading novels, jotting a lot of notes to myself, realizing that I’m not cut out for the standard 9-5 job, writing for my Dungeons and Dragons’ campaign, writing my novel series, and writing about writing.

I think I’m in this field for the long haul.

_______

Bronte as a Bag with Legs

Brontë Bettencourt (Episode 34) graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors in English Creative Writing. When she’s not writing or working, she is a full time Dungeon Master and Youtube connoisseur.

 

On Top of It #3: Don’t Let EL James Ruin Fanfic

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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On Top of It #3 by Lisa Martens

Don’t Let EL James Ruin Fanfic

I’m not a fan of the Twilight or Fifty Shades franchises, but I can appreciate that Fifty came from fanfiction, because I think there is a great community around fanfiction, and it’s constantly dissed and ignored, no matter how much it grows. But EL James, why are you disrespecting Mom?

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about:  For the 10th anniversary of the Twilight series, Meyer has released a gender flipped version of the book called Life and Death. In this one, the dude is the teenage mortal with perpetual derp face, and the vampire is a chick.

But this wasn’t what Twilight fans were expecting. For years now, Meyer has been working on and off again on a retelling of the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view.

If this sounds familiar, it’s also the premise of Grey, the new Fifty Shades book told from the perspective of, that’s right, Christian Grey.

EL James, what are you doing? I enjoy some erotic, awkward fanfiction as much as the next person. You got very lucky (as someone who has read parts of the book and has experimented with bondage, I can safely testify that you got very, very, VERY lucky, and that maybe your editor is neither familiar with American English slang nor with sex), but why are you hurting your mom? You’re a millionaire now. You can come up with your own bad ideas, and people will read them. Or, at the very least, start stealing ideas from people who are more low key.

To be clear, I’m not telling you to steal ideas. You just seem to be doing that anyway, so you should be smarter about it.

Do you like the Twilight series anymore? Have you forgotten where you came from? You were basically Tina Belcher with a Blackberry. You blew up, a lot of very dissatisfied women bought your book on Kindle so they wouldn’t have to admit to owning it (until it became so popular that it became cool to hold a copy in public), and now here you are, still taking ideas from Stephanie Meyer, and ruining her release because of it.

And for everyone harping on and on about how Shakespeare shouldn’t be converted into modern English and how Amazon is the death of publishing, loosen up and read some goddamn erotic fanfiction. I’m tired of going to AWP conferences and seeing pompous assholes scoff at it.

Fifty Shades happens to be a terrible example, and I can understand how it’s more ammo for your arsenal, but there is also a lot of good writing and a very open, non-judgemental community out there.

Besides, your kids probably wouldn’t even be reading if it weren’t for Tumblr or Wattpad.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

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