Lady Eleanor Goes to AWP 

AWP, the Association of Writing and Writing Programs, was established in 1967, seeking to expand the blooming presence of writers in academia and advocate for the establishment of creative writing programs. Today it gathers emerging and established writers across the nation, offering attendees a glimpse into the current literary climate and the rising voices in poetry and prose. 

Rue not, if you were unable to attend this year's literary hub. Instead, enjoy the account of my AWP adventures below.

The AWP Book Fair

The Bookfair is a hive. Coffee in hand, tote bag over shoulder, the room is abuzz with bookworms and bibliophiles. 

Literary magazines, small presses, indie bookstores all put their best foot forward in a snaking rainbow of booths. 

Chatting with poets, playwrights, novelists, and creatives, I reveled in the spirit of creative excitement that buzzed throughout the convention center. 

From handmade zines to glossy hardcover novels, I crowded by tote with a treasure trove of literary finds. I picked up translations from Zephyr Press, I snagged the most recent issue of the Santa Clara Review, I perused the recent publications out of Red Hen Press and Graywolf Press, and Black Lawrence Press. 

I’ve seen with my eyes the promise breaking over the literary horizon. It is a breathtaking thing to behold. 

Thieves or Transformers? How Much of Fiction is Fiction?

A Fiction Craft and Criticism Panel

“Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is entirely coincidental…”

We often draw a hard line between fiction and nonfiction. But a true storyteller knows those lines can blur. This morning I joined a buzzing crowd for a panel diving into how fact can inspire fictitious.

In this panel, Thieves or Transformers? How Much of Fiction is Fiction, novelists Leslie Kirk Campbell, Kristen Arnett, Ananda Lima, and Sidik Fofana and entertainment lawyer Lizbeth Hasse explored their perspectives on the oft-hazy delineation between truth and fiction.

The writers united in their discussion of how their art inevitably draws from their experience of the world. And yet, it was fascinating to hear each creative’s unique process and relationship with the fiction and truth woven together in their writing.

Ananda Lima described often realizing she’d drawn from her reality long after writing a story, “[The real-life inspiration] often comes from a soup of interior thoughts.”

Kristen Arnett described borrowing a friend’s “party story” about a misogynistic father realizing, to his disgust, that his parrot was a female bird. She described transforming the truth of this tale by shifting it tonally, and diving deeper into the the story’s core of surprise.

Sidik Fofana confessed that his characters are often amalgamations of real people. When writing a rough draft, he often leaves characters with actual people’s names until the ninth hour.

The Art of the Uncanny

A Fiction Craft and Criticism Panel

From contemporary humors leaning towards the absurd, to audience craving for escapism, to the introduction of new and oft uncanny technology, there are multitudinious reasons that surrealism is a distinguished theme in modern storytelling.

In The Art of the Uncanny panel, moderated by Heather Scott Partington, writers Anita Felicelli, Carribean Fragoza, Rita Bullwinkel, and Kate Folk explored how and why writers’ spheres venture into strange and uncanny realms.

From removing the linearity of time to submerging audiences in a world that operates under unfamiliar rules, this captivating panel offered a profound interrogation of the many forms and functions of the surrealist storytelling realm.

Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth that Feeds You discussed how she often enters into a liminal or unreal space by experiencing a place’s present and history.

“I often think about time when I’m writing a place," said Fragoza. "I’m very aware of the historical contexts of a place. And the histories that people bring to a place. I see history not as something that is detached from us but something that we constantly coexist with. I feel like the past is constantly bubbling up from the ground. I think the uncanny can be living in the moment we’re in and also different moments.”

“The uncanny needs to lead you towards the question not the answer," said Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot.

“The Uncanny allows me to access an emotional truth that straightforward fiction doesn’t," explained Anita Felicelli, author of Chimerica & Love Songs for a Lost Continent.

As we interrogate the similarities and differences of storytelling’s many containers, from a careful page of poetry to the epic worlds of feature films, we allow ourselves to consider our craft by looking at another. In many ways the literary world is a sibling, not a stranger, to the filmic domain. And yet the specificities of her craft and tradition, the inner workings of her industry, the habits of her creatives are not quite the same. 

Our journey begins at the Los Angeles Convention Center. What awaits within its green glass and white wire? 

Though the rendezvous locus changes, every year the literary world gathers to celebrate and discuss the art of writing. 

From Satire to Dad Jokes: How Humor Can Be Literary, Political & Funny

A Fiction Craft and Criticism Panel

The best comedy is the kind you painstakingly extrapolate. I kid, darlings. Humor is the hilarious heart of so many stories, from visual to written. There is a great power in humor. 

In this both hilarious and profound panel writers Alana Saab, Kathryn Fay, Kristen Arnet, Z. Hanna, and Isle McElroy dove deep into the many forms and function of comedy.

“Humor feels collaborative to me. Humor feels like communication," said With Teeth Author Kristen Arnett.

This panel spotlit the unique craft and challenges of humor, exploring everything from the vital role of pacing and timing in written humor to the challenges of considering the shifting tastes and contexts of your comedy’s audience, to how humor often offers an entry point into painful or difficult topics. 

“It doesn’t make sense to write towards timelessness," said People Collide author Isle McElroy. "As soon as you put writing on the page it’s already dated. What you want to write towards is the most realistic and fully contained world.”

Novels in Stories, Fragments, and Constellations

Fiction Craft & Criticism

Refractions, constellations, kaleidoscopic fragments–art can be simultaneously a part and a whole. 

This panel, Novels in Stories, Fragments, and Constellations, featuring Helen Georgas Nicole Haroutunian, Ananda Lima, Yiming Ma, and Sequoia Nagamatsu, explores the power of self-contained stories that coalesce into a cohesive whole, and the idea border between the short story and novel mediums isn’t necessarily as concrete as literary conventions often assume it to be. “Memory epics,” 

Yiming Ma described thinking of the parts of his novel as transcendent “memory epics.” And Sequoia Nagamatsu explained that his novel was ordered like a mixed tape–while there was a clear order, readers were encouraged to choose their own chronology. Ananda Lima described viewing her novel in stories as the pieces of a broken mirror, celebrating a review that called her work a “novel in refractions”.

Concatenations of LA

Multiple Literary Genres Readings

Creativity cannot thrive in homogeny. And thus, subculture, community found at social margins, cultivates lush artistry. “A Concatenation of Sprawls” by Raquel Gutiérrez, an essay exploring the 1990’s queer Latine underground inspired this panel, featuring Alex Espinoza, Raquel Gutiérrez, Vickie Vertiz, and Rubin Martinez.

A critical karaoke session exploring everything from “the art of gay cruising and the policing of gay bodies” from Espinoza to interrogations of the unique functions and failures of the spheres created within the neon painted gay clubs of Los Angeles to the beauty and meaning of rasquachismo.

Looking back to pave a way forward, this reading series electrified the audience, aiming to, in Martínez’s words, “excavate the future and the past” to find “how the past may form a liberatory pathway.”

Poets in the City of Movies

Artistic and Professional Development Panel

Have you ever considered that the cinematic marvels you create may be inspiring stunning poetry? Though the ties between novels and films are more clear, the connection between filmmakers and poets is oft overlooked. This panel explores an idea right at the heart of our series–there is a great overlap in the craft of visual storytelling and poetry. 

This panel, held in the heart of the movie industry, featuring Dorothy Barresi, Suzanne Lummis, Ramon Garcia, Ron Koertge, and William Archila celebrates poems inspired by films. 

“I think because cinema is a visual art form, it's a visual language, it operates with the images. It seemed natural for me to gravitate toward it, as a very early cinephile,” said Ramon Garcia. 

The poets discussed how the nature of the film industry, a presence that shapes the very landscape and culture of Los Angeles, shapes their art form—from the topics they choose to the imagery they craft to the way they perform their work. 

“Los Angeles is a city on the make,” said Dorothy Barresi, “and I do not mean that pejoratively. I find that old gangster phrase particularly useful when thinking about writing poetry adjacent to Hollywood. The biggest industry devoted to creating images. hustling images, we might say, and then endlessly disrupting, distorting, displacing and recreating those images for worldwide consumption.