awp finite finito

Lindsey Lewis Smithson interviews me in the Winter issue of The Coachella Review.

There's also two poems from God Damsel.

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Yes, I'll be at AWP this week. Here's where you can find me:

Table D7 at the bookfair. No Tell Books will be sharing with Bloof Books.

My official "author signing" time is Friday, 10am - Noon, but I'll be there a lot. The full No Tell author signing schedule is here.

Bloof, Cooper Dillon and No Tell will be holding the LOTTERY. Winner receives our entire catalogs.

I'll be participating in the following panel:

Friday, 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM
Executive Room
Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby

Writing the Beltway: Four Washington, DC Publishers Navigate the Capital. (Matthew Kirkpatrick, Reb Livingston, Richard Peabody, Caitlin Hill, Dave Housley) Editors from Barrelhouse magazine, No Tell Books, Gargoyle magazine, and Poet Lore magazine read from their journals and discuss their experiences working to produce and promote literary art within the politics-obsessed sphere of Washington, DC.

* * *

And that is it. As I mentioned last week, I passed on participating in readings and offsite events. I'm not even sure how many I'll attend as an audience member. If I make it to two, that'll be a clear measure of my Capricorn ambition. There were some really nice offers, oh but my heart, fleeing. To keep track of everything going on offsite, I select "maybe" on the FB invites so each day I'll have a handy list. Or that was the idea. It sort of worked last year, but this year, it seems that I have the option of attending 10-20 events each night. Now I can't look at my upcoming event list because when I do I start to hyperventilate. And the invitations are still coming, even today. I wonder how many people I made hyperventilate by linking to the above No Tell going ons. If I have, I apologize.

This going to be my last AWP for a while. It's simply too much. About a month after AWP people start working on their panel proposals for the next one so I get about 5-10 invitations to participate on panels about "online" and "blogging" and "social media." I am so very tired of those subjects. Then summer comes and you have to reserve your hotel room if you want to stay at the conference hotel. And of course they want a deposit. Then AWP sends out it's barrage of messages encouraging/frightening you to register, order a table, buy a pricey ticket to the big dance. Then people start making plans for all the offsite stuff which means more and more emails with proposals, questions and schedules.

I feel forced to think about AWP all year long. There's never a break. It's constantly there. Looming.

That doesn't even touch on all the personal garbage that comes along with it. Having to see the people you'd rather not, the over-saturation of other people's drama, anger, insecurity, jealousy seeping into your own sphere, being unsure of people's motives, being approached by folks who are pissed because you didn't take their work, or invite them to participate in something, or are still offended by something you said last year, or wrote on a blog and lord knows what else.

Not going next year is a really easy decision. Chicago. Again. Expensive. Cold. Unpleasant associations. Blah. No thank you.