AWP highlights

I'm just back from the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) 2010 conference in downtown Denver. Roughly 9,000 people attended the event, monopolizing hotels in the 16th Street Mall area for a four-day period.

Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, etc) was the keynote speaker Thursday night, and his talk was definitely one of the best I've ever witnessed. Funny, deep, intelligent and incredibly modest. Among other things, he shared some of the more sophomoric ideas he included years ago as a young 20-something in his (failed) attempt to secure a Stegner Fellowship as well as his first meeting with a well-known professor in his creative writing program. The professor said simply and deliberately (about Chabon's fiction submission), "I don't like it."

Another highlight of my first experience of AWP was a Saturday-morning panel that included Richard Bausch. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Bausch gave really helpful advice to the many would-be novelists (and already novelists but awaiting completion and publication) in the packed room. He talked about the process as one where you are driving in the dark, and you can see as far ahead as the headlights illumine, but no further. Bausch also discussed the role of failure--frequent failure and doubt--in any endeavor that aims for excellence, giving his own early writing as concrete evidence of this.

The panel that left me most fired up (in both good and bad ways, I think) was one on the place of journalism instruction in creative writing programs. Jim Sheeler, author of the Rocky Mountain News features that became the book Final Salute, was one of five panelists (all journalists) urging their audience of the need for more focus on journalistic skills in the creative writing (particularly creative nonfiction) curriculum. The panelists were all convinced that too often young writers only write about themselves and not about other subjects. While I do sympathize to some degree with their concern for not only this trend but also the need for accuracy in giving a "real-life" account of things, they so emphasized these concerns, with no attention to the idea of nonfiction projects as primarily artful as well as made up of real events, people, etc. It would have been interesting to have someone at the opposite end of the spectrum (e.g., John D'Agata, About a Mountain and The Next American Essay) on the panel as well. Plus somebody somewhere in between the two extremes.

More on AWP later, perhaps. It's lunchtime.