. . . and the hump story is "Moon walk"

The 11th story in the 21 story collection is a streamlined version of "Moon Walk," which originally appeared in the Paycock Press anthology Gravity Dancers: Even more Fiction by Washington Area Women. "Moon Walk" is a straight up ghost story, the longest in Curio. Tomorrow I hit AWP hard, and I'll be armed with postcards to pimp the collection.

Tomorrow night, I'm part of the dogzplot/wigleaf/jmww/sententia offsite reading at the Wonderland Ballroom. Uh huh.

High class AWP off site readings!

Your Thursday and Friday nights are spoken for

no problem

From the classifieds of the March/April 2009 AWP Chronicle: "Great Western Fiction is seeking submissions of Western fiction set in the American Old West before 1914. . . No language. No Sex."

Not everyone misses Al Swearengen.

The ad is more complete than this, with a promise of fuller guidelines at the website, but it looks like this venture has already folded. They offered $50 for short stories, $500 for novels.

the retractions are coming every few minutes now

okay, so I posted some snarky-butt things about the AWP conference and Zoetrope workshops on this blog, but now I'm writing to confirm that they are probably awesome. and I don't mean that in an eye rolling yeah-mom-that's-a-pretty-big-ball-of-twine kind of way. Clearly this year's AWP in Chicago was as sacred as it was profane, and I'm totally jealous of everyone who went. As for "Zoe" (people call it that, I'm not really so comfy yet), I've spent the last 36 hours obsessively reading flash drafts posted there, and it has been very exciting so far.

AWP-- a great place to hook up?

I'm sad I didn't go to the AWP conf. I'm glad I didn't too. I've never been, a fact made slightly awkward given that I teach fiction writing at the institution that houses AWP. By the time that AWP entered my consciousness (as event and body), I was solidly married, and even though we were hanging out with unmarried writers, there was a slow-train-leaving-the-station kinda thing pervading our social interactions, with Dean and I on the train, settling into our sleeper car, while our friends were piling into rusted Chevy Citations, chanting 'road trip! road trip!'

I guess what I'm saying is, AWP, like libertarianism, always seemed like a young man's game to me, with the conference providing an apparently wonderful opportunity to exchange powerful feeling, and my sense is that the conference produces more in the way of civil unions than artistic enrichment. Which is terrific, really. You don't want bachelor writers just out there in the population. Pair them up. Heck, triple them up.

All this is a load of BS, though. My real thing is that I dislike readings. I'm not crazy about people, either.

PS--I'm reading AWP round-ups now, and it looks like I'm full of it.

message recieved, repairs commencing in 3, 2, 1 . . .

I could blame a number of reasons why I’ve been rough on my students lately. As we near the end of the semester I’m ready to say goodbye and they are just warming up to me. I often feel like I haven’t done enough for them or brought them far enough along to guarantee a summer of better writing, or it may all boil down to the fact that my annual review is due Wednesday and I haven’t started it yet. Whatever the reasons, I have to admit I’m being a bit sharp in my critiques, and it has taken demonstrations of both defensiveness and thank-you-sir-may-I have-another humility, along with the perfectly reasonable and humane insights of Catherine M. Wallace to make me aware. Wallace writes:

“We don’t want advice. We don’t need advice. We want and need something that will send us back to our keyboards in gladness and singleness of heart.” This is from her essay, “Care & Feeding of the Work in Progress,” The Writer’s Chronicle March/April 2008.

and because I can’t leave it

AWP’s distillation of the NEA report decries the decentralization of reading’s importance in culture and declining basic literacy in the same breath, as if they are the same problem, which is a bit like saying a starving child and a man who only eats brie are equally malnourished, and can therefore be served by the same nagging science. They aren’t and they can’t. The child needs the state. The man needs friends.

To the NEA’s credit, they pay attention to 9 year olds, and “Reading for fun” is one of the important measures in their report. Huh. I rather doubt that AWP supports fun, so that must be a sticky point for them. Well I know it’s cheap laughs to pick on AWP’s review of the report rather than complain about the study itself, (I can't pick on the study--it's all full of numbers and stuff) but I feel AWP speaks more directly to writers and writing teachers than the NEA. I won’t go so far as to claim they set the tone, but they certainly echo it.

AWP could set the tone though, if they were more stimulated than depressed by the new. Seems like it’s their job to be stimulated and stimulating. Certainly the writers they feature recognize that the act of moaning is a symptom of sentimentalism.