Monday, February 7, 2011

AWP 2011 and Ideas for AWP 2012

It was fun, and it was exhausting.



After a few days of attempting my best impersonation of an extrovert, I am now ready to sit back and make sense of AWP 2011 in Washington, DC, where I live.



There are many lovely people I see only there, or only there and a couple of other places during the year. I may sing their praises in a separate post if I can do justice to anything like the right number of people.



Yet the mind already turns to AWP 2012 in Chicago, where I have lived and studied; I grew up in the Far West suburb of Aurora.



While it seems unlikely that I will propose a panel for 2012 myself, a glance at this year's schedule suggested a few that others may wish to take on.



They are the following:


  1. No Text Please, We're Students: Reluctant Readers in the College Classroom

  2. Writing Auto-Erotic Identities

  3. Libel and How to Get It Right

  4. Dairy Queens: Gay Male Poets of Wisconsin

  5. New Opportunities in the Teaching of Fortune Cookie Composition

  6. He Takes Out a Felt Tip, You Take Out a Ballpoint: Writing the Chicago Way

  7. Establishing and Maintaining a Lactose-Intolerant Writers' Group

  8. When Your Promotional Strategy is Better than Your Writing: How to Hide the Gap

  9. War of 1812 Bicentennial Reading

  10. Desire and Ambivalence in the Rejection Letter

  11. Stranger Things Have Happened, but Not Many: When Political Poetry Is Actually Good

  12. Reconsidering William McGonagall

  13. Deservedly Neglected Illinois Writers

  14. The Barbaric Yawp, or Teaching Creative Writing to Dogs

  15. A Celebration of Solipsism: New Confessional Poets

  16. Prize Winners Display their Fabulosity

  17. What Would Nelson Algren Do?

  18. The Ego Has Landed: Projecting False Modesty Once Your Career Takes Off

I wish the best of luck to anyone who wishes to make these ideas a reality. Attribution of the original source will be most welcome.

8 comments:

32poems.com said...

Love it!

J.D. Smith said...

Thank you very much.

And I forgot one:

iRad: Reconciling your technotoys and your Che Guevara T-shirt.

Ru Freeman said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ru Freeman said...

Hilarious while striking hard at the you know who you are... looking forward to seeing some of these though I fear they won't be situated in the ballrooms.

Charles said...

In Wisconsin, we used to call senator Herb Kohl the Dairy Queen. For, you know, the obvious reason.

J.D. Smith said...

One more has come to mind.

It is "To Witness Bears: Lutheran Nature Writing."

Unknown said...

Special Topics in Totebags: How to look like you actually paid to attend the conference.

The Seventh Spiel: Pitching your book idea to the publisher's intern.

We Got a Ballroom and You Didn't: A reading by the MFA students of Asdf College from Jkl; the Anthology of MFA Students from Asdf College.

And this last one is from Jeremy R. Johnson. Night of the Living Dead WITH ZOMBIES: How to make the genre mashup work for you.

Unknown said...

Special Topics in Totebags: How to look like you actually paid to attend the conference.

The Seventh Spiel: Pitching your book idea to the publisher's intern.

We got a Ballroom and You Didn't: A reading from the MFA students of Asdf College from Jkl; The Anthology of MFA Students from Asdf College.

And this last one is stolen from Jeremy Robert Johnson. Night of the Living Dead WITH ZOMBIES: Making the literary mashup work for you.