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:
- No Text Please, We're Students: Reluctant Readers in the College Classroom
- Writing Auto-Erotic Identities
- Libel and How to Get It Right
- Dairy Queens: Gay Male Poets of Wisconsin
- New Opportunities in the Teaching of Fortune Cookie Composition
- He Takes Out a Felt Tip, You Take Out a Ballpoint: Writing the Chicago Way
- Establishing and Maintaining a Lactose-Intolerant Writers' Group
- When Your Promotional Strategy is Better than Your Writing: How to Hide the Gap
- War of 1812 Bicentennial Reading
- Desire and Ambivalence in the Rejection Letter
- Stranger Things Have Happened, but Not Many: When Political Poetry Is Actually Good
- Reconsidering William McGonagall
- Deservedly Neglected Illinois Writers
- The Barbaric Yawp, or Teaching Creative Writing to Dogs
- A Celebration of Solipsism: New Confessional Poets
- Prize Winners Display their Fabulosity
- What Would Nelson Algren Do?
- 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.
