AWP Conference in L.A.

Just got back from the AWP Conference, this year held in Los Angeles.  This is the second time I've attended and I find I don't go, as so many do, to make contacts and meet people.  It's enough for me just to be around 13,000 people who cherish books and writing and want to talk about it.  I want to listen.

There are hundreds and hundreds of presentations and you can only attend a handful in three days.  It's like being in a huge chocolate store where you only buy one or two small pieces but leave feeling reassured that there is chocolate there waiting for you should you ever return.

On the last night Joyce Carol Oats read.  She didn't read from her most recent novel, her 40th I believe, but instead created an interview with herself based on the kinds of questions, many suspect, that she'd been asked over the years.  It was funny and insightful as one might expect.  She is getting on in years now but in person she looks and talks and reads like a woman in her mid-thirties.  She writes with a pen from eight-thirty in the morning until one in the afternoon.  If she's on the road she writes from ten in the evening until one in the morning.  She was once asked if she ever lounged by the beach with a light summer read.  She said she'd rather eat ground glass.