President's Corner

by Ken Schept

Serendipity Marks AWP Conference Experience

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs Exhibition and Bookfair in Baltimore felt like publishing-industry Ground Zero. I went with a double objective: promoting myself and Columbia Fiction Foundry. I accomplished both.

I was among 10,500 visitors and 650 exhibitors at the Baltimore Convention Center, according to AWP.  The upstairs-downstairs event combined seminars on the craft and business of writing on the upper floors with a superstore of small presses, literary publications, and associations and consultants in booths lining the aisles of the ground floor exhibition space. I got in my steps, averaging almost five miles daily.

An unexpected encounter happened at around mile twenty on the last day of the event, when I had just enough time for a quick bite before catching the train back to New York. Determined to maximize even my final show moments, I started a conversation with the gray-haired guy sitting next to me at a lunch table. Two bites into my hot dog (you don’t go to AWP for the food), I learn  he’s a Baltimore native whose wife happens to teach English at Johns Hopkins and has served on the board of a local literary magazine with a specific mission: publishing writers over age fifty. 

Terrible timing! The perfect literary match for me and many other CFF members materializes when I should be dashing for the exit. Instead, I strap on my backpack and head to Booth T538, the serendipitous lunchtime encounter confirming my recently acquired, later-in-life predisposition: Be Out There. Expect to have a good time. And something good will happen. That’s why I enjoyed and benefited from the AWP Conference and Bookfair and recommend it for immersion into a large, knowledgeable, and helpful literary community. Before I describe my experience at Booth T538, some context.

When I write fiction, I meander until the characters reveal the way forward. Success at the AWP event requires outlining and plotting. The AWP app helped me easily prioritize and schedule seminars to attend, exhibitors to visit, and presenters to meet. Having gone to many trade shows during my business journalism career, I also relied on muscle memory and Best Practices. Keep moving. Keep records. Plan. And stay open to the unexpected and new possibilities…

… Such as discovering that a seminar panelist was someone I worked with twenty-five years ago, just months after she’d graduated Columbia with an MFA and published a first book of stories. I reintroduced myself and we spent an hour catching up on family and careers. She’s published several novels and generously offered to read the opening of my novel, Vows.

… Or what happened just after I’d added my name to an email list and was talking to the co-founder of a small press. A woman called my name. I didn’t immediately recognize her until she introduced herself and we spontaneously hugged. We hadn’t seen each other for forty years, since working together at a business-to-business publisher and attending some of the same trade shows. She was at AWP as a poet. I was there as a novelist.

… And my experience after I visited the booth of my undergrad Alma Mater, American University, and met the head of the MFA program, which didn’t exist when I graduated. She invited me to a reading that evening to hear MFA alumni read their fiction and poetry. Following the reading, I met the editor of the AU literary magazine, Folio. The evening before, I’d listened to CFF colleague Jennifer Sears and other writers read their work in a darkly paneled, vintage Baltimore event space.

I’d translated my positive attitude into action on day one of the AWP event, after visiting Jessie Glenn at the MindBuck Media booth. An industry publicist featured in a CFF webinar last November, Jessie reiterated her message of Literary Citizenship. She advised me to support the writers and editors selling their work. I left Baltimore with my spirits lifted and arms weighted by the debut novels and literary magazines filling the AWP tote bag.

Among the literary journals is the one I picked up at Booth T538, Passager, which calls itself “The only national literary journal dedicated to writers over 50.” Executive Director Christine Drawl was intrigued when I explained that CFF has an energizing confluence of members: some coming to fiction writing after successful careers, and others writing fiction while launching careers. For more details about Passager, AWP and other literary publications, small presses, consultants and resources that I encountered at the AWP Conference & Bookfair, please see related story.