Liveblogging my day at the AWP Conference as one does.

7:36a – Back to my roots: riding a Metro train downtown. (I grew up in the DC area. Metro is basically in my blood.)

8:17 – Almost fell exiting the station. Thankfully (?), no one was around. The train in LA is weird because you need to cross the tracks to get from the platform to the sidewalk so there was a weird cement sign holder thing that I didn’t see and tripped over. Okay, I didn’t trip over it so much as almost fall backward over it as I closed the gate. I didn’t twist or break anything, bless.

8:26 – At the convention center. Taking the train was so easy. I can’t believe I’ve been driving to downtown all this time like a ding dong. In my defense, all people here say is how terrible the public transportation is in LA, so I never looked into it once I got my car. “This is a driving city!” they say. WELL, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE.

8:38 – My colleague (KK) and I got here at the same time. Magic! So we go through the registration line together and then head to the room for the first panel where our colleague is presenting.

8:45 – Hello, colleague on sabbatical! The three of us have  a delightful reunion, and I see someone I’m friends with on Instagram who I haven’t seen in 3D since the Before Times. We met briefly at an event, and she didn’t remember so technically our first in person meeting since becoming friends.

9:00 – I ask my colleague what she’s doing for lunch and realize I LEFT MY LUNCH AND SNACKS IN THE CAR ????????????. There are not enough ???? emojis in the world for what this realization did to me, especially because part of the reason I didn’t get to bed until after midnight is that I was prepping my food.

9:03 – First panel! Disrupting the Composition Classroom: Strategies from BIPOC Creatives. First presenter is also the moderator (Cynthia Guardado). She talks about using poetry (Docupoetics) and how it’s situated in the historical and that the author’s are commenting on current events.

9:12 – Next up is Michelle Brittan Rosado. She uses assets-based pedagogy. First writing assignment (diagnostic) is reflective, asking about their lives as a writer, including strengths and what they want to work on. (This is not the same as a literacy narrative, btw, which I have stopped doing in my classes because they are depressing af.) Last assignment is a reflection that explains their writing process, their evolution as a writer, how their last essay in particular developed, and their future as a writer in the academy/beyond.

Writers of color like Vershawn Ashanti Young, Amy Tan, and Ross Gay serve as models for how to incorporate the first-person with purpose to enhance their arguments and to root their knowledge in personal and hard-earned wisdom

Assigns one poem per unit to approach the essay as a genre, so they critique what the academic essay can be and its perceived superiority over other formats.

9:19 – bridgette bianca, poet and professor (and Instagram friend :D). She presents five lessons from the past 15 years. She uses Black liberation framework in class.

1. Being my full Black self in the classroom – do not assimilate, whitewash, water down, or code switch. Wants students to succeed, not survive.
2. Using course themes to subvert and dethrone whiteness as the default – specifically, identity (migration and displacement, myth of the American Dream, coming of age while Black & Queer, etc)
3. Loading, Reloading, and Exploding the canon – decentering whiteness in assigned texts, presents work by writers of color as the norm not the exception
4. Lead with curiosity when creating assignments – every assignment is an opportunity to see where their curiosity leads them, begins with what she’s curious about. What are you currently reading and what do you want to read about?
5. Offsetting and upsetting Whiteness outside of the classroom – go into every committee ready to speak up and piss off people. Her sabbatical project is creating a curated list of Afro-American literature so people will stop emailing to ask her for book recommendations or saying they don’t know what to teach/assign. She plans to make this public.

9:32 – Arielle K. Jones, course development and how we treat our students and conduct ourselves

1. Remember (What was it like for YOU?)
2. Revisit – Revisit these ideas – What do I want to ensure? What do I want to avoid?
3. Relate – what is used vs. what is shown (how can they use what you show them?)

9:48 – Simona Supekar (my colleague!)

Student outcomes say nothing about essays and grades. The first and last time she had a South Asian instructor like herself was in postcolonial literature course. She got an A on the paper so Salman Rushdie signed her copy of Midnight’s Children with an A. (Everybody said, “Awwww!” and clapped when she told us this.)

She talks about neural coupling – telling stories to others connects the listener and teller.

10:02 – Q&A. moderator opens by saying we met her quite awkward self at beginning of panel and that’s how she is in the classroom, becomes authentic self after about twenty minutes or so, has to get over the hump of “everybody’s looking at me.”

12:06 – Getting ready for Jasmine’s panel. KK and I went to a breakfast with other people from creative writing programs and then walked through the book fair (booths 200-500). The breakfast was perfect timing because we both were SO hungry (see above re: no snacks). After we ate our oatmeal (I know, but that’s how hungry I was) (I hate oatmeal, for new readers), we both felt ourselves coming back to life. We also (smartly) snagged pastries for later. I say smartly because I’m about to eat one RIGHT NOW.

12:10 – panel time! Big & Bodied: Writing Against Fatphobia

Statement from panel creator (who isn’t present because of a scheduling conflict and whose name I didn’t catch/isn’t on the website): “To write in America is to write about fatness and disordered eating.”

I somehow didn’t know Carmen Maria Machado  is on this panel. Okay, I know how I didn’t know. I just looked up Jasmine (Guillory)’s panel and planned to be here so didn’t pay attention to anything else except the title.

(Also my phone is at 44%. Ridiculous. I think it’s because the WiFi isn’t working so I had to use my hotspot. Plus also, I’m sure the conference app is draining a bunch of my battery life.)

Jasmine is first. There’s a microphone issue. “Can you hear me?” she asks.

“NO!” someone way in the back responds.

She turns on the mic and says hello, but the mic is turned way up so her hello is a HELLO. Everyone laughs and Jasmine tells Machado (who is sitting right next to her), “Now you know what to do when it’s your turn.”

She reads from The Wedding Date and says that people always comment on the amount of food, some as a compliment, some definitely as not.

Carmen Maria Machado is up next, says she’s always been interested in writing about the body but realized she hadn’t written a story in her collection that was about a character who was fat on the page. She also tried writing nonfiction but it was terrible so she wrote a story and that helped her get to what she wanted to say in the essay. Reading from “The Trash Heap Has Spoken,” which is about what it means to have a fat mind. (SN: I definitely need to read her work. My students select it a lot when it’s time to read for choice.)

Isle McElroy (they/them) says what they think about eating disorders has changed, and the risk of writing an essay about what you think is that you might change your mind five minutes later. They read two excerpts: one from an essay, one from a novel. The essay is about internalized shame; the fiction is about the harm and self-destruction of the eating disorder itself. Line that stood out to me from the fiction: “He believed himself to be above the love of others even as he desired their unadulterated attention.”

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan – main character’s mother has my daughter’s name, which means I need to read her book immediately. (Jasmine and I make eye contact and wow faces when Sullivan starts reading hahaha.) Sullivan has never read this section of the book publicly before because of intuitive or implicit sense that a fat, black girl presented without sass wouldn’t be welcomed. She now has a greater clarity about the purpose of her work – to tell the truth, the full truth, the BIG truth. During the panel, she wants to talk about the hunger for positive representations of fatness while also wanting/needing to tell the truth about these experiences.

Megan Milks (they/them) – got told not to write “an eating disorder book” because there was cultural fatigue around the topic. They tried to call it everything else, but it is at heart an eating disorder narrative. I want to read this one. There’s lots of genre play—character starts on juvenile shelf, moves to ya shelf, then gets stuck in eating disorder book they can’t get out of. Book took a long time to write. The excerpt they read is from the perspective of Margaret but written in second person. (Noting this because my students and I always talk about how rare second person is in novels.)

[This was an excellent panel. I gave a brief description of Jasmine’s but only because that was how brief her intro was to her section. During the panel, they talked about the importance of showing fat people eating and taking pleasure in eating since that’s usually not a luxury afforded to them. That led to a discussion on fat bodies and pleasure as well as the challenges of showing pleasure for people with disordered eating who may not what pleasure is or may be uncomfortable with it.

I did not take notes during the Q&A/discussion portion because…I don’t know why. I think it’s because it felt like a conversation and not a presentation, so I was less interested in taking notes. Also, this was the case for both of the previous panels, btw.]

1:26 – bathroom stalls that open inward will be my villain origin story

3:21 – Ate lunch and now it’s time for the next panel: Holy F**k: Women, Faith & Sex in Fiction.

Everyone starts with a remark about why they’re here.

Aaliyah Bilal  – You’re a person first before your beliefs so behind the belief is always the person underneath and the self is always trying to express itself.

I appreciate the diversity of faiths presented on this panel – Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and evangelical Christianity.

Felicia Berliner – reader said her book helped them realize Hasidic Jews aren’t a monolith

Bilal – the gay agenda is the same as the Black agenda and women’s agenda: how do I get these people to see my humanity? “There’s a problem with the kinds of conversations we have in public that are not necessarily about how Muslims feel.” (This was in response to a reader saying she wouldn’t let her son read the book because of the gay agenda. She says many US Muslims are accepting of gay people but that’s not what gets discussed by the community.)

Dantiel Moniz – As an artist, your job is to create. What people think your art is not your business. Creating the work and putting it out in the world means you’ve done your job an artist.

Deesha Philyaw – avoid writing for the bad faith reader who doesn’t/won’t like anything you write

Question: what would you say to someone who is thinking about writing about faith, etc?

Moniz – If you’re being called, you have to answer. You are in collaboration with whatever creative power you have been called by.

Berliner – “Go fully for it.” “You do not have to explain your character’s world.” She says that while reading Temple Folks (Bilal’s book), she was now part of the temple. She also points out that there are lots of workshops for writing about sex, not many (if any???) for writing about faith. (When she says about faith, I think she means grappling with or questioning faith since that’s what all of the panelists’ books have in common.)

Bilal says once she became a writer, she stopped reading for story, started reading for heart. You can say hard things with love about the things you love.

Aaliyah Bilal is so funny but doesn’t think she is. She had us laughing out loud several times.

(Also I did take notes during this discussion!)

8:04 – back home and mostly settled in. On the train ride home, I once again wondered why I ever drove to or through downtown. Also, by the miracle of science my food in my lunchbox was still cold. Thank you, ice pack!

Today was a lot of fun, forgotten lunch and snacks as well as not-working wifi notwithstanding. All of the panels I attended were fantastic. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.