AWP26 Recap

by McKenzie Watson-Fore

A low, smoggy sky greeted me last Wednesday when I stepped out of the Baltimore Washington International Airport onto the grubby sidewalk to await my rideshare. 11,000 other writers and I descended on the city like a plague of small-press-loving locusts, and from Wednesday through Saturday, I feasted on panels, off-site readings, and instagrammable meet-cutes with my writer-crushes in the book fair. Regrettably, because I can only handle so much media at one time, the deluge of books and chapbooks and bookmarks and stickers in the book fair left me with no additional bandwidth for social media, so I was pretty absent from the apps all weekend, which means all the writers and editors I met and fawned over will be hearing from me today, and I hope I made a strong enough impression that they’ll connect my face (and hopefully winning demeanor) with my digitally abstracted internet profiles.

That seems to be the name of the game at AWP: interact as much as possible. Make impressions. Ask questions in the panels. (The obvious pitfall here is that writer-bros who fancy themselves philosophers will feel way too much permission to pose their pseudo-insights as questions—and yes, I am talking about you, blond dude in the Literary Criticism panel who asked if we could all just take a minute to consider the resonances of the word “criticism,” particularly as contrasted with “scholarship”, and you, man in the panel on flash nonfiction, who asked how the editors would know if you secretly submitted fiction).

Since sneaker wave magazine is informally headquartered in the Pacific Northwest, where long walks on the beach are threaded through with a constant wariness for the sneaker waves that give our magazine their name, Baltimore was too far for our entire team to travel and set up camp in the book fair. Therefore, I glad-handed my way solo through the crowded walkways, tracking down contributors I’d never before met in person and writers who I’m jittery with hope will send in their work.

One of my favorite parts of AWP, overwhelming as it can be, is learning about the vast profusion of outlets for writing.

These are my back-of-the-lecture-hall snapshots from panels about different ends of one spectrum of nonfiction storytelling: flash nonfiction, ranging from 100 to 1200 words, and the longform essay, in the 5000-word range and beyond. There is so much demand for great nonfiction outlets! sneaker wave magazine finds our sweet spot somewhere in the middle, since we publish stories between 2000 and 4000 words. We are still open for submissions for one more week, and we’d love to read your work! Send us your nonfiction stories, your personal essays about “that one time . . .”, your memoir excerpts, your darkest secrets.

These are three sneaker wave contributors I found in the wild (at least, the heavily moderated wild of AWP)! Gift yourself some time with their stories:

Kase Johnston, left, wrote “ring of fire,” which was instrumental in University of Utah’s decision to shut down the fraternity that Johnston wrote about. True storytelling wields power, and that’s why we’re here.

In the center of the photo grid above is ThereseB, holding up the badge that explains she lost her voice during the conference! Still, you can spend time with her words in the story “dear stranger,” which reflects on her experience of unexpectedly encountering a drowning.

On the right is E.C. Birdsall, author of the recent “how to get a reputation.” EC and I met at an off-site meetup hosted by Margo Steines, a writer-friend I’ve long admired and whose work continues to inform the way I think about language, structure, and the body. You can trace similar obsessions through EC’s story, below:

I’m so grateful to have gotten to see some of you in person this week, and we can’t wait to get back to our regularly scheduled programming of running compelling true stories. We’re still open for submissions until midnight on Sunday, March 15th—send us your work!