There was a reception Wednesday night with some free alcohol - hard to believe some writers might be interested in that. By this time, Jeff Parker had arrived in Atlanta, as had Dwayne Hayes and Jessica Bomarito of Absinthe: New European Writing - all three of them from Michigan. After hanging around a bit before the reception, we wandered on up.
If you want to meet some authors at AWP, hang around with Jeff Parker. If you want to meet anybody who has translated any writing from a European language to English, hang around with Dwayne and Jessica. We hadn't made it five feet into the room when Parker was introducing us to Sean Thomas Dougherty, which led to an introduction to Peter Conners (BOA Editions, and a fine writer as well), whom I've had the pleasure of emailing and even speaking with via phone, but never had met in person.
Not much later Dwayne was introducing us to Adam Sorkin, an amazing translator. It was shortly after this that the free alcohol was pulled from the room and the bulk of the party wandered downstairs to the Hilton Lobby Bar (While I'm sure it really had a name, the Hilton Lobby Bar is how it was generally being referred to as). It was down there that I had the pleasure of meeting many great practitioners of flash fiction: Kim Chinquee, Kathy Fish, Darlin' Neal, Girija Tropp, Claudia Smith, Jeff Landon, as well as soon to be M/C published, Pia Z. Erhardt.
The combination of 2 hours and 45 minutes sleep over Monday and Tuesday night, with the 13 hour drive had me turning in early at about 2 a.m. (huge props to Aaron Burch, who had probably only slept an hour more than I had those past 60 hours and yet hung until sometime beginning with a 4).
What fun! I'm hoping to go next year when it's in NYC. The best of all worlds...
Posted by: Kaytie M. Lee | March 05, 2007 at 11:33 AM