Western Book Roundup

Thoughts on the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Part 1

By Jenny Shank, 4-13-10

This was the first year I’d experienced the all-out literary blitz that is the Associated Writers & Writing Programs conference, held last week in Denver.  I am tired and my feet hurt, even though I left the festivities several hours before they ended each night.  My overall impression is that Denver has become a hub of literary activity in a way it has never been before.

Colorado’s university writing programs, including those of CU, CSU, the University of Denver, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, have always hosted readings and supported the local writers who teach there, but the activity at AWP demonstrated that there are many writers and book lovers at large in Denver, unaffiliated with a university.  Many of these unaffiliated writers come together around the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop in Denver, which was a Literary Partner of the conference, and hosted a number of events, including a party at The Jet Hotel and a reading by David Wroblewski.  The AWP conference and book fair provided the chance for representatives of the writing programs in Colorado, small presses (including Fulcrum Books, Unbridled Books, and Elixir Press), literary magazines (including the University of Colorado at Denver’s Copper Nickel and CSU’s Colorado Review), and bookstores in the area to gather under one roof for a few days.

The conference spilled out of the Colorado Convention Center, with off-site events each evening.  I’ve never seen anything like it in Denver: guys performing Bukowski poems on the street corner, a literary burlesque show to benefit the group Women In the Literary Arts (appropriate, as Denver has been active in the recent retro-burlesque trend), and poetry and fiction readings at museums, bars, and gathering places around town.

It makes me hope that someone who has access to funding (not many of us, these days) will carry forward this momentum by starting a reinvigorated Colorado book festival that should have nothing in common with the dreary, stodgy old Rocky Mountain Book Festival, which withered away about a decade ago.

My impression of how lively Denver seemed during AWP is biased, of course, due to the fact that I grew up there (and crowds spilling in for the Rockies’ opening day and an Avalanche game over the weekend made parts of downtown unusually bustling).  As for the thoughts of people from out-of-town, Steve Almond wrote in “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Braindead: An AWP Retrospective” for The Rumpus:

“Trip Out on the Strangeness of Denver Itself.  This city with its fancy, barren downtown and its endless highways. This is the loveable West, the way they drew it up all those years ago. But it all feels too new, too sprawling and imposed, and you can’t help feeling slightly corrupt (or perhaps party to a larger corruption) as you gaze out at the snow-capped girdle of mountains rising in all directions like a beer ad.”

And the prestigious Portland-based literary magazine Tin House tweeted:  “Denver...We’re not thrilled with your closing-time policies. Consensus: worst since semisonic,” and “Bye Denver. Your food was mediocre and your Climate was temperate.”

Well, we can’t all be Portland.

Tomorrow, I’ll have one more post about the 2010 AWP Conference, focusing on some themes I saw in the content of panel discussions, several of which focused on what it means to be a Western writer, or how to navigate the changed publishing landscape.

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