AWP

Wednesday afternoon right after yoga, I'll be hopping on a plane and headed to Chicago. David McDonald promises to show me the wonders of the T (Is that what's it's called there or am I getting it confused with someplace else?). I'll be there until Sunday.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to meet some of the folks I've been corresponded with over e-mail. If you happen to be a reader and bump into me at the conference, by all means, please introduce yourself. You've seen pictures (new haircut and all), you know what I look like. But if you're one of those people who think casinos should be outlawed, just keep on walking, don't want to know you!

This is the fourth AWP conference I'll have attended. The first one, which ended up being a blast, started off a truly agonizing experience. A while before the conference I was working on a website with someone whom I grew to consider an unstable and not-too-smart person (but this person considered himself quite the expert -- very laughable if you looked at his "award-winning" site). Prior to our falling out over the design of the new site we were trying to launch (never happened, after I left and he never did anything with it), he asked me to put together a panel for the conference (for some reason AWP used to have this person to handle part of the conference). He was impressed with my "connections" and ease of putting together the panel with editors from presses. It clearly was the best panel his part of the conference had to offer, so when we ended our "collaboration" he said, "No hard feelings, this has nothing to do with the panel, I hope you'll still do it." Of course, I'd still do it, I told him. I registered for the conference, bought my ticket, reserved my room, put together the panel and responded to every e-mail he sent to me that required a response. Two weeks before the conference when he was sure I finished all the work and it was too late to change things, he sent me an e-mail informing me I was off the panel and I was not to have any more contact with the panelists. He then badmouthed me to all of the panelists telling them I was unreliable, had it in for him and I was basically a nutjob (I know this because some of them told me what he had said).

I sent in a formal letter of complaint and got a very sweet telephone call from the then-director of the conference. She apologized and said this was the first complaint she ever received about this person. Later I found out that wasn't true. A number of editors from journals who felt left-out from this section of the conference got together and complained of the exclusion. Also, this person was an ass and accumulated numerous enemies. I'm guessing there were lots of complaints.

Of course, I felt much better after I attended the panel (in the backrow, sunglasses, hah hah). This person decided that he would moderate the panel. He didn't know any of the presses URLs and had to ask them during the panel (the whole point of the panel was to talk about small presses utilizing the web), didn't bother to cache any of their sites so it took years over the modem line for each page to load and he referred BOA Editions, Ltd. simply as B-O-A. Oh yeah, and he didn't lead the discussion anywhere. It was pretty much talk amongst yourself to the panelists while he tried to get their sites to load.

That's when I decided these panels are for the birds. The real reason to attend AWP is to meet up with friends and meet new people, party and buy a few books and journals. I still attend panels, but they're not what I get excited about.