From Me to You: A Little About Networking

Last week, as I prepared the exegesis post for "The Girl on the Bike", I wrote this:

I must disclose that I have a dear friend who's a semi-dormant editor at the Rumpus, and I ran "The Girl on the Bike" by her before I sent it in. I am certain that I got an acceptance because of the piece's quality, not because I got my friend to push something into publication as a favor. But the nature of the writing world, like most professional worlds, is that the more people you know, the more help you can get in order to succeed. I have a lot to say about this, as it pertains both to this piece in particular and to publishing in general, but I am lucky in who I know and I'm well aware of it and you can be mad at me if you want. I got lucky by paying for opportunities for myself, but I also got lucky by showing up, for free, for years, in all kinds of circumstances. I'm going on and on now but I will write a separate post about this someday.

I wrote this as a footnote, and then I took it out. I didn't want to distract from the issue at hand, which was talking about "Girl", and by the time I was typing the last sentence I realized that I had a lot more to say about the subject than I could put in a footnote.

One Writer's Experience at AWP

In March I attended the 2016 AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference in Los Angeles. It was interesting. I'm going to write about it as if you, the reader, are a writer who is considering going to AWP in a future year and you need help deciding whether or not to go.

Well, I'd go, unless you don't like crowds, in which case definitely don't go. It wasn't packed like a concert (no sardine syndrome), but it was packed like an amusement park (astonishing in the sheer number of people around you). I read that 12,000 people were at this particular AWP, and I fully believe it.

But yeah, I'd go. For these reasons: