Well, I clearly didn’t update yesterday, but hey, that’s ‘cause I was doing stuff:

  1. A surprisingly good panel on innovative/experimental fiction. I say “surprisingly” because I got to an “experimental” panel every time I go to AWP and except for the second(?) one and this one, they’re always pretty so-so (at best). Plus, we ran into two of the presenters, Alexandra Kleeman and Alex Gilvarry, later on in the day and had a wonderful chat with them (they’re very generous, cool people, and I look forward to adding them to my booklist), and anyway, though I had a lot of feelings about the panel (because I have a lot of feelings about this area generally), I liked it and found it generative. Good recommendations in there for the booklist, too.

  2. A panel sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) about book reviewing, why do to it, and how to get into it. Also pretty lovely. The senior panel member, Greg Barrios, was great and I could have listened to him forever. Also enjoyed the other panelists (though the presenter had a tendency to talk over a few of the others, ah well), and generally thought it a good conversation. Also, I kind of want to review books now. But like actually though: it sounds like something I could do after I graduate, so I’ll think on that.

I did get a little writing done in the morning (by writing I mean revising, but we’ll count it), and also did some book fair chatting and shopping; I’m not 100% done but as I am hoping to come home with far fewer books than usual for a variety of reasons, I got the stuff I had actually planned on, more or less, out of the way.

Right now we’re in the AirBnb having some breakfast and Nicole is playing some soothingish morning music on her laptop (some sort of soul/country kind of stuff), Ghegan’s working on… not sure. Lisa relaunched her Twitter, and I think Brooke is getting ready for the conference. Me, I’m just kind of fucking around, waiting to go. All the Jewish lit panels I had wanted to go to today were cancelled (ha: hypochondriacs! All of us!), but there’s one or two things I’ll check out and then I will try and get going on the thesis revisions. I am assuming once I start them, they will come…


I may update this, I may not.