"how was your awp?"

​I arrived at AWP in LA on Wednesday night with a few things in mind. I wanted to meet some friends and people whose work I know (some I’ve known for years on social media but never met in person). Meet some authors we’ve published at the online magazine where I’m an editor. Participate in a reading of a new anthology where my work just appeared. Attend a reading panel of working-class LA writers where my husband would be reading. Attend some offsite readings where friends would be reading.
 
I wanted to meet people, but I’m not a sociable person. I hurried by the babble of writers at tables in the lounge at the Marriott feeling overwhelmed by noise and the potential moment when someone would call my name. Indeed I was greeted by hugs on the street and at the book fair that initially felt like surprise attacks. Have I met this person before? Or are they just familiar from their picture online? What’s their name?
 
Now that I’m home again, I’m aware of the writers I wanted to meet and didn’t, the readings and panels I wanted to attend but couldn’t because of conflicts with other readings and panels. But I managed to get to a large breakfast of flash writers (even though it meant getting up at 7am). I managed to get to my own reading (which was excellent) and Steve’s (also great) and a few offsite readings (some with horrible acoustics). I managed to meet some writers I’ve known for a long while on social media. Some writers whose work I accepted and edited at the magazine where I work. A writer whose book I blurbed (much younger than me but also, it turns out, bipolar and in recovery). A writer whom I interviewed via email earlier this year (funny and smart with an unexpectedly deep voice). I had coffee with some writer friends here and there, some I know from the Bay Area but don’t often see. I chatted with some magazines where I’ve published before, and with the editor at the press that published my chapbook. I bought some books, but not more than I could carry home.
 
I managed to pitch my book a few times. I’ve sent it to one publisher so far, and have another in mind with an April deadline. I discovered that my chapbook publisher takes subs from previous authors year-round and I don’t need to wait for their open reading period. I have an elevator pitch, and a synopsis. Did I manage to use them? Of course not. 
 
On my last day at AWP, I walked to the Café Fig at Hotel Figueroa to meet two friends from my long-time bimonthly writing group for brunch. We used to meet in a member’s roomy flat in the Inner Richmond in San Francisco, and I’ve known one of them since those days. The other joined the group shortly after we switched to Zoom because of the pandemic. She lives in LA and I’ve never met her in person. On the way I noticed a pedestrian talking into his Bluetooth phone. Tall, lean, with bleached hair shaved close, a diamond stud in his ear. Good looking, dressed in fashionable, dark workout clothes. Maybe an aspiring dancer or actor. Let’s call him a dancer. Gradually I became aware that he was angry and confrontational in the phone call, saying he could sue someone. He arrived at the entrance to the Hotel Figueroa a little before me. A doorman in uniform stood between two ficus trees in planters, maybe eight feet tall. The pedestrian wrestled with one of the trees, and broke off a large branch near the base that connected to about half of the tree. He waved it once and then commenced walking with the enormous tree branch. The doorman’s expression didn’t change, he didn’t do a thing, probably the best course given the dancer’s erratic behavior.
 
My manuscript is called The Lunatics’ Ball, there are lunatics, there’s dancing, no one steals a tree. What’s my elevator pitch? Thank you for asking! “My genre-bending essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball explores my two bipolar breakdowns and my bipolar aunt’s suicide within the expanded context of female lunatics in past centuries and the history of the treatment of mental illness in women.” You can see that it would be hard to just say that, in an elevator or elsewhere. At least for me.
 
I missed a panel on speculative nonfiction I really wanted to attend, but made it to another and enjoyed the discussion of “what iffing” and how often that occurs in the wake of a death, particularly a suicide. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’ve described my creative nonfiction as speculative, my collection, which verges on the lyric and fictional, as genre-bending. And the synopsis? Here goes: “Inspired by my grief over the suicide of my young aunt, The Lunatics’ Ball grew into something larger than I’d expected, a collective (auto)biography combining research-based snapshots of over thirty female ‘lunatics’ with memoir essays tracing my aunt’s bipolar disorder and my own. In the nineteenth-century, lunatics’ balls in asylums gathered together lunatics, staff, and the public. Intended to show off the asylums’ enlightened treatment of their inmates, the balls often functioned as voyeuristic spectacles for a curious public, furthering the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ My lunatics’ ball introduces women from the past two centuries whose lives were touched by mental illness and who’ve been either misrepresented or excluded from history. Some are well-known, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Nina Simone. Others are lesser-known but equally compelling women, such as Lorina Bulwer, who embroidered her story in enormous samplers; Lizzie McNally Halliday, a serial killer called ‘the worst woman on earth’; and the writer Janet Frame, who narrowly escaped a lobotomy. Many of these women led tragic lives, trapped in asylums for decades or dying by suicide. Many of them spoke out or found other means of expression. Exploring their lives led me to scrutinize my own. I realized that I had let my bipolar diagnosis trap me and that it was time to emerge from my self-imposed silence to celebrate their courage and speak up myself. I needed to come out as bipolar and tell my story along with theirs.”
 
Some writers begin a project armed with a plan, others discover their plan while they’re writing and unfortunately that’s how mine evolved. Unfortunately because it’s a very large project which I wrote “bird by bird,” as Anne Lamott's father advised her brother when he was faced with a gargantuan school assignment. Organizing the pieces and fitting them together, identifying themes as they emerged, I felt like a lunatic wrestling with a ficus tree under the watchful eyes of a doorman. Or something like that.
 

flash breakfast organized by Avitus B. Carle

THE PAST TEN anthology and new books by Len Kuntz, Sarah Freligh, and Avitus B. Carle

Rose and Sasha from my San Francisco writing group!