my trip to AWP: part one

[supercheesegirl]

on wednesday i left work early, stopped everywhere i needed to stop, and got over to the airport over two and a half hours before my flight. when i checked in on the e-ticket console, a message popped up that i had to see the agent for more info. uh oh, i thought, but then it turned out to be good: my 5:17 flight was having delays and would probably run like 45 minutes late, so she asked if i wanted to grab a seat on the 3:55 flight instead. i said, heck yeah! by the time i got through security, i only had to wait about an hour for the plane.

the most notable thing about the flight was that the seats on american airline flights are covered with a fabric that totally reminds me of the triforce. 'nuff said; the flight was fine. when i got to chicago, i was a little mixed up judging to the time change--just one hour, but when you don't know it's going to happen it can get confusing. i called stina and she agreed to wait for me before going to dinner. i caught a cab from the airport, not realizing how *incredibly expensive* that would be. yowch. oh well. got to the hotel, went with stina and her OSU friends starr and jill (hi starr and jill!) to Giordano's for pizza. we figured we'd get the obligatory chicago deep-dish right off the bat, and it was really splendid stuff--we got the stuffed crust pizza, and the cool thing about it was that the only cheese was inside. on the top was only the sauce and the toppings. this meant that the cheese didn't form a seal over the top of the pizza, trapping heat in the sauce and scalding your mouth like normal hot pizza. this was really good. really really good. and you all know how i feel about pizza.

"It's wonderful--I'm just looking at it."
stina quote to the waiter, when asked if everything was okay

when we got back to the hotel, we discovered that the hotel pool, which was supposed to be open til 10:00, was only open til 9. we were pretty pissed. plus they had no hot tub, which we had all been excited about. stina was also disappointed by the state of the dessert she had gotten to go from Giordano's--she had been really looking forward to a ymmuy italian dessert, and it was not the way she imagined. i thought it was pretty tasty, but i could see her point. and then we went to bed.

i took the first shower thursday morning, and thereby discovered that the shower in this hotel was certainly nuclear-powered. i felt like the water was going to pound my nipples off, seriously, and it wasn't a pleasant feeling. (i kept saying "i'm going to DROWN in the WAVE!!!" but none of you were there to save me.) but i survived, and after watching some weather channel stina, starr, jill, and i headed to dunkin donuts for breakfast/coffee. i had a berryberry bagel. you know how i love them. at the conference, i skipped registration (which i continued to do successfully for the rest of the trip) and headed right to a 9:00 session on History and Poetry. the panelists were poets who wrote on historical themes, put a character in a historical setting, etc. Nicole Cooley was the most interesting to me, because she wrote a whole book on the Salem Witch Trials that i'd be very interested in reading. i found several of her poems in various journals over the course of the conference and was pretty impressed. Aliki Barnstone was also pretty interesting--her character was a Greek Jew during WWII--but i thought she was a little weird. the other panelists were Ethelbert Miller (who was really funny) and Alan Michael Parker (one of whose books takes a tribe of Vandals out of history and dumps them in the present--kind of neat--but more on him later).

after the session i hit the bookfair because i just couldn't contain my excitement anymore. ah, the bookfair. i got a free travel alarm clock from the Gettysburg Review (which i later discovered works pretty well, and even came with a battery), and at the Louisville Review (i think?) they had a duckpond. i won a free t-shirt with my duck! woot! I also found alison at the UWisconsin Press table, and we made a date for dinner that night.

the Indiana Review was giving out temporary tattoos of poems, so i got a Denise Duhamel one and applied it to the inside of my right wrist. here's what it says: "I'm a sweetie-pie, a sweet mama, a finer diner, a squab, / a hot tamale, a gumdrop, a lambie-pie, a quail." for the entire rest of the week i enjoyed the look of having a poem tattooed on the inside of my wrist, and even contemplated getting one placed there permanently, but now i'm sort of ready for it to wash off and be skin again.

for lunch i grabbed some burger king really fast, and then went to the 1:00 panel, "An I for an Eye: Women Poets, Confession, Witness." the panelists for this one were Kim Addonizio (always awesome), Denise Duhamel (iloveyou!), Aimee Nezhukumatathil (thus beginning my love affair), and Susan Browne (who maybe i'll look up at some point). it was a really interesting session, mostly just to hear poets i really like talk about how they see their work and women poets in general fitting into american lit, things like that. afterward i asked Denise to sign my book and she was very sweet and gracious and lovely. then--because there weren't any more sessions i cared about on thursday--i headed back to the bookfair briefly and got Aimee Nezhukumatathil's book, Miracle Fruit. then, overwhelmed with all the people, i ran back to the hotel for an hour to sit around without pants and write (free) postcards to people. maybe you'll even get one.

thursday night i met up with alison for dinner. we went to the italian village, or la cucina (not sure which is which or if they're part of the same place or what). anyway, the restaurant was upstairs and was decorated much like the restaurants in epcot center--ie, it looked like we were dining on a rooftop in italy. very, very cute. and the food was SO GOOD. alison and i split an entree, some kind of chicken but i forget what. we knew we were somewhere good when even the salad was spectacular. the roasted garlic dressing! dear god. and the chicken was just amazing. really amazing. with potatoes. and we got dessert, too, the rum cake, which was also really good. plus we had a long and really good chat about various things including the AWP in new orleans where we first met and all the events surrounding that. i'm so glad we hung out, because she is hella cool. (hi alison!)

after dinner, we rolled ourselves back to the Palmer House (where the conference was and where alison was staying) and met up with adam cole for a drink. hadn't seen him in a while. also met ken, the fiddling poet. ran into fritz, was excited, made a lunch date for friday. adam went to bed and i stopped upstairs to katie's room to give stina the new key to our hotel room (long story)--she was hanging out with katie, and i stuck around a bit, and we all ended up going down to Trader Vic's for drinks. it was kind of an interesting tiki bar, right there in our hotel, and i had a pina colada. stina wanted to order a menehune drink or something, because it said on the menu that that drink arrived with a menehune toy in it that you could keep, but she was disappointed when they didn't have any of the toys. instead she had a peach concoction and then something else. starr liked my pina colada and had one of her own. stina also was excited to find out that on fridays Trader Vic's had some sort of deal which involved complimentary pu pus (i never found out if she went back to get any or not). i ran into dan albergotti down there too, and there was much rejoicing.

as soon as we got back to our own hotel, i wrote a postcard to my mom, letting her known that i had been seen drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's, and my hair was... pretty okay. then stina and i proceeded to stay up until 2am talking. i just love that girl, you know? she's been through 12 kinds of hell in the past few years, but i can't imagine anyone coming through it with more strength and grace. yay stina.

and that's all for today...

Comments

[queende.livejournal.com]

dear lord, those sound like very busy (yet fun and exciting days:)

yay for stina:)