AWP in chicago: part two

[supercheesegirl]

friday morning. stina and i, after staying up so late the night before, decided to sleep in a bit and skip the first session at 9:00. so around 10am we made it to the corner bakery for breakfast/coffee. looking at all the ymmuy pastries, i can't decide what i want, and so i ask the black guy behind the counter, "what's good today?" he's like, "it's ALL good!" which didn't help at all, but eventually i decided on a coffee cake (or something) and a blueberry muffin. stina got a latte, after the counter guy asked her "Have you been good today?" which she totally didn't get because she was looking at the menu or something when i asked him about the pastries. she was a little confused.

on the way out of the bakery, stina had an accident in the revolving door. she spilled some coffee on her chest, and the resulting OW! caused her to jump, spilling more coffee down the front of her outfit where it previously had not spilled. she was wearing a beige top and khakis, too, so it showed up pretty obviously, but then she did a bit of scrubbing in the ladies' room at the palmer house hotel and was able to eliminate all obvious signs of coffee attack. she told me that, since it spilled on her almost right as she got out of the revolving door, she thought at first that scalding hot water was falling from the sky and she was going to turn around to tell me to be careful. after this incident we started noticing that every place in chicago has revolving doors and how odd that is.

we went to the 10:30 session together; it was a reading for The Journal celebrating its 30th anniversary. Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Bob Hicok, Carl Phillips, Kathy Fagan, and Linda Bierds were reading. i totally would've skipped this one and maybe gone to the Indiana Review reading instead except that both adam and stina work on The Journal and needed to put in an appearance, plus both adam and stina get all gooey over Beckian Fritz Goldberg, so they made me attend. and it was a really good reading--i'm interested in picking up some Bob Hicok now. the most interesting part of the reading, however, was the part where so many people were crammed in the tiny room that a security guard kept coming in and making people clear out of the aisle and away from the door. he did this several times. at one point he even went up to the moderator of the session (Kathy Fagan i think) and told her that the fire marshal might come through and that people had to be out of the aisles. this was all really distracting to the readers, which sucked, but since we had arrived early enough to get seats, it was also incredibly funny.

for some reason, my scribbled notes on Things To Post About In EL Jay say, "I'm not the Chinese techno woman" here. i feel like this is something stina said, but i really have no clue; however, i'll still put it out there for y'all, for posterity's sake.

after the reading, i got the divine ms. pierce to sign a copy of her chapbook for me. yeah. she has a chapbook out on an actual press, she's in a phd program, she's writing lots and doing marvelously. sometimes i think i spend my life just wishing i was her. as much as i really like the girl, and as much as i realize she's a touchy subject, i wanted to mention it, because i did hang out with her quite a bit at AWP. and it was nice. but still weird. well, let's just drop that topic, shall we?

so then i met fritz, and he suggested we go to the russian tea room for lunch. (i know fritz from greensboro via xina/emily, btw). neither of us had any idea what this restaurant would be like, but we were rather surprised to find that the first three pages of the menu were all about various kinds of vodka and how to drink vodka russianly and translations of russian drinking toasts. the restaurant, by contrast, was really very nice and made me feel like i shouldn't be there in jeans. and the wait staff all had russian accents. we both got the portobello sandwich, and damn was it good. i was quite pleased. we also sat and had a good long chat, and when we realized that we were totally on the verge of missing the 1:00 sessions we had planned to go to, we just said oh well and stayed to chat a little longer. i could chat with fritz for days.

oh, and while out and about with fritz, i pointed out the prevalence of revolving doors, which he hadn't noticed before but was struck by after i brought it up. i then theorized that perhaps revolving doors keep the wind out better than ordinary doors do--it wouldn't help with just cold air, since you'd revolve cold air in with you, but if it was windy out and you opened a regular door the wind could blow in. fritz thought this a good explanation, and i do too.

after lunch: made it to the 2:30 reading to see Sandra Kohler, one of my first poetry teachers, read from her new book that won the 2002 AWP Poetry Award. the fiction and nonfiction winners also read (Joan Connor and Mark Anderson) but i was there primarily to see Sandra. afterwards i asked her to sign my book, but she didn't quite remember me (thought i was tara, which wasn't too far off the mark since i think we were both in the same intro poetry class) and then told me she'd be downstairs at the AWP table signing in a few minutes and could i meet her there? i hung around for 20 minutes and then approached her down there; she could tell that she *should* know me, and after i told her that i'd been in one of her intro poetry classes with sarahfarbo she placed me immediately and remembered that i used to have long hair. and then she was excited to see me and we chatted about what i'd been up to, which was cool. she misses sarahfarbo, too, and we chatted about her.

then i really wanted to try to make it to the Art Institute, since it was only a few blocks away and everyone had been going there and seeing the picassos and saying it was awesome. by this time it was almost 4:30, but i figured they'd be open til 6 on a friday, right? wrong. i got there at 4:45 and found they had closed at 4:30. i was so disappointed and pissed off. one of the worst things about conferences like this is that you go to this city where you've never been and you end up not seeing anything interesting in the city except for the two blocks around the hotel where you're staying. very frustrating. in new orleans i didn't get to see as much of the city as i'd wanted, but i did hit bourbon street, saw the graveyards, ate beignets, and took a ghost tour, which was enough for me to feel like i'd done something. and i'd been to baltimore before, so i didn't care so much, but i also got to go to the aquarium and across town with david bowen and some people for dinner, so i also saw stuff. chicago was somewhere i'd never been before and never even really thought about before (as opposed to new orleans, which i'd thought about considerably due to the influences of anne rice and kate chopin), and i wanted to just see something of it before i left. i ended up taking a walk along lake michigan and the parks there to clear my head, and took some pictures that i'll be getting back today. i felt a lot better then, especially since on the plane i had been wondering if there were any lakes in chicago. there is, and i saw it, and i took its picture.

then i went back to the hotel and chilled out for a bit. stina came back to drop off her latest crop of books, and invited me to go to dinner with her and jill and her friend laura, so i went. laura brought along two other women too (Trish and Elizabeth/Libby?), and we went to The Big Downtown, the other restaurant in the palmer house hotel. i wasn't feeling very good, and my chicken tenders were more like chicken toughs or chicken supercrispys, so i didn't eat a whole lot. then i split a dessert with laura--the godiva chocolate brownie thing. it had ice cream and a slice of cake in addition to the brownie, plus it was drizzled with fudge sauce and raspberry sauce. i freakin' love that raspberry sauce, i could drink it right from the bottle. so i helped considerably with the eating of the dessert. there was quite a bit of a problem trying to figure out the bill, since laura had a gift certificate that she wanted to use on hers and stina's and jill's food (since she had invited them out with the intention of treating for dinner) and it was all very complicated.

then we went to the keynote reading, which i almost forgot about except that it was awesome. this reading was in the faces of all those who had said that AWP stood for All White People (which is pretty funny and more accurate than it should be). the first reader was Reginald McKnight, whom i hadn't heard of before but who i'm definitely going to look up now. he read from his newish novel and i was so impressed and blown away. next up was Sandra Cisneros, whom i had never heard read before but who was just really incredible. really, really incredible. we were all right there with her on a street in mexico listening to her parents screaming and being watched by all the pedestrians in the street. she took this incredibly tense and horrible situation told from the perspective of a young girl and made it real while at the same time making it funny and ridiculous and heartbreaking. she's amazing.

after that i'm pretty sure i just went back to the hotel with stina and went to bed. i can't think if i did anything else. oh wait, i remember now, this was the night when stina got all pissed off (much like battistini gets pissed off--it must be the freakin' rican in them) about access at this conference for people with disabilities. stina is narcoleptic (diagnosed fairly recently), and so she's been really interested in disabilities lately and is considering getting a phd in disabilities studies. which is just cool. what sparked her getting pissed off is that jill (who is mostly blind? legally blind? and uses a cane) had gotten kind of blown off by a panelist earlier that day when she had asked that person's opinion on how academic departments might treat a disabled colleague. jill had told us about this, and also about how navigating these conferences is tricky for her since she can't see the signs for the different sessions, and it's hard for her to get to things on time, and therefore get a seat, with only a fifteen minute break between the sessions. stina also remembered how her professor steve, who is fully blind i think and has a guide dog, wrote a letter to the AWP planners telling them how inaccessible the last conference was for him, and never even got a response.

so i said, "stina, why don't you organize a panel discussion on this for next year?" and then she got *all excited* and was thinking of who could be on the panel and what all they'd talk about and how she could do a project on disabilities in her next class and make her students do a project too and use that research for the panel discussion and so she had to run downstairs to the computer right then to email her professors. and while she was gone i fell asleep.