Whirlwind in Florida at AWP18
My brain has just begun to settle from all the excitement at AWP18. Though as I sit down to write about it, my mind starts ping-ponging around. Tell them about reading your book ARC in public for the first time! No, the comics panel! Oh, all the people at the Hippocampus table! The pencils! All the beautiful print publications! Posing with Oscar Wilde!
Wilde: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
Me: Cool, want a pencil?
Wilde: “Writing bores me so.”
Me: You can draw with it
Wilde: “All art is quite useless.”
Me: People kiss your tombstone all the time, with bright red lips.
Wilde: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
Me: Sweet, bye 🙂
Signing Prints! Unboxing the ARC! The moon lamp! All the awesome writers and drawers! Bianca Stone! Tom Hart! Alexander Rothman of Ink Brick! Chelsey Clammer! I won her knit hat! Donna Talarico being her amazing kind self! Kevin Beerman in a dinosaur costume! Believing I won $1,000 from The Pinch and then getting a free issue instead and reading a lovely essay in it by Olivia Dunn about driving through prairie grass in Iowa! MotionPoems!
Then I have to think about seeing a manatee breathe. The slow patience in the wait for it to surface, just a nose up for air. Then down again. Then the wait. Ah, a breath.
I think about cedar tree knees. Lettuce Lakes. Great egrets snatching up fingerlings in a swamp. Orchids. And the trees.
p.s. you can still get my signed prints with pre-orders of my book, By the Forces of Gravity, through Books by Hippocampus!