The intersection of music, writing and literature has been discussed in these pages before, but the arrival of the 2018 Association of Writers & Writers Programs (AWP) Conference makes the connections more literal and tangible than they’ve ever been.
The AWP was founded to arrange support for writers all across America, and its mission is to “provide community, opportunities, ideas, news, and advocacy for writers and teachers of writing.” The annual conference is the exciting culmination of that goal. This year, Tampa is hosting the party, which kicks off on March 7 at the Tampa Convention Center & Marriott Tampa Waterside.
Writing is often a solitary and frustrating trade, so AWP constructed these four days of networking, learning, teaching, and sharing with the writer at the desk in mind. The conference is an essential destination for those wanting to get a little something more out of their writing. Lectures on all things authorship — from that first rough draft all the way to the editor’s office — will be accompanied by a massive, eclectic book fair that is open to the public on March 10.
Upwards of 800 independent publishers and folks repping writing programs from universities and colleges across the country will be there, and there will be more books on hand than one human could read in a lifetime. One publisher bringing the goods is Third Man Books, an offshoot of Jack White’s Third Man Records, which will offer books at a discount plus other special Third Man surprises.
“I like to make this comparison: AWP is the book world’s SXSW,” said Chet Weis, a writer, poet and the chief editor at Third Man Books, in an email. “Instead of bands, there are authors. Instead of records, there are books. Instead of record labels, there are publishers. And just like how Austin fills up with music at every bar, laundromat, and ice cream parlor during SXSW, so will Tampa fill with off-site events everywhere featuring poets and writers reading their work."
“For one weekend, writing and books will be the main topic of barstool talk everywhere in downtown Tampa. It’s a beautiful thing,” he added.
Weis has toured extensively with Southern trash-rock band The Quadrajets and Alabama garage-punk outfit Immortal Lee County Killers.
On Thursday, March 10, he’ll participate in a panel called “Smells like Teen Spirit: Writing Pop Music as Resistance in Poetry,” where he and four other poets will discuss the influence of pop music on their writing, and examine how their poems internalize the aesthetics of resistance inherent in music they love. Weis and the other panelists will also read from work that looks at the ways pop deepens and troubles readers’ notions of identity and desire.
It’s a good thing the panel is happening in the afternoon, because Third Man is helping throw one hell of an off-site poetry reading and concert the night before. Weis says he’ll probably be “dancing like an inflatable tube man” at Ella’s in Seminole Heights, where he’s tapped Miami garage-rock band Jacuzzi Boys to provide sounds. The band counts Iggy Pop amongst its fans and has released a live album on Third Man Records, but even the band’s presence will be trumped by the poets and writers reading at the free show.
Small Beer, Black Ocean, and Birds, LLC will be represented at the Ella's readings along with Dan Hoy and Abraham Smith, two writers who’ve released work on Third Man Books.
Hoy’s poems poke around and underneath the various forms of apocalypse and the vastness of space. He said that Third Man's creativity is what really sold him on pitching Weis on a short collection of sci-fi poems.
"They brought a lot of ideas to the table, including making it not just illustrated but a flipbook. It was a great experience," Hoy told CL in an email. "I love their approach to bookmaking – there’s a kind of playfulness that’s also serious, which I think comes Third Man Record’s legacy of creativity and collaboration."
Hoy added that a theme which binds his 2017 book The Terraformers and another work, The Tree, is ecocide.
"There’s a line from my book The Deathbed Editions that I think about a lot: 'The world is the end of the world.' Also: 'People are the disaster,'" Hoy wrote.
He wrote The Tree after living at an offgrid community in North Carolina where he was studying permaculture, thinking about how trees inhabit space, their relation to their environment and how they foster life as if in defiance of human modes of being.
"We know how humans inhabit space – they chop down trees," Hoy said. "The Terraformers is basically the endgame of human civilization: marooned on some inhospitable planet, every technology failing, all intimacy mediated by domes and pressure suits."
Smith — who is debuting a new book, Destruction Of Man, at AWP — takes his own experiences as an educator, writer, performer, and community arts organizer to hold forth on America. He tends to ramble, from what the kids are saying on his Rate My Professor page, but in a way so eloquent and intricate that you might stop and think, “Uh, maybe this guy writes poetry.”
He's since left the University of Alabama to teach in Utah at Weber State and says that, "generally, yes there's a robust connective tissue between classroom and writing practice."
"My enthusiasms for the contours and sonics of rhythmical language tip back and forth between school and home: there's effusion ebullience and spontaneity percolating right along through both, through each," Smith added. "As for Alabama specifically, hinterlands all elide: I am from rural Wisconsin but the ethos there and the ethos in Alabama crosslist: maybe some three-month old rain in a tire swing out on the yard; maybe a bored dog fixing to try his teeth on your passing gravel-popping tires."
Smith says Destruction of Man is a pastoral patchwork love story told through snippets and snarls.
"Sort of like I am talking through a harmonica and the harmonica is a living bobolink. I gathered a lot of culture history from 90-year-old farmers," he said. "And I yowled about tractors and skid-steers and hawks and all: sometimes there's the bouquet of straightforward narration; sometimes the reader is in a kayak made of popsicle sticks slaloming through rabid froth."
Juan Martinez, a former Floridian now teaching at Northwestern in Chicago, will also present, along with writers from Portland (Zachary Schomburg), Nashville (Caroline Randall Williams), Washington D.C. (Abbey Mei Otis) and Durham (Lauren Hunter). Chase Berggrun, poetry editor at lit collective and publisher Big Lucks, will also read.
Weis said that Third Man Books takes the same genre-agnostic approach as the record label, which has pressed vinyl for everyone from Wolf Eyes to Loretta Lynn to Charley Patton to Greek folk music to Timmy’s Organism to Jay-Z and Carl Sagan. The common thread is a dedication to aestheticism and good writing, and AWP is a chance for him to get turned on to new authors while also catching up with writers he already admires.
“When I played in bands at SXSW — this was years ago when SXSW was a bit smaller animal — it was like a big reunion with everyone we worked with or saw around the world in one place for one weekend. We always met new people, too,” Weis said, adding that he loves guitar solos as much as life itself and even as much as a good poem.
AWP offers a nice change of pace for Bay area fans of independent music and a chance to mix it up in a scene they don’t normally operate in.
“It seemed like we always left SXSW with at least one new interesting idea,” Weis said. “For a new single or LP or maybe a new connection to play a festival somewhere.
“Same exact thing happens at AWP. I always leave the festival with a range of new possibilities.”
This article appears in Mar 1-8, 2018.