AWP

Of my 1,600 odd facebook friends (some significantly odder than  others) a hefty percentage are writers.  Some of them are real writers who have written books that have actually been purchased and read by  people who don’t even know them personally, but I  suspect the greater number are writers like me, who continue  to write in the vain belief and desperate hope that one fine morning their literary genius will be suddenly and universally acknowledged and acclaimed, even though  there is  no real world indicator that such a revolutionary development  is imminent.

Hello. My name’s Dave and I’m a Writer

With  so many writers, a lot of the conversation the  past few days has been about  the annual AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which should logically be abbreviated AWWP but, you know, writers;  not all of them are big on accuracy), now taking place in Seattle.  Some people saying they’re going,  more people saying they wish they were going, and now some people who are actually there.

On the one hand, I’m a little  bit jealous.  Although one person, who has been several times, wrote to say that it’s really not a  very productive conference, more of a shmoozefest,  it would have been fun to go for the shmoozing, meeting lots of writers, maybe making contact with some of my faceless facebook friends, getting some new ideas, stopping at any stand that’s giving away free stuff, or food.  Also, Seattle’s a fun town.  There’s plenty of other stuff to do, too.

What struck me, though, was the number of people going: 12,000.  That’s a really big number.  How many writers are there out there, anyway?  Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

I guess this is the result of internet publishing and absolutely anybody being able to call themselves a writer, which I am all for, as I wrote a few days back.  Without that recent democratization of the process, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a writer, either.