The AWP (The Association of Writing and Writing Programs) represents 50,000 writers, 550 college and university creative writing programmes and 150 writing conferences and centres.  Every year the association holds a conference in a US city.  This year’s was in Los Angeles. PhD student Niamh Prior was there.

I am not a numbers person and chances are if you are on this site, you might not be either. So let me illustrate. I’m from Kinsale, a town with four hotels, four churches, three supermarkets, countless shops, restaurants and somewhere in the region of twenty or so housing estates blending is edges into the countryside. Over five times the population of Kinsale attended the AWP conference. (And yet I still managed to bump into someone from Cork before I’d even made it to the queue for registration.)

I’d spent weeks preparing to get to this writers’ Mecca. I had printed and bound the programme in advance and spent at least two in-flight movies’ worth of time on colour-coded highlighting which events I planned to attend. The AWP conference is a mongrel of a beast: a literary festival, book fair and academic conference all in one, from the light to the super nerdy, with events categorised into talks, panel discussions and readings.

So, suddenly, there I was in the middle of the Los Angeles Convention Centre with my free AWP tote bag, name badge dangling from my neck, feeling, and possibly looking, like a child in an airport attempting to figure out the flight schedule board. With between 30 and 40 events on simultaneously, from 9am until late, in a conference centre the size of an Irish village, it would be easy to drive yourself crazy trying to get to as many of them as you think you want to attend.

Thankfully, I had received advice from an an American friend who had been before, telling me to only go to a few panels a day, lest I burn myself out. Damn good advise which I heeded. There is after all only so much any set of ears or brain can take in in a day.

First stop was a talk titled “In case you think you don’t belong here: Impostor syndrome at AWP.” This talk gave some good tips on keeping a notebook, talking to people and so on; it was a sort of primer for the first timer. One highlight for me was seeing Ellen Bass, who wrote one of my favourite poems of all time (“What Did I Love”), read. Another was Ocean Voung, whose distinctively fragile voice challenged my hearing to the max and whose poems blew me away.

Other events I attended included an intriguingly titled “Poetry of Comics”, Readings by Red Rock writers and a panel discussion on the influence of music on writing. I dipped in and out of various panel discussions and readings as it is set up so that you can easily leave or arrive between readers.

The book fair was, yes, a large affair. Seven hundred…or was it eight hundred?…stands filled the main hall, manned (and womanned) by people representing university programmes, literary journals, publishers, residencies, agencies and any other business the mind can invent to do with writing. Meandering up and down aisle after aisle of stalls was quite an experience; it was almost obscene to be surrounded by so much writing relatedness.

At every stand there was someone friendly with time to chat, which is a special thing when they represent something that until then had been an ethereal entity, such as for me, Poetry (Chicago). To find myself chatting to actual people at this stand, who gave me a free badge and as many free back copies as I wanted, brought this journal down to a physical reality — something that seemed no longer quite so out of reach. And so it was for all the other levitating literary institutions; here they all suddenly were, material and present.

I went to the poetry slam, which turned out to also be an open mic. I went to it to see how it’s done, expecting it to be a massive affair. Yes, the room was massive. What came as a shock was that at a conference which 12,000 people attended, the audience for the poetry slam and open mic was no bigger than at our local poetry night here in Cork, Ó Bheal. I realised that reading for the open mic part would not result in my death by palpitation.

However, I had come unprepared to read and there was no wireless access in that part of the building. So, advice for all writers: always have something to hand to read should an open mic present itself!

I was also there to support fellow PhD student, Kathy, who was not just brave enough, but eager to pitch her slamming skills against the Americans. She held her own, coming in with very high scores and making a big impression on everyone there. After the event, I had to prise her from the clutches of some newly-won fans in order to get back to the hotel before jet lag could get the chance to drop us unconscious on the floor.

On the last night, we finally managed to stay awake long enough to attend the public reception and dance party (with an hour of free bar) which had been on every night. It turned out not to be the life-changing networking event I thought it might me. Sorry, Kathy, I’m stealing your description of it as there is none more apt: it was like being at a debs where you don’t know anyone. Let me add to that: a debs where you don’t know anyone and there is a dancefloor full of young Americans doing synchronised dances to songs you’ve never heard. Let’s leave it at that. And we did.

A big part of AWP is that is in a different city in the USA every year. Which city that happens to be adds to the experience. There will, of course, be a tussle between the writer in you and the tourist in you, if you attend. This is natural seeing as the writer in anyone is a tourist, hungry for new places, experiences, people.  Because all of it, all of it is fodder for settings, characters, plots… So, it’s best to prepare for this eventuality.

LA itself is notoriously hard to get around, so I was lucky to see what little of it I did. After the conference, however, I took a few days extra to drive up the coast, following Route 1, along the winding roads of Big Sur, a stretch of land that has housed and inspired artists for years, bordered on one side by cliffs and surf and on the other by redwood-forested hills.

This road trip felt like a sort of pilgrimage in the footsteps (or tyre-tracks rather) of so many writers, ending in San Francisco where I spent two nights and three days. Everywhere along the way literature and songs I had been exposed to throughout my life suddenly clicked and made sense as if by travelling this road I’d been given a deciphering key. (I might add here that this was also my first time in the USA.) Words by artists from Kerouac to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers took on a new resonance.

The main thing I got from going to the AWP conference… is that I have been to an AWP conference. That is the only way I can think of putting it. As soon as I got home I made a list of things to do to prepare for the next one, all of it far too practical and itemised to include here. I’m not yet sure how or when the next trip to AWP will be, but I certainly plan on putting that to do list to use.