Tag: AWP20

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AWP Retrospective

It’s that time of year again, already–AWP!!! We feel like we are hanging on for dear life. Somehow we forget every year how fraught January and February are… no matter how carefully we plan and organize.

What causes chaos at the start of the year?

End-of-year bookkeeping is a beast. Royalty calculations, statements, and then checks going out. It happens every year, and we always think, “next year it’s going to be easy…” But each year brings special challenges. still we’re pretty sure this time. Next year WILL be easier. but the royalty checks went in the mail yesterday. Whoosh! (6 weeks of my life I’ll never get back… and the bookkeeper’s life… You all have no idea how much work goes into getting those statements right. So many small sums of money come and go from so many directions that it takes a specialist or two to get it right, and at the end of the year, no amount of careful recording makes all of it make sense!)

AWPs past

Then there’s the anxiety brought on by memories of AWPs past. So many things have gone wrong. Kim’s first trip to AWP she was very green. She shipped four or five boxes of random books and didn’t read all the convoluted instructions about tax documents and all the rest of it, so spent that whole conference sitting with more experienced poets and authors who published with TRP. We couldn’t really sell books, so we gave a bunch away, and Kim learned plenty just shooting the you-know-what and people watching.

Current Madville authors, Mike Hilbig and Michael Gills stand at TRP's table at AWP 2017. Gills holds his book from that year. There's a bit yellow sign with blue lettering on the front of the table that says Texas Review Press

AWP in Washington DC in 2017. The table for the press with Mike Hilbig standing with Michael Gills.

AWP 2018 in Tampa

In 2018, Kim was at the tail end of her time with TRP, and planning for Madville’s launch. She sat, for the second year in a row, next to Rick Campbell, veteran editor, publisher, and poet, and a friendship developed. It was once more a good time and place to people-watch and learn. An unfortunate connection was made to a printer/distributor who offered what we thought we couldn’t get for Madville as a start-up… full distribution. (Y’all know that old adage about when something seems too good to be true?? But these guys were old school, respected…) At any rate, friendships grew at that Tampa conference and seeds were planted for Madville.

Luanne Smith, Lisa Rose, Kim Davis, Suzanne Heagy, and Laura Leigh Morris
Madville founding board member Clay Reynolds with Theodora Ziolkowski who won the Clay Reynolds Prize at TRP that year.
The Goliad guys… John Molina, three Cooper boys, and Joe Haske

AWP 2019 in Portland

2019 was Madville’s, our big introductory year. And that Thursday morning as Kim was walking into the bookfair to kick the whole thing into gear, she received the email from her printer/distributor that they had filed for bankruptcy and Madville should figure out what to do with their books. We got the books back, but those so-and-sos ate all our money for our first year of operations. But you know… we did what we do… We put a brave face on it and had a good time.

Kim and Jacqui at AWP19 in Portland.
Luanne Smith moderating her panel at AWP19
Jacqui Davis outside Voodoo Doughnuts in Portlandf
Luanne Smith’s panel at AWP19. Notice how you can barely see Lu benind the podium!
Kim and Jacqui arrive in Portland!
Kim and Jacqui at AWP19 in Portland.
Poet Leah Meuller manning the booth at AWP19.

Then there was AWP 2020 in San Antonio

2020 should have been our big breakout year. We were determined to make a grand splash in San Antonio–in our home state. We splurged and took a whole booth space in conjunction with our friends at Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art that is put out by Fairmont State University. And wouldn’t you know? March 2020 marked San Antonio, Texas, as ground zero for the Covid-19 Lockdown.

We had fun anyway, not realizing how serious the situation really would become. We saw old friends, breathed in each other’s general directions, and tried to figure out social distancing. And we didn’t make the splash we hoped we would. Many people were sensible and stayed home, but news was breaking while we were driving to San Antonio. We carried on with our plans, and Kestrel shifted over to an empty booth up the way. We had rented a house and made all those plans… sponsorship reception, reading in the bookfair, parties in the house every night. It was a good time… right up until it wasn’t! Yes, some of us did get sick, but we pulled through.

Jacqueline Davis and Gianna Russo
Jacqueline Davis, Cierra Caballero, Bill Davis, George Drew, and Gerry LaFemina.
A party with numerous people chatting in a kitchen.
Author Wondra Chang in the foreground, with Brian Petkash and George Drew in the background.
Author Bobby Horecka reads.
We managed to snag a time on the bookfair stage…
Poet/Author Michael Gaspeny and Artist Charles Moody.
Poet Stephen Powers
A man and a woman stand talking at a buffet table.
Gerry LaFemina and Susanne Heagy chatting at the buffet table.
Woman with white hair and a blue blouse with a scarf draped around her neck reads from an orange book.
Author Lee Zacharias reads.
Author Rick Campbell reads. He has longish brown hair, dark framed glasses, and wears a pale green shirt.
Author Rick Campbell reads.
Two men stand in front of a sign that says Madville Publishing / Kestrel
Bill Davis and George Drew pose in front of the sign for the booth.
A booth at a book fair.
Our booth was a busy place in the not bustling book fair.
five people posing in front of a tan wall at a convention center. All wear nametags.
Gianna Russo, Kim Davis, Brian Petkash, R. Dean Johnson, and not sure.

AWP 2021 was virtual

Nobody knew what to do. To be fair, we were learning how to do things remotely, but this one was a waste of our time, and a very cheap way for AWP to get out of reimbursing us for 2020, which they said they’d do, but did not.

AWP 2022 in Philly

Or… the 2022 SNAFU! We were traveling large to Philly. Luanne Smith splurged again, and bought us the nice sponsorship package with all the bells and whistles. She had a book coming out, you see… I think it was Muddy Backroads that time. And she is one of our board members. Kim, meanwhile read all the instructions from the material handling company, and they suggested quite strongly that we should palletize the books we shipped there because otherwise we would be forced to pay exorbitant fees per box delivered to the booth. Cutting the story short, FedEx were extremely difficult to deal with and didn’t get the books there in time. We had no books to sell at the booth. We had fun anyway, but we really wished they would have just allowed us to claim a loss. But no. They found the books, sent them home, and had the gall to bill us again–several thousand dollars for the pleasure of dealing with them. For future reference, FedEx has no live humans running things anymore. They answer the phone and read from prompts on screen. No decision making capabilities at all. It was really an expensive trip for nothing other than camaraderie, and poor Lu, who paid for it all, barely got to attend due to family issues.

AWP 23 in Seattle

AWP23 in Seattle was a blast. Once again, we had help from Madville board member Luanne Smith, who splurged on a fancy sponsorship package for us. We had a a fabulous location for our booth on sponsors row with Dolly Parton, larger than life to celebrate the launch of our Dolly Parton anthology, Let Me Say This. We had a fun, fun panel about writing poverty, a reception, and an “off-site/on-site” reading that was really nice in one of the hotel conference rooms. Many of the contributors to the Dolly anthology came out to read their work to us, as did the rest of our Madville authors who attended AWP that year.

karla k. morton

AWP 2024 in Kansas City

Thanks to Michael Simms and Vox Populi for sharing their space with Madville in 2024 in Kansas City. And thank you to Lee Zacharias for the photos!

AWP 2025 in Los Angeles

Dolly had proven such a success, we attempted something similar with Honkeytonk Sue, a character created by Bob Boze Bell originally, and used to illustrate several poems in our Santa Fe Trail: Chasing the Big West. She was great, but no where near the attraction that Dolly was. The most fun, we think, from Los Angeles, was the University of Utah honors college students who helped out at the booth. They’re all novel-writing students of our Michael Gills.

We’ll be updating with plans for #AWP26 in Baltimore soon!

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Dress Code for AWP20 in San Antonio

AWP20 ad with Madville/Kestrel events

What should you wear to AWP20 in San Antonio this year?

For those who do not know, AWP is the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and their annual conference is coming up:

#AWP20 Conference and Bookfair

San Antonio, TX
Henry B. González Convention Center
March 4–7, 2020

Key Dates

Materials to View/Download

Social Networking

[I wrote the following observations following #AWP17 in Tampa, though it feels like I started writing them at #AWP16 in Washington DC. I hope my attempt at sarcasm offends everyone equally, but no one gravely!-KD]

I’ve just attended the 2017 Association of Writing Programs (AWP) conference with some 13,000 students and faculty from writing programs and universities around the United States in attendance. I sat among representatives of small presses in the cavernous hall that housed the book market. Everyone was trying to attract students to their writing programs, authors to their submission pages, and buyers to their books. Meanwhile, a profusion of recent MFA and PhD grads schmoozed and congratulated one another comparing notes about the dismal state of the academic job market and reminiscing about grad school. Many had job interviews in hotel rooms scheduled around the trendy off-site readings and parties, though with the advent of the Skype interview, the formerly nerve-wracking AWP interview is not now the right of passage it once was. Still, the young guns found their old friends and discussed who had landed increasingly rare tenure-track jobs and who was still on the market and spending hard-earned adjunct wages to be there. They compared the climates of their respective universities—politically and meteorologically. They drank too much and slept too little, while seasoned faculty members chaperoned grad students—the target consumer group for the massive book fair and the audience for the panel discussions and readings in and around the conference.

I sat behind a crenellated battlement of books I couldn’t even give away and watched people stream past for all three days of the conference. White male Boomer-aged professors wore sports coats and jeans, grey pony tails and earrings the fashion accessories of choice. The African American tenured men favored bright silks and glistening shaved heads. All wore “cool” more comfortably than their female counterparts, who, apart from the tastefully professional African American women, appeared to be either crones or mutton-dressed-as-lamb. Since I fall on that spectrum myself, I feel qualified to comment. The crones gossiped a little too loudly, hair in awkward tufts, mascara smudged, while the mutton-dressed-as-lamb draped chic, risqué clothing over skeletal frames a little too casually, their entourage of graduate assistants shielding them from direct light.

The newly tenured wore uniforms of respectability, tattoos covered. Button-down shirts and sweater vests for the men and blouses over cigarette-skirts for the women with stockings and sensible pumps. The millenials dressed in predictable gender-blended variations, hairstyles their most obvious concession to fashion. Extravagant undercuts and outlandish color declaring their lifestyle choices. Students showed facial-jewelry, body art, and outlandish clothes, while professors favored short buzz-cuts.

And there were poets everywhere. At off-site readings, I listened to angst-ridden verses about sex—childhood abuse, and low self-esteem. Young poets marveled that anyone would have them and ended in despair. Old poets read about their mortality, exploring the seasons through metaphor inevitably resigning themselves to the inevitable. Veterans read in the staccato rhythm of gunfire ending abruptly. Despite the repetitive themes, the abundance of creative writing programs has brought about a renaissance in poetry, but knowing how difficult it is to sell poetry, I expressed my dismay at this situation to Michael Gills—a seasoned fiction writer and professor in jeans and cowboy boots. He set me straight explaining that, in his view, all these programs obviously turned out far more writers than we need, but each of those new writers is also a voracious reader. It’s a kind of writerly-readerly circle jerk.

At the end of the day, when selecting what to pack for AWP20 in San Antonio March 4-8, remember who the audience will be. And remember what you are there for. If you want to sell books, dress like someone who belongs on a university campus. “Business casual” is always safe, but if something more casual is appropriate for your audience, then wear that. Be yourself.

What will the weather be like?

We can guarantee that the weather in San Antonio, Texas, is warmer than where you come from. But it will be early march. You shouldn’t need more than one of the following: a light jacket, blazer, hoodie, or cardigan. Bring light weight clothes you can layer. We predict that we’ll all start shedding layers by lunchtime.

Generally in March, San Antonio maintains an average daily high temperature between 71 and 76 degrees Fahrenheit (21 to 25 degrees Celsius), while the average low temperature ranges between 48 and 54 °F (9 to 12 °C). 56% average humidity. San Antonio tends to get about nine days of rain most years during the month of March. Be sure to have a look at the forcast a few days ahead of your departure for San Antonio.

Where can you find Madville Publishing at #AWP20?

We’ll be in the Bookfair in San Antonio this year, at booth number 1658 alongside our friends at Kestrel Journal of Literature and Art.

A close up of the AWP 2020 book fair map showing Madville's booth #1658 in Sponsors Row

 

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New Titles for #AWP20

AWP 2020 Logo

We will have a bunch of new titles on hand at AWP20 in San Antonio!

It’s our home state, so we decided we had better make a good showing. That is why we pushed out everything we had for Spring 2020, as well as a couple of books we’ve been perfecting. These new offerings cover the full spectrum of what we publish, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. (Of course you can see them all to buy or pre-order on our website at MadvillePublishing.com

We’ll be offering all of our books at discount prices at #AWP20. Come by our booth, #1658.