AWP Portland, with edits

A man I know asked me the other day, "how do you write?"

"All writing is rewriting," I answered

I'd meant to say yesterday in this space that I saw books for the first time in my life as commodity while walking through the aisles of AWP, but I couldn't say this until today, I hadn't seen it while I was walking through AWP at the time I was walking yesterday.

Writing and publishing is little fish and big fish--the classic capitalist trope. There are big fish writers and little fish publishers and little fish writers and big fish publishers, and fish of each type somewhere in between little and big.

Bill Mohr, with whom I shared a table at AWP said, "it's good for you to be here to see what you're in to, what's around you, who's doing what with who, and how many of them there are." 

Quentin, who runs Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, said something like this: it's the small presses that are doing all the big work, that the large presses can't make money anymore and the small presses have taken up the slack, and that's why you see so many of them.

And the proliferation of MFA programs! That one can get a graduate degree in Fiction or Creative Non-fiction or Poetry. Heather, who is affliated with a small, well-established liberal arts university in Colorado, is now developing an MFA Writing Department for the university, such is the demand for the product.