I went to AWP in Denver. I unpacked one of my bags yesterday. Here is what was inside:

An advance reader’s copy of Firework by Eugene Marten, from NY Tyrant Books. Here is an excerpt in The Brooklyn Rail. The cover features a hand pierced by a fishhook; the text inside functions in a similar manner.

Paraffin Days by Richard Peabody. He signed it. He said “Peace.”

Gargoyle #53 with words from Rikki Ducornet (who also did the cover), Reb Livingston, Peter Jay Shippy, and many others.

Christopher Sunset by Geoffrey Nutter, Water’s Leaves & Other Poems by Geoffrey Nutter, Black Life by Dorothea Lasky, all three from Wave Books. Their books are pretty and fun to touch.

Booth Journal #1, in which Jonathan Lethem writes about Finnegans Wake: “Unlike Ulysses, I have not even bothered to fail reading this book. But it is making me smarter and more literary every day just by being there.”

Spring 2010 Beloit Fiction Journal with some quality textual oddities. I liked the human beings at their AWP table.

NOÖ Journal #10, “free as your hand since 2005.” Very excited for this one.

Summer 2009 Indiana Review containing its usual awesomeness including a Special Highlight on Short Short Fiction and the Prose Poem including work by Peter Jay Shippy, Mark Leidner, and a piece called “Applebough” by Eric Ekstrand, behind whom I sat in a post-1945 American Literature class in undergrad in which the teacher would yell at people who were late, saying “YOU’RE BANISHED!” after which they would laugh nervously. I liked the human beings at Indiana Review.

RAIN TAXI with reviews of Lydia Davis, among others.

THE SUN. Personal. Political. Provocative. Have you heard of it?

The Harp and Altar Anthology from Ellipsis Press, edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim, and featuring, by my count, sixty-nine authors, including Joshua Cohen, Lily Hoang, Steve Katz, Peter Markus, Eugene Marten, Zachary Schomburg, Peter Jay Shippy, Derek White, and sixty-one others.

Also nabbed issues of Gulf Coast and Mid-American Review. I subscribed to some things but I can’t remember what. I ordered the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry when I was sober, but you needn’t be when you do the same.

Bat City Review Issue 4, containing some beautiful words and art. Cover below.

At next year’s AWP I suggest you:

1. Get damn dissipated. Not only is it very writerly, everyone is doing it.

2. Google image search your favorite authors and journal editors. Maybe make a collage and study it. Use binoculars to spot them at faraway tables, on the way to the bathroom, etc. Approach them and say you love their story in Vegetable Box Review, their chapbook from MonkeyHouse Press, their memoir, etc.

3. Write down the names of everyone you meet or get them to sign your chest.

4. When dealing with some of the older, more illustrious literary magazines, tell them to refer to you as “the Chekhov of the Suburbs.” Tell editors at the edgier journals that your work is “sort of non-linear and transgressive” and maybe mention the Hale-Bopp comet and the spaceship beneath it.

5. C9H13N.

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