I had gone to the AWP conference last year in Philadelphia and realized how exciting it was to be around other writers, to run into old friends and make a few new ones. Last year I was on a panel with other South Asian American Writers. I managed to attend a few interesting panels and spend time with friends, especially my old friend Vivek Narayanan. I was determined to visit AWP again in 2023 and so on March 8, I left San Francisco 5:45 AM to reach Seattle the same day and I did despite some nervousness towards the end as darkness and rain appeared all around.
I stayed with my wife Amna Ali's nephews in a nearby city of Redmond.
Amna Ali was initially supposed to come along, but decided not to because she didn't feel right leaving our fairly confident 12-year-old boy home alone. That meant I had to sit at the Weavers Press table all by myself, all day long. I had friends at a nearby table though, wonderful folks running the combined space for Chicago Quarterly Review and Catamaran Review. But before I settled down, my neighbors on the right-hand side table Word Crafters in Eugene introduced themselves and offered to look after my table if I needed food or bathroom break. It started slow making me wondered if the rest of the day and the days after that were going to be as boring.
The game changed the moment Syed Afzal Haider showed up with his wife Janice. I cheered up. Soon after my friend Elizabeth McKenzie and her husband Steve had arrived too, assisting CQR and Catamaran, waving hellos at me. Just when I thought I'd faint of hunger, Janice showed up with pizza and insisted that I eat half of the pie. Godsend! As my body regained energy, a nonstop stream of fellow writers kept pouring in. Syed Afzal Haider accompanied me several times and we caught up on many personal and literary issues. Many young students of writing of South Asian background stopped by to chat, wondering about the motive behind having a press dedicated to publishing South Asian American writers. I had a wonderful time speaking with them. Vivek Narayanan showed up on Friday and spent many hours with me at the desk.
Writers from South Asian and other backgrounds made a stop to say hello. There were San Francisco and Bay Area folks and there were those whom I had either not met before face to face or had only met once or twice. I may not remember everyone who came by to hug or shake hands but the ones I remember include my old friend Cesar Love (poet), Maw Shein Win (poet), Heather Bourbeau (poet), Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poet), Zeina Hashem Beck (poet), Deema Shahabi (poet), Chris Cook (journalist/prose writer), Sarika Mehta (interpreter), who introduced me to her friend Allison deFreese (poet/translator), Tauheed Zaman (prose writer), Torsa Ghosal (fiction), Kathleen Wood (fiction), Rajika Bhandari (prose writer), Kate Jessica Raphael (mystery), Nawaaz Ahmed (fiction), Priya Subberwal (fiction), Mira Vijayann (fiction), and Christine Marie Lauder (fiction), who teaches at Habib University in Karachi. Then arrived Chaitali Sen (fiction), Oindrila Mukherjee (fiction), Faisal Mohyuddin (poet), Rooja Mohassessy (poet), Karla Heubner (fiction) and Douglas
Kearney (poet). It was nice to run into Kazim Ali (poet) and be introduced to Malvika Jolly (poet) at bar by Vivek and Faisal.
The funniest moment, I believed, came when a man in his late thirties arrived at the desk and after a brief conversation, I asked him where he'd come from. When he replied Colombia, I overacted and exclaimed, From the land of Senor Marquez? While he smiled, nodded, I pretended to get and said, Can I touch your feet? I was honored to meet one of the sweetest poets I have ever met, Claudia Castro Luna, who was the WA State Poet Laureate (2018 - 2021) among other feathers in her cap. The high point came when Vivek and I noticed that Charles Johnson, whose Middle Passage I had recently finished (and Vivek being a big fan of his Oxherding Tale), had finally arrived at the Chicago Quarterly Review table. Vivek didn't mind parting with his magnum opus After for Mr. Johnson's pleasure who gladly accepted the book and quickly took our picture to text it to the distinguished Prof. Amritjit Singh, a common friend. I texted him and it seemed he never got our photo. I had briefly joked with a passerby, a man with an amazing handlebar mustache, on the first day. Two mornings later I spotted him outside a cafe near the Convention Center. He came to the table to buy a few titles and I told him I saw him working his magic on a woman. He corrected me that it was the other way around. It told him he should've thanked his mustache.
It has taken me thirty plus years to start exploring North West when I took a trip to Portland by car, stopping along the way in small towns and big towns such as Ashland and Eugene. I have developed a small-time affection for a very small town called Weed. One of the three exits the town offers, there's a tiny espresso cubbyhole that I like to stop by while refueling. But on my way, I ended up taking a different exit and to my surprise found a young woman actually reading a book behind counter when not serving a customer. I asked for her permission before taking her picture for future generation who may not know the phenomenon of reading a book while at work instead of gawking at the phone.
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