My Full Circle Moment in Kansas City

What my first outing as a public novelist taught me.

What up, Substack fam! Happy Valentine’s Day. 

First off, a sincere apology for not posting here as consistently as I have in the past. We are officially one month out from VICTIM’s release (wild shit, right?) and your boy has been quite busy—in a good way! I just want you to know that I’ve not neglected this space so much as I haven’t had as much time to write to you all in the thoughtful manner that I strive to. 

Now that my throat-clearing is out of the way… I wanted to drop in and write a bit about my trip to the AWP conference last week in Kansas City (The Association of Writers & Writing Programs, for the uninitiated). 

The gist for those who don’t know: Each year thousands of writers and publishing industry folk descend on a new city for a few days. They wander through a large convention center filled with booths hawking swag from MFA programs, literary magazines, and indie publishers. They sit on and attend panel discussions that range from life-changing to meh, and hit up readings in nearby art galleries, warehouses, and lounges. By the end of the night, they all end up drinking at a designated hotel bar. 

This is the third conference I’ve attended. In the past, I’ve come as an MFA student with the aim of trying to rub shoulders with my heroes, maybe meet an agent, gain some insight about the publishing industry, and drink as much as I could on my tight budget. 

This year is the first in which I actually have a book to my name and something to sell—or, in my case, give away. I came to the conference armed with a suitcase full of VICTIM galleys and bookmarks to hand out because they were just collecting dust in my apartment. My bag on the way over to Kansas City was heavy as fuck. 

Said heavy as fuck bag.

On the plane there, after heaving my bag into the overhead bin, and taking stock of how much I was spending on the flight, and the hotel, and how much I would spend on Ubers and food—this trip was on my dime, aside from the registration fee (thank you, University of Miami!)—I wondered if I was making the right decision by going. 

I wondered, truth be told, if I was just throwing my money away. After all, my book isn’t actually out yet, so I had nothing to sell, really. And sure, my book has gotten a bit of press here and there, but at the end of the day I’m far from a big name. I was signed up to sit on two panels at AWP, and as the plane took off, I imagined myself sitting before an empty conference room, and the shame of paying all this money to do such a thing and return home with a bag full of books and bookmarks nobody wanted. 

But the opposite happened, and I’m so glad I did go. 

I won’t recap everything I did and saw while I was out there, mostly because I think those recaps are boring. But I will tell you about a couple of incredible moments I experienced during my first panel. 

I was scheduled to speak at 9 a.m., which is, as you might imagine, the shittiest time slot. I arrived in the conference room first, about 15 minutes before the panel was supposed to start and this is what the scene looked like. 

Yikes.

It seemed like confirmation that I’d made a mistake. But then, slowly, people started trickling in. And by the time the panel actually started, we had a pretty full house. 

The discussion was billed to be about Latino/a/x/e (am I missing one?) narratives that stray away from the immigrant experience and touch on stories about Afro-Latinos, children and grandchildren of immigrants, and any of the other multitude of permutations of what can be considered a “Latino story” these days. The panelists, which included Chicano poet Nathan Osorio, half white and half Chicana short prose writer Samantha Chagollan, and my Puerto Rican/Nuyorican/Polarican (Polish and Puerto Rican, for those who don’t know) ass, were tasked with speaking about how our work expands the canon and diversity of Latino literature. 

Before we started answering questions, each of us read from a selection of our work. For the first time in public, I read from a short excerpt of VICTIM, and also, read for the first time from the final hardcover edition that had just come in the mail a few days prior. 

Isn’t she beautiful?

I chose a section early on in the novel, where Javi, the protagonist, has just met with his guidance counselor, who has informed him that if he writes about challenges and obstacles he’s overcome in his life—and plays up his trauma as much as possible—he’s very likely to get into a top college. Javi comes home and relays this information to his skeptical single mom, and tries to recruit her to tell him traumatic family stories he can use in his essay.

Hilarity ensues. 

I read from about three or four pages of the section, and to tell you the truth I was quite nervous about how it might connect. It’s one thing to write something alone, another to have others read it on their own and write nice reviews about it, and another entirely to stand in front of a room of people and see, with your own eyes, the boredom or indifference wash over their faces. 

Thankfully, there were tons of laughs and lots of agreement with some of the deeper subtleties in the passage, which tease out why Javi’s mom refuses to see herself as a victim and shudders at the notion of Javi being the victim of anything. It was clear by the end of the reading, that this test audience got it, and man did that feel good. 

And yet, that isn’t what this post is about. 

What is most memorable to me about that panel is the part where we took questions from the audience, who seemed to mostly be made up of young students in MFA programs or budding writers looking for their first break. 

Many of the questions we received centered around identity, and around wondering where an audience member’s story fit into the category of “Latino fiction” or “Latino poetry,” which many had seemed to define for themselves as a particular kind of box they had to contort themselves into, shaving off their nuances and uniqueness in the process.

What felt most fulfilling was speaking to them about what I’d painfully learned in the ten years it took me to write VICTIM, which is that you don’t have to twist yourself, or your writing, to fit into that box. Rather, you have the ability—and the permission (because that is key)—to spread yourself out and widen that motherfucker. The box is in fact malleable. It’s a box that you can—with intense creative effort, belief in yourself, and ideally, support from a few good folks—expand and push the walls out to bring in more people, not keep them out. 

To tell you the truth, the coolest thing about my whole trip was watching the young writers myself and my fellow panelists spoke to nod and feel a hint of recognition, and sense of relief. I noticed this and realized, about halfway through the Q&A, something important. To the audience, I was the guy at the front of the room with a nice hardcover from a nice publisher with some nice early reviews and so forth. 

I was, in other words, the sort of writer I’d go and hear from at past AWP events when I was in MFA school. When I was in the shoes of many of those in the audience. When all I had was a vague notion of what I wanted to write, a yearning to be accepted, and a desire to do whatever I thought being accepted entailed. 

It was a full circle moment to be on the other end of that equation. To be the one giving permission and doing the opening up. It made me feel proud of the entire journey I’ve been on, and even more so when many of those people in the audience came up to me afterwards to thank me for what I said, excitedly asked for a galley (I was cleaned out of all 20 I brought with me by noon that day!), and had me sign them right then and there. 

Look at me, doing novelist shit.

It was the first time I’ve ever done any of that kind of stuff as a public novelist, which is something I’ll certainly remember.

But the experience also taught me something important, too. Something I’m sure I’ll continue to learn as I go forward on this journey. Which is that we don’t write in a vacuum. 

Yeah, the literary community is small, and the amount of readers out there wouldn’t compete with, say, NFL fans. But there are a good number of us out there, and there are people who will encounter your work, and people who will be moved by it. There are even people out there who will be so moved by it, that it might give them the permission or the inspiration to do something of their own. 

When you write something that is true to you, something you feel that needs to be said, perhaps even something that feels scary to say, it kicks off this self-reinforcing cycle. Your words can plant a seed in someone else, a seed that sprouts and leads to another seed, and so on, and so forth. Does that make sense? I don’t know. Maybe I hung out with too many poets last week. 

The point is, the lesson I learned from my experience is that it’s important for me to continue to be intentional with my work. To continue to write in a manner that speaks to people I want to speak to.

What was so dope about that panel is that I felt I had a room full of people who I’ve always wanted VICTIM to speak to. People who maybe don’t see themselves reflected in a bookstore, and if they do, believe they have to write in a certain way, or tell a certain story in order to be accepted. People who feel they have to stay within these fake margins that, from their vantage point, seem predetermined and inescapable. 

I remember feeling that myself, and I remember how weird and uncomfortable it felt to do something different and write against those self-imposed boundaries; to try and write the story I felt like I needed to write. 

It was pretty damn moving to see the end result of that. To see that doing that not only resulted in a book I’m proud of, but actually created a bit more space out there for someone else to do their own thing.

I truly can’t think of a better outcome. 

Peace, 

Andrew

Recommendations

• Pre-publication essays are a dime-a-dozen, but this one by Brandi Wells for LitHub is one of the best that I’ve ever read.

• Junot Díaz
  on why it’s important to quell the desire to be a “serious” writer. “Instead of working hard at being a ‘good writer,’ a ‘serious writer’ or ‘a writer with a second chapter,’ work hard at finding the play state where you feel open, creative, unjudged — you know, free.”

• This podcast episode featuring three writers I really respect—Jay Caspian Kang, Tyler Austin Harper, and Musa Al-Gharbi—dishing on academia and whether “kids these days” are really as bad as everyone makes them out to be.

• This insane New York Magazine feature by Caitlin Moscatello that takes you behind the scenes of a multimillion dollar operation to create the “perfect college applicant.”

• Ross Barkan
  on the hustle and creativity needed to sustain a career in today’s media ecosystem. “It’s less about being a jack-of-all-trades and more about having backup plans, and backup plans for those backup plans. It’s also about that ability, almost ineffable, to stay ahead of what’s happening.”