I asked the editors of two-dozen journals to briefly describe their publications and what they look for vis-à-vis content (genre, aesthetics, etc.) and the response was universally this sentence: “We publish poetry, fiction, art, and creative nonfiction. We’re looking for anything good” (with the occasional rearrangement of said words). While I do not doubt them, I wondered how such journals (and there were legions present, though I couldn’t get an exact figure, as some were under the guise of host MFA programs) could distinguish themselves in a wildly overcrowded field. (While the freebies were great, the AWP conference comes but once a year.)

To find an answer, I headed to a presentation titled “Let’s Avoid a Quick Death, Please: Starting and Sustaining a New Literary Publication.” I was pleased to hear the panelists say that a good journal’s identity should extend beyond “anything good,” though none of the four journals represented on the panel explained what they were looking for. Likewise, I was curious to learn how these journals were sustaining themselves. After all, major multi-million-dollar publishing ventures fold every year. Was there, perhaps, an underground network of journals making real money—journals that might one day supplant the established order?

The panelists first described the teams necessary to put out a quality publication. A really good designer, they all agreed, for both print and the web, and a strong team of editors, each focusing on fiction, poetry, etc. This is obviously an expensive proposition, and so I was in awe of these young literary entrepreneurs who had discovered the secret of success. Here is the secret of success: You have to use your own money to keep the journal alive, or in the case of one panelist, you have to use your university’s money. Sometimes you can Kickstart each issue. None of the journals represented on the panel were reported to be moneymaking propositions. It was never explained how this is sustainable.

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A presentation called “How Twitter Works (and Doesn’t Work) for Writers” played host to an overflow crowd of writers closer in age to AARP cards than birth certificates, all of whom were eager to understand the weirdness that is the micro-blogging service and what pound-sign-A-W-P-one-four meant exactly, and how will it help me find an agent/find an editor/sell books? I have taken the liberty to condense for you the takeaway message to the length of a tweet: Try to get a lot of followers, and do your best to get retweeted by famous people. While, yes, this is technically true, for those in attendance it was a lot like being advised by an accountant that the best way to really make money this year would be to get a high-paying job.

Those panels orbiting closer to craft, literary theory, and the pedagogical were top flight and impossibly comprehensive and invaluable. Here, bestselling authors of literary fiction like Summer Wood and Tara Conklin explained the structures of their novels, and why, and how they arrived at their methodologies. Lan Samantha Chang and Marjorie Celona and Leah Stewart described “the mechanics of plot in the realist novel.”

Courtesy of AWP

The changing nature of books and learning was much discussed. As low-residency programs move online, it has become a pressing issue to determine how to recreate virtually the physical-space “workshop experience” (which generally involves students as a group unpacking one another’s stories, noting weaknesses, and making suggestions). The consensus of the panel was that Blackboard, a ubiquitous, bloated discussion forum and file distribution service generally foisted upon English departments by universities everywhere, is inadequate to the task (“I dismissed it out of hand,” said one professor). Some creative writing programs have taken to using lightweight bulletin-board systems, and one has found great success with email, which everyone already knows how to use. The panelists rarely admitted to using Skype, as geographical diversity (one program represented has a student in Hong Kong) made schedule coordination impossible. Still, went the consensus, the very idea that workshops could play host to students not only in different time zones but on different calendar dates altogether makes manifest the need to figure out online education, and soon.

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The most interesting panel I attended, by far, was titled “How Far, Imagination: Writing Characters of Another Race in Fiction.” Serious literary fiction takes the reader deep into the mind of a character. This is fine if you are, say, John Updike, and you’re writing about white men. But what if you want to write a character of a different race? How can you really, really understand what that means? The consensus of the panel was that this is a very hard thing to do indeed. But, said Mat Johnson, a professor and author of the acclaimed novel Pym, “I’m trying to write about the world, and if you’re trying to write about the world, usually other ethnicities, other cultural backgrounds, other genders, other sexual expressions, come into the text. And so I understand why some people get very uncomfortable very quickly about the question of writing outside of one’s race, particularly, but also writing outside your personal identity.”