The guy who sold a superhero script to Disney was giving a talk in the Jabuticaba Room. The topic was whether superhero scripts were still commercially viable. The consensus was that they were not. The consensus was also that a superhero script optioned by Disney could pay the rent for up to three years in west Los Angeles if one lived frugally. The crowd appeared very amenable and the speaker was loud and effusive. It seemed like this was the most exciting thing he’d done in a long time. He told jokes and a few people laughed. A knot of MFA professors sat together, sipping the free coffee, looking on with blank expressions. It was the first event of the last day of AWP.
The aged lesbian who’d written a dystopian novel about gang rapes on a subterranean moon base was hosting the Mangosteen Awards Ceremony for the year’s top 30 writers under 30. It was called Mangosteen’s 30 Under 30, which had nothing to do with gang rapes on a moon base unless one wanted to think in very abstract terms. It was being held in the Tamarillo Auditorium and was listed at the top of the programme.
The important thing was HBO had adapted the moon base novel into a three-season series. Everyone wanted to know: how did this happen? How did she get an agent? How did her agent get an agent? How does one sell a novel to HBO? How does one sell a novel? Could I sell a novel to HBO? Could I sell you a novel to sell to HBO? Where is your agent’s assistant? Could she be sitting somewhere in the Tamarillo Auditorium right now? Are we in the Tamarillo Auditorium or are we somewhere else? Who are you?
The third top writer under 30 received her medallion at the podium and began to speak about her literary influences. She wanted to thank her mother and her fiancee, Matt. She wanted to thank Mangosteen Magazine for this award and for saying we see you. She knew she wanted to be a writer at age three, when she wrote her first short story. It was about a young girl with impostor syndrome. Moon Base broke in, said thank you and now we need to move on to the next medallion recipient. The third top writer hesitated, looked at the audience, then sat down in her folding chair.
The fourth top writer was called. His name was Durian Miller. Extremely pale and thin with spiky carrot-orange hair, he leaned into the mic and spoke directly to the first two rows, which appeared to be fellow students from his MFA program. They cheered like a high school pep rally. He wanted to thank his girlfriend and someone named Parcheesi. Or maybe his girlfriend was named Parcheesi. He’d already published a chapbook with Operose Press and wanted to congratulate them for going all-in on his recent short novel, The Whitest Tooth. He wanted to thank his agent for believing in him. His agent was also his mother, but she was his mother before she was his agent. He grinned and the first two rows clapped and hooted and called out, “Durian!”
Then came a pause for refreshments. Smokers over the age of 40, ineligible to receive a medallion from Mangosteen Magazine, shuffled toward the exit. A few others dashed past them. Neil Gaiman had been sighted in the bar across from the convention center, which created some anxiety. How long would Neil be there? Would there be time to approach Moon Base, ask her about HBO, and still catch up with Neil? There were 26 more top writers to go.
There was the panel discussion of nature writers who were now or had once been high school English teachers. It was held in the Tamarind Business Plaza, two blocks south of the convention center. This was an older crowd. The event was not well attended. Multiple glasses of water were drunk. There were many thoughtful, perhaps mordant, pauses in which panel members and the audience seemed to turn inward and ask themselves how it could have come to this.
A gray-haired panelist named Jacob spoke haltingly about his creative process, then stopped in mid-sentence and sighed. Someone at the back of the room began a phone conversation. But, because it was a small room, everyone present came to understand that the dog had gotten loose and the wife had been driving around the neighborhood with the kids calling its name. Its name was Salty.
The large woman to the left of Jacob had her hair in a thick braid that ran over her shoulder and coiled in her lap. She spoke slowly about the ecological conditions in western Paraguay, the Gran Chaco dying because of social media, her brother-in-law’s stomach cancer, and the rise of fascism.
Salty had not been located. Did you look in the park? Not that park, the one by the rec center. I know it’s getting dark, but you’re going to have to walk around. Tell the kids to stay in the car. I know they’re upset. IT’S NOT MY FAULT THAT THIS HAPPENED WHILE I’M GONE, CHERYL.
Someone said Neil Gaiman’s giving a reading in the bar across from the convention center, but the audience didn’t react. The woman with the braid had moved on to systemic racism Canada. Rare earths pillaged from Africa. The organ trade. Tibet. Birds killed by wind farms on the Central Cordillera. No one had the energy or the inclination to interrupt her. She did not speak about writing. People were constantly returning from feeding parking meters along the street.
The closest bar was the one where Neil Gaiman was supposed to be reading. It seemed probable, even necessary, that after this everyone would go there. Not for Neil but for solace. The parking meters would need to be fed along the way.
Back in the convention center, there was a different reading scheduled on the Jackfruit Mezzanine. Poets. Poets but actually MFA students who’d written poems, calling themselves poets. Well, that’s what they were, right? If you write a poem, doesn’t that make you . . .
A young woman had printed business cards. They read, L. B. Hannaker, Writer & Poet. They had a Gmail address and blog URL. Nice paper. Embossed. Would make a good bookmark. Could you let me have a few more? But L. B. was already across the room, still handing them out, smiling directly, if only for a moment, at every recipient. Blond hair. Big blue eyes. You’ll go far, my child, one thinks and then berates oneself for unconscious sexism. Of course she won’t go far. She’s a poet.
She’ll go as far as the podium to read something called, “My Grandmother’s Hands.” After that, she’ll read one entitled, “I Loved You In Sadness.” A knot of MFA professors will look on with blank expressions—except for L. B.’s poetry professor, Kyle, wifeless for the duration of the conference, who’ll give L. B. a loud, standing ovation. The other MFA professors will slowly turn their heads and look at him.
All these things will come to pass like dust in the wind, like blossoms on the cherries, the cherries of fate, the cherries of consequence, perhaps mistaken for salak in denser climes. Called “snake fruit,” salak have a scaly exterior that suggests snakeskin. They grow in Malaysia, Sumatra, Indonesia, Thailand. They’re a fruit-lover’s fruit the same way J. K. Rowling was once called a “writer’s writer.” But who called her this? Maybe a literary journalist, trying to stir something up. Maybe someone on a low-level pop-culture site, prospecting for clicks. J. K. Rowling is the snake fruit of the publishing industry. Once the darling of emotionally stunted grownups who liked to dress like English boarding school children outside Harry Potter movies, she’d become a pariah due to her political statements on social media. She was not invited to AWP. Still, there was a rumor. She’d arrived with her security detail at nearby hotel. There’d been a protest in the lobby. Arrests. A group of anti-trans-exclusionary furries. The donkey punched the puma in the face. A large rabbit was also involved.
Still, still. The important thing was that J. K. Rowling had a new book in spite of the controversy and a Potter TV series. The important thing was: how did this happen? How did she get an agent? How did her agent get an agent? How did she get stinkin’ rich? Can I get stinkin’ rich? Can I at least make enough to live in west Los Angeles for up to three years? J. K. Rowling, the salak of our times, might know.
People snuck out of the convention center and went looking. They slipped away from the “Creative Non-fiction for Social Justice Symposium” and the “Is Moral Fiction a Thing of the Past or the Future” address. They redirected their questions from Moon Base to Rowling because, after all, Rowling was richer and more famous than Moon Base. The world will never know whether Kyle, L. B. Hannaker’s poetry professor, was actually one of the furries arrested in the lobby, perhaps the man-sized pink lemur.
The last thing, the continuous thing, was the book fair itself, a noni of possibilities, lumpy, green, and undeniably pungent. Despite its smell, noni is highly valued for supporting the immune system. And so it was with AWP’s central book fair, more convention than conference, each booth containing a pocket dimension of dismay and prevarication, desperate glad-handing and perspiration. Walk around that noni and grow stronger.
This is where the business cards that say “Writer & Poet” really start to flow, where the indy press people, in their raggedy T-shirts and jeans, affirmatively and regularly remind themselves not to grind their teeth because, after all, they don’t have dental. It’s where you can walk the length of the floor, looking at new books, magazines, and literary journals from all over the world and not feel interested in any of them, everyone smiling but not wanting to smile, everyone passive-aggressively sharing contact information, eyes wide, thinking about the future or lost in the past.
At the end, the rumors about Neil Gaiman were revealed to have been started by the owner of the bar across the street. The reader was Neil Greenman. But by then, nobody gave a shit. Everyone just wanted a drink. The juice of the rambutan with four shots of soju. The devil’s soursop, a margarita of despair. The last night of the last day of AWP is when the healing could begin, but even that had a price. And Salty was still missing.