One of the great gifts of AWP is the chance meeting with interesting people. One morning for breakfast I met a professor from Virginia who's written a number of nonfiction books about Russia, and his wife, whose family came from Lithuania.
At lunch one day an older attendee - a woman my age - asked if she could join me. She was a writer of fiction. "All these people at the quarterlies tell you they want something edgy," she said with an expression somewhere between dismay and disgust. "Everything has to be edgy."
