As we prepare for another snowstorm and extended winter here in Michigan just a couple of weeks before spring break, I have been thinking back, especially warmly, to my PD trip last March. During spring break of ‘25 I was fortunate to take NMC Magazine literary staff/ Creative Writing students to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Los Angeles.
Attending AWP for me, regardless of location, is always a homecoming. It’s a chance to reconnect with faculty from undergraduate and graduate days and to see a mix of friends from writing programs and fellowships currently teaching across institutions or working in publishing. Upon our arrival in LA, after immediately discarding all of our layers, we headed to check into our hotel in Little Tokyo and map out goals for our conference attendance the next day before going out for ramen. I was looking forward to a range of sessions, including ones that spoke to teaching experimental forms – “the uncanonical canon”, the poetics of revolution, and working with neurodivergent writers. My students were eager to attend panels highlighting queer, trans, and feminist authorship; writing across borders and diasporic histories; and the daily life of literary editors.
On the first morning of the conference, I was thrilled to happen upon a former professor of mine, Pamela Uschuck, and make plans to attend her panel discussing the pedagogy of climate change in the classroom. In it, writers talked about teaching the epistolary poem, the slow violence of climate fiction, and how “the future is taking place at the margins.” In an ominous endnote, panelists concurred the environmental lit course was in danger, not just pedagogically, and was safest rebranded as nature writing.
During the conference, my students and I took on a divide and conquer strategy with our schedule. I attended a variety of sessions about the use of OERs, open-ended play, small press ecologies, and AI in the creative writing and composition classroom; the mantra for concerns raised by the latter was “maybe the product was never a good way to measure the process.” I went to a couple of panels about overseeing student-run lit magazines and the years-long process of digitizing magazine archives. While discussing historic literary magazine archives destroyed in the LA fires, an editor turned archivist kept reiterating when asked for sage advice, “the contingency plan is redundancy.”
Among my favorite sessions was a presentation about building eco-resilience through poetry and community, during which Jane Hirshfield and David Hassler spoke about the founding of Poets for Science and how both microscope and metaphor serve as instruments of discovery. During her talk about the need for collaborations between disciplines across academia and across communities, Hirshfield read from her seminal, now quite prophetic, poems “Let Them Not Say” and “On the Fifth Day” . She concluded by stating one must “remember what kind of life poetry calls you to live.”
Perhaps most emotionally-charged was the packed event featuring Palestinian poets Lena Khakaf Tuffaha and Mosab Abu Toha in conversation with one another. Their event moved beyond learner-centered teaching and writing practices to evaluate why we teach and write. During chaotic times in need of scientists, advocates, and witnesses at large, Khakaf Tuffaha and Abu Toha posited “who needs poetry?”; their answer, of course, was all of us. They reminded listeners it falls largely to the literary arts to demonstrate to the world the need to hear narratives outside our own; to teach empathy; to unpack what is at stake for others when we speak of truth, justice, and memory.
As a backdrop to the conference was the city of LA, full of diversity, vibrancy, poverty, and art merging together. Each morning and evening my students and I walked through Little Tokyo noting colorful glowing lanterns, anime shops, and paintings that covered the full side of buildings. We ate green tea donuts and sweet black sesame Koko Churro rolls. After conference sessions we took field trips downtown. In The Last Bookstore, we wandered through their rare books annex and genre-themed archives. My student Krissy took photos of the book tunnel, the labyrinth, a glass case of disembodied dolls, and one of me sitting in the metal chair in the horror room.
Another day, my student August and I went to see the Walk of Fame so he could find Prince’s star (spoiler: we walked all the streets, he doesn’t have one) and to look through the vinyl at Amoeba Music. Afterward, stuck in traffic, we watched a Palestinian Land Day rally while our realtor-turned-Lyft-driver talked simultaneously of growing grapefruit-sized butter-yellow avocados in the garden of her childhood LA home, and of investors buying up real estate all across the city and just sitting on it indefinitely. “Where is everyone else to live?” she exclaimed, her hands in the air.
Further ahead outside, Krissy was walking around alone, only to find herself suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the rally itself. A Palestinian flag and behind it a Mexican one waved, almost as if to each other and not just the crowds. For her this symbolized something of home, of belongingness, of a place where cultures merge together visibly and vocally.
In the hot car with the sound of voices raised in unison outside, I opened my recently purchased Abu Toha book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, and read from the title poem: “When you open my ear, touch it/gently./ My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.” Beside me, remembering his year abroad in Thailand, August looked through maps to locate LA’s Thai Town and Chinatown neighborhoods and made his plans for the evening. We were due to leave the following morning around 4 am for our flight back to Traverse City. On the streets the traffic was at a standstill, but the jacaranda bloomed blue-violet, the petals picked up by the thick wind and scattering.