AWP is a massive writers’ conference that is held annually in an urban convention center.  Official readings and panels take place in sterile, look-alike rooms, with florescent lights above rows of stackable seats.  As we anticipated our reading at AWP 2013 in Boston, the desire was blare our music, spraypaint the walls, do something, anything, to strangify our rectangle of space.

However, there is something to the sameness of each conference room: the environments are equalized.  It is up to each reader to do the transporting, the transforming–each reader must bring her own magic, and it must come from her pages, from her voice.

And at our AWP reading, we were spellbound.

We had a kickass lineup, and that’s the truth. First, bam, Margo Jefferson–who made her way from NYC in a snowstorm to be with us–she took us into the “we” of her youth when she read Twain and Baldwin as not just a young scholar, but as a young girl of the Negro elite.  She shared the resultant epiphanies, kept us rapt by her mind’s journeying.

Keya Mitra followed, beguiling us with the story of Anita and her two wombs, each the home of a baby created by another man: one, who is her Indian-American husband; the other, her great Anglo Austin lover.  We laughed, we grimaced, we laughed some more.  She finished and we knew why she had been declared a best new American voice.

And then our last reader was Justin Torres. For those of us who have read We the Animals, there was no reason to expect, or wish, that his reading of the work would add anything more to his stunning novel.  Wrong.  His voice was hypnotic, full of desire, elegy, and light. If Torres would have dropped to a bare whisper we would have fallen out of our chairs trying to listen.  Before starting, he said he had stopped reading that opening chapter, that he felt it all read-out, but decided that on this occasion to share. We hate to break it to him, but his declaration may be like the Stones declaring they were dropping “Satisfaction” from the set list…  nice try, but no one is going to let him get with that. Classic work resists retirement. away

All we know is that by reading’s end, we were all very satisfied.