From March 31-April 2, 2016, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop took part in the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2016 conference in Los Angeles, California. During the event we pitched CREDO anthology to presses and advertised our writing retreats: Spring in Newport, Rhode Island (April 22-24, 2016), Summer in Barcelona & South of France (July 18-26, 2016), and Summer in Granada (July 28-August 5, 2016). Visitors were able to take flyers, CWW buttons as AWP 2016 Collector’s Items, and even contribute to our daily exquisite corpse poem:
Eat me, I am the beginning of everything.
A cartesian circle of regret.
A big holy moly banging box of
babies spilling a tangle along the edge
Beware, what you see may only be a fringe of time.
Babies have many egos they fit inside a match box
full of burnt out matches
matches that are lit by cuts that are strewn on the couch
Stasis comes in many forms, couches can grip like a vise –
strangled by the need to pull yourself
inside out
Side-to-side, macaroni shifting on the walls
they danced,
knowing they were made of more than the tinkering of macaroni on the ground.
Yet the clatter brought them back to earth,
eternally bound by the falls of their feet.
Their footing finding the fall to feel but
who knows the how and when of landing
on the open sea or a small green island
a seal jumps out of the water, hungry, sun-blind and lost,
connected to nothing like wallpaper
yet feeling trapped from the blanketed sky.
Blue black bruises around my eyes
No one asks who helped me harvest them.
Our staff for the event included CWW Creative Director Rita Banerjee and Managing Editorial & Communications Intern Emily Smith, who helped set the booth up and networked with various publishers and presses. Friends of the CWW and readers at our official AWP off-site reading were also present at our table.
On April 1, the CWW headed over to Sabor y Cultura for our scheduled reading. The event featured fifteen readers: Rita Banerjee, Emily Smith, Jess Burnquist, Julialicia Case, Ariana Kelly, Gwen E. Kirby, Katie Knoll, Ellaraine Lockie, Ondrej Pazdirek, Heather Aimee O’Neill, Brenda Peynado, Esther Pfaff, Jessica Piazza, Jonathan Shapiro, and Emily Skaja. The three hour reading featured a great mix of poetry, short fiction, essay, and book excerpts.
We had a great time at AWP, and we can’t wait to see you next year at AWP 2017 in Washington D.C.!
Cambridge Writers' Workshop 