I long to move with the sharp certainty of a flight attendant doing his thing, giving the spiel, keeping us safe. He points to This! That! There! These! As soon as he tucks himself away, I doze. On the ground in Kansas City—flat, gray, brown—the hotel lobby smells lovely, like other hotel lobbies of my life, specifically the Westin’s and the Moxy’s. My curiosity’s thus piqued for the ensuing days of the writers’ conference: This hotel doesn’t share a family with those hotels, so who is copycatting whom; and what, in fact, makes this bewitching fragrance just the thing to greet a weary traveler? But we’ve no time for rabbit holes. We have dinner reservations for one, corner booth, mood lighting with hot buns and housemade butter and an Old Fashioned and Sonic Youth playing (takes a teenage riot to get me outta bed right now), and the voice from the kitchen incants, Service, please. Service, please. Service, please. Later I leave a reading early—can’t hear, and the air smells of farts—and fall asleep with the lights on.
Convention centers have bad, bad lighting. Convention centers full of writers are in fact such a harrowing place for the writers, for this and other reasons, that now the conference organizers have created a “Low-light room” and a “Quiet room”— not one and the same—and I am determined to visit both before this is all over; they sound like good places for me. But now it’s work time. The brand-identity game amongst our fellow tables is strong and I am taking notes. I’m in need of a Sharpie; when Yurina arrives, she is carrying, bless her. Behind the table is a safe place to be, so safe, so comfortable, oh the people watching. When I venture out into Bookfair I feel every bit as sad-happy, happy-sad, as I expected to feel, in this particular creek bed of indie bookstacks and piles of stickers and bookmarks and pamphlets that we mostly pick up and discard two days later in our hotel room trash bins. I doubt I’ll ever feel any differently about Bookfair. The word overwhelm will never stop being the most appropriate word, exhaled by all of us, weary and accepting and cowed. We belong here and also we do not belong. These are our people and yet oh how lonely, how tender my ego, leggo of it won’t you, stop jerking me around! Perk: There are sweets. My candy tally for today: a fun size M&Ms, one Werther’s Original, one baby Kit Kat, a Hershey Kiss. I purchase one book and feel that the small—but mighty, and revered, as these things go—press selling it is not adequately showering me with gratitude for my purchase. They are big dudes in this little-dude world, and I guess they feel they have the right to be less than obsequious. Later my people and I dine in the belly of a crow—Negroni, agnolotti, fried chicken, seaweed donuts, most delightful server with curly blond hair. I reveal a sordid truth and am rewarded, vindicated, affirmed; I’m not the worst actor in this tale, as I have long known, quietly, that I am not. Is this the high point of the writers’ conference?
No, the highest points consist of: Laughing about Harry Potter problematics and Christian weirdos. Making the hotel coffee shop barista’s day when I am the second person in 10 minutes to tell her she looks like Lucy Dacus. Getting another red-lipstick tip. Hearing the story of Dave—the Wonder Fair shop cat, an orange boy among many shopcats on Lawrence, Kansas’ Massachusetts Street—from Christy Lynch (I can listen to Christy Lynch talk about most anything, especially cats). Lunching with Julia over a split sandwich and a beer, feeling like now this is my people. Ordering nigiri for the first time! Jamming out to the just-dropped Brittany Howard record in my hotel room on a sunny morning! Successfully avoiding the baddest actor, who lurks around here somewhere! Skipping out on my final chance to hobnob it up and swallowing my anxiety about not getting enough work done, this is a work trip innit, and instead walking through a crisp Kansas City morning—where the freshly sprayed-down concrete glistens and the shopfronts are like CHIEFS KINGDOMMMMM!!! and nobody is yet shooting up the place—to find a swank coffee shop-bakery with a perfect croissant and a seasonally appropriate mocha and an hour or so to be in my own head among throngs of people, many of them writers, breathing the same air. Watching a woman with purple and green hair roll a slab of dough into croissants, and wondering if she has figured something out about life that I have yet to figure out. Watching croissants spin in a big hot oven. I never do make it to the low-light room or the quiet room, damnit. There’s always some other year.
Can never go wrong with a Christy Lynch story/explainer!
This is lovely. So glad I didn't have to go.