Today, I’m attending my first AWP conference which happens to be right here in my home, Kansas City. It’s a convention-center-sized-word-nerd-gathering, filled to the gills with panels on form, on themes, on how to write about hard things and stay afloat. Each aisle in the convention center is filled with booths from publishing presses, literary magazines, MFA programs in creative writing, pages and pages and pages of peoples’ heartfelt words.
As I continue working on this queer book, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to learn from queer writers who queer time, place, and form in their works. In a life that gets so full so fast with work and caring for loved ones and taking care of my own sick body, it’s a big blessing to take a second and ask curious, loving questions of my craft. To hug friends I made at the summer writing workshop I attended back in June. To remind myself that among being a sober, chronically ill, queer, lady, lover of cheese, walker of dog, scratcher of cat, and kisser of lover, I am also a writer.
Last night was my first “real” and second “ever” opportunity to read my work into a microphone to a room full of writers. Florida poet Nicole Tallman hosted A Very Gay Literary Happy Hour (that was actually the official name) at a cute lounge three blocks from my house.
There were faces I’ve admired through the small window of Instagram for so long, all real and supple and soft and smiling right in front of my eyes. The French 75s were being ordered all around me with gusto and my non-alcoholic Heinekens were feeling good on day 599 of sobriety (hello 600, today I meet you with a kiss on the face).
Ends up, you can take a thyroid out of a body and you can still feel hot faced and turn to coping mechanisms like pinching the skin on the back of your hand between the thumb nail and index finger nail of the opposite hand when you’re nervous to speak aloud in front of a crowd. Ends up, thyroids control other kinds of stasis-hormones.
A number of featured Very Gay poets read from pages of their physical chapbooks, flipping through the pages to take us on a mouth journey through their hearts. And then the open mic portion started and about halfway through the list of readers I turned to Iman and said “Maybe I’m not a poet.”
My confusion around poet identity didn’t stop Nicole from eventually calling my name. I awkwardly circumnavigated barstools and cocktail tables and made it the couple steps onto stage.
I read a poem that I called Root. It’s an ode to all the wisps of memories that come up when someone asks “so what is your root?” Or, in other words, “so where did your gay come from?”
It’s a mush of words that I wrote on a page and words I wrote in the notes app of my phone, squished together in short, jammed lines. It’s a small set of phrases I showed to a bunch of my queers here leading up to last night with suggestions and care and questions brought back to me. It’s a love song to the gay in me but also loved on by the gay around me, the gay that holds me.
After it was all over and my heart started to settle back into a non-deadly rhythm and my face started to return to its normal pink and not the big bright red, other poets and readers from the night came up and offered such support, such grace, such care, such community. We followed each other on places online and gave suggestions of where to submit work and told our stories of how we all got to this small lounge in Midtown Kansas City on a Thursday night.
This contentedness is one that can only come with community. The kind that leaves me brave enough to share a gay poem with my parents and to settle under a blanket on the couch at the end of the night and not worry about tomorrow. The kind that reminds me there are ways to feel valuable and good without drinking. That kind that shows me that maybe I can be a poet, maybe not. But I can hold onto something with certainty, that I am definitely, without a doubt, a Very Gay writer.
I haven’t listened to it yet but I cannot express how excited I am that Usher’s new album came out this morning. “My Boo,” the duet with Alicia Keys that I used to sing out of tune in the shower (sorry Madison) was the number one played song on my pink iPod Mini that I toted around in my middle school backpack.
After AWP is over, I’m heading to DC for time with yet another awesome group of doctors from around the country, to be in a different kind of community. Layering and layering and layering different bits of self around spaces and places, trying to recognize the parts that feel the most me, the most home.