A few months ago, I asked on social media if anyone wanted to talk about their conference hookups, romances, and relationships. No need to name names. Immediately, the messages started arriving. Funny, hot, romantic stories. There’s the now-married couple who first met on the AWP dance floor. The two people, each married to another, who hooked up at every AWP conference they could. A tryst that started in an elevator. A writer who could hear another writer’s activities from the hotel room next door. Some quotes, included here with permission:
“When he walked into the restaurant where another poet friend and I had been grabbing lunch, I turned to my friend and said, ‘I’m doomed.’”
“Three guys, one AWP. Two open marriages and one ‘just broke up.’”
“A poet and a prose writer met in the smoking hut, and one said to the other, ‘We should know each other,’ and now we are five years married with a three-year-old kid.”
“I was certain he was going to be the person I married, but I was in a relationship. We became email friends instead, for years. We’ve been married now for thirteen years.”
“We met at a conference and we’ve been in and out of each other’s lives romantically for twenty-five years.”
“Would I have hooked up with this dude in any other circumstance? I don’t know. Probably not.”
“We met (crushes activated) at AWP, but I was in a relationship, so nothing happened. When that relationship ended months later, I happened to be a visiting writer at his MFA program and bam! Celebrating our twentieth anniversary this spring.”
“A meeting at a conference turned into a seven-year relationship.”
Sure, we go to AWP and other writing conferences for the panels, the bookfairs, the community, the conversations, the reunions with old pals, the chance to meet new pals. We go to learn and to commune. AWP is fueled by a collective artistic understanding, a sense of possibility. It’s also the stalwart institution creative writing programs have come to rely on. It can track all the logistics and statistics of planning, panel proposals, and attendance—everything except the part that happens behind closed doors.
To be clear, this is about consensual encounters. It’s about the strangeness of desire, which shows up in our writing and reading. It shows up, too, at readings, at the hotel bar, in how we think about language. It can also be matter of fact. A 2009 Inside Higher Ed article about the Modern Language Association conference (yes, even unsexy MLA has its moments) quotes a professor of English and women’s studies: “Conference sex is a metaphor for life in the academy: One takes what one can get when one can get it.”
