Finding Solace in the Margins: A Queer Woman’s First Literary Conference
I bought a ticket to attend my first writing conference three days before it started. I had been laid off a couple months before and I hadn’t thought I could afford the trip. On a whim, driven by the combination of a new job offer and social media fueled fomo, I decided to buy a flight from JFK to Seattle, rationalizing being able to stay with my parents as proof that I could swing it.
Life had a plasticky sheen to it at the time, as if everything was a bit fake. I flew to Seattle in a daze. It was odd that for months I’d woken up with no need to log into work. It was odd to be in my parents’ house when it wasn’t filled with the scent of pine needles, bright lights lining all the houses in my neighborhood. Even odder to wake up before the sun, take the train downtown, and file into large lecture halls with hordes of other writers from every season of life.
Take my perspective – a queer girl who scans every room she enters for fellow queers – with a grain of salt, but the literary world reads very gay to me. Everywhere I turned was another queer writer I loved, a new queer writer to start loving, a panel on the future of queer publishing, on queer historical fiction, on authentic LGBTQ+ voices. Let this soothe your mind about finding a place as a queer writer at a large writing conference – space exists for us. We have clawed it out for ourselves. We are perhaps even taking over.
The highlight of the conference for me – and arguably the primary reason I flew to Seattle (sorry Mom and Dad) wasn’t even part of the conference itself. The Queer AWP Offsite Reading was held at The Wildrose, a historical dyke bar on Capital Hill. Despite it having a prominent role in my first manuscript, I had never been to The Wildrose. The last time I lived in Seattle, I was below the legal drinking age and vastly unaware of my queerness. The Wildrose hadn’t even been on my radar, but as a queer adult, it had long been on my bucket list. I met up with Sonia Ruyts, a fellow queer writer I met in a Zoom writing workshop many years ago, to attend the reading. We caught up on the status of our book projects while hiking up one of Seattle’s steep hills. Eight hours of panels had sapped my energy. By that point, I was too tired to feel either anxious or excited.
At The Wildrose, we sat in a semi-circle on the floor, the crowd bursting into screams as Vanessa Friedman regaled us with a tale of being fisted by a rabbi at a queer adult summer camp. T Kira Madden read a sex scene from her forthcoming book Whidbey, Marissa Higgins shared the first chapter of her novel A Good Happy Girl, and the brilliant Marisa Crane shared from their recently published I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (the best book I’ve read in a long, long time).
By far the most beneficial – and most popular – panel of the conference was called From Slush to Sale: Literary Agents Explain It All. It was held in the largest conference room, and still 20 people were asked to leave the room due to fire code limits. As someone on the cusp of querying, I devoured every morsel of wisdom the panelists offered: Do your research on the agent; don’t quote the agent’s bio back to them in your letter; do offer ‘vibe comps’ – especially ones that are contradictory (“This book is Malibu Rising meets Grindr”); do not make big bold claims in the first line of your letter to try to draw the agent’s attention – just follow the query formula (“I really liked this other book you represented, mine is like it for this reason”).
A later panel of debut authors offered this important advice about querying: You will go out to query too soon. You will get rejections and feedback and revise and try again in a year. Do not get discouraged. There is no rush. There is no rush. I need this constant reminder.
I left the conference feeling creatively revived. I was eager to return to my first manuscript, which had been patiently waiting for more editing attention since I’d been laid off. I wrote three essays in the week after the conference. The experience reminded me why we are all doing this writing thing – for the love of words and sentences and stories.
Returning to New York, I read an Instagram post about Sonia’s experience at the conference. She pointed out the loneliness of being on the periphery of the literary world, looking in at those in the center. So many of us are trying to get published for the first time, raw dogging our first drafts without the help of an MFA community, anxiously querying agents that hundreds of writers who attended the conference have already obtained. I spent my days at the conference eating lunch alone, and wandering the book fair by myself, tentatively approaching my favorite authors for signings while watching others run into old friends. I was privileged to leave the conference each day and return to my parents’ house, dinner and a glass of wine waiting for me. But if I had been in another city, I would have gone back to my hotel room alone.
The duality of this experience was a beautiful contradiction, to have my community seen and respected, while still feeling at the fringes. Perhaps someday the way I move through this conference will change, as I work to widen the network of literary humans in my life. But I suppose one reason that it didn’t bother me much at the time was because writing has always been solitary for me. Until a few years ago, I never shared it with anyone. Most of the time, I am writing alone, sitting with myself and my words and my worlds. It is a sacred space for me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
