This was my first AWP conference, and I drove from New Orleans to Atlanta. Twenty miles into the trip, I passed a truck on fire in Slidell, sped through opaque black smoke, which felt like driving with your eyes closed for too many seconds. I prayed the person had gotten the hell out of there. Then, in Atmore, AL, the interstate was shut down and thousands of cars and trucks had to detour through the railroad town, which took an extra hour and a half. Halfway into it I had a Katrina evacuation flashback, except I could've U-turned and gone home. The ugly part of me hoped something serious had caused this slowdown, and the better part of me worried people had been badly hurt or killed. The trip took me over 8 hours, but I got to Atlanta at 8 p.m. and met friends for Thai food.

There's a lot to say grace over at AWP. I didn't talk to every friend/writer I wanted to, or visit enough tables of lit mags and small presses, or hit all the panels I'd circled in my program like Charles Baxter's or Thom Didato's, or stay long enough to hear Elizabeth Spencer read, but the conference was productive, helpful, a feast. 5,400 writers attended, and the downtown Hilton was stressed lines i.e. slow lines for coffee, cocktails, elevators. Not enough chairs in the lobby so you had to step around the legs of writers camped out on the carpet because they quickly needed a place to talk, and we sit when we need to.

Highlights: Bruce Beasley's and Mark Doty's poetry readings; the "fairy tale" and "flash fiction: words across the world" panels; hearing Iowa Prize winners Jim Tomlinson and Kevin Moffett read from their short story collections; a rainy dinner with the kind editors at MacAdam/Cage and writers Sheri Joseph, Katherine Towler, and Jack Pendarvis, who makes me laugh so heartily that my Adam's apple jumps; Antonya Nelson's essay on THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING; discovering the entertainingly dangerous stylings of Michael Martone and hearing John Barth read, meticulously, from his new novel; and, spending delicious real time talking and drinking with writers I know from the web.

On the way home, I stopped at the Atmore, AL exit and asked the woman at the BP station what had happened on Wednesday to close the interstate. She told me there'd been brush fires - 30 miles of them - that made her 2 hours late for picking up her kid. No one got hurt. I don't know what happened in Slidell, but when I checked the Times Picayune at home, there was no mention of a fatality and the burning truck.