Glitterati.

Today is the penultimate day of the Writers @ Work conference--both exhilarating and exhausting. I have thus far attended four readings and will attend three more before it's over. I have an introduction of a poet to make tonight that's making me feel a tad on the sweaty side. Also, I'm in charge of the daily grocery run, where I have to see if any writers need to make a run to the store for, what, cigarettes or tampons.

This year, I enrolled in a workshop, mainly because it was being taught by a poet whose work I love and I was thrilled about the chance to just meet her. It has been excellent, if slightly troubled by a sensitive new-age guy with not very much sense about how he was hogging the discourse space. Maybe that was just me.

I did better this year at schmoozing, aka networking. I went to the big party the night before the conference and hung out and talked with the poet. I picked up a poet/editor at the airport and I'm taking him back to the airport tomorrow. I had a manuscript consultation with him (he liked my work! he liked it!) and I'm sending him my manuscript at his invitation, which makes me feel like singing and dancing. I introduced the poet aforementioned, and he's the poetry editor of a literary magazine. A bunch of us took the poets, a fiction writer, and one of the fellowship winners to lunch yesterday at Trio. I helped them get tickets to the Lucinda Williams concert tomorrow night.

And--and this, my readers, is the best part--I am going tomorrow with the poet whose work I love to make a few returns at Anthropologie (her returns, not mine; her idea, not mine). I'm giving her my manuscript (at her invitation), but she said, and I quote, "this will be the best way for us to hang out, I think." How, how did she know? Shopping and poetry. Speak, o Muse!