Awefulmazing Georgetowntastic

RARRRRRRR... bad blogger.

Over a month has passed! I went to New Orleans. I got the flu. I started using the word "awful." I went to New York and saw Chicago on Broadway. I wrote some poems. I read the first two books of The Hunger Games series and got too busy to read the last one and my head almost exploded.

Son of a bitch. Why haven't I been writing about all of these things?

I got an iPhone. That's why. It's awful.

There's no more effective time suck than a shiny gadget with lots of blinking lights and bright colors, where you can download an entire arcade worth of distractions for free (or close-to-it). Why would I look other human beings in the eyes when I could make a tiny waitress run around a tiny kitchen for fake money or fling all kinds of objects at all kinds of other objects? AWFUL.

But, somehow in the midst of this latest digital catastrophe (it was the Kindle before that and the Wii before that), I managed to silence the beep boop long enough to attend an AMAZING symposium on Immigrant Authors in America at Georgetown.

Sometimes I forget that Georgetown is a very fancy and expensive school because we souls in the English Masters program spend all of our time in one conference room (Holla room 311!) and the grad lounge which, though it has it's charm, looks a little bit like the set of All in the Family. However, when one is treated to lunch with Cristina Garcia and a wine reception with Junot Díaz, one is reminded why one is willing to spend the next thousand years repaying loans. (While Georgetown professors and acclaimed poets/authors Fanny Howe and Caroline Forche sit to my left and directly in front of me throughout... name dropping: I does it.)

But lunch and wine aside, the really amazing thing is sitting six feet away from these incredible authors while they speak and then getting to talk to them afterward--they're human! Like you and maybe me on a good day, when I behave normally! It's so wonderfully and gives so much hope to anyone who hopes to live creatively.

The visiting authors at this year's symposium were Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Charles Bowden, Héctor Tobar, Juan Fillipe Herrera, and Cristina Garcia. I had to physically restrain myself from bringing the EIGHT books I own by these authors for autographs (I reeled it in to just four).

If you have have the opportunity to hear Junot Díaz speak: GO. He's so intelligent and he gives me so much hope. And on top of it, he's simply hilarious. When I asked for his autograph, I told him that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was the book that made me decide to go to graduate school, because I knew I had to discuss it in an intellectual environment with other people who cared about it like I did, and he got this amazed, grateful look on his face and he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek! That was, (mark this down) the first time I've gotten an autograph from someone that I didn't say something stupid and horrible. I said exactly what I meant to say (the absolute gods honest truth) and was completely surprised by the result.

Edwidge Danticat is similarly amazing. Her grace just fills the room. I could listen to her talk for hours. Our society has such difficulty seeing human beings as human beings and I just wanted to take every word these authors said about Haiti and Mexico and Cuba and El Salvador and our own homes and plaster it all over the walls.

Finally, I have to mention that Héctor Tobar is an unsung hero in my book. Not only was his novel, The Tattooed Soldier, an amazing book, which I should have reviewed for you, but didn't because I wrote a 20-page paper about it instead, but he spends his days writing about the Latino community in Los Angeles for the L.A. Times which means he gets a lot of racist hate mail for looking at the real world. His new novel comes out in September and I can't wait.

In short, racism is awful. Literature is so empowering. Authors make me giddy. Georgetown can keep taking my money if they keep bringing these role models into my life.