I took the Lucky Star bus to Boston with Andrew. A week or so earlier the Fung Wah bus, the bus I’d taken between Boston and New York for five years, had terminated operation by demand of federal government? (Did I read that wrong?) After a long, and delayed, transport, we made it to my parents’ house in Westborough, where we awoke the following morning to what would become 18 inches of snow.

We helped my parents shovel (my father worked the snowblower).

I’d had no intention of paying the registration fee, but things were kind of lax anyways? This is what the inside of the conference looked like.

We decided to head over to the Holy Trinity offsite event at Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge. There we happened upon a jovial Justin Taylor and a timid Ariana Reines chatting about Tao Lin’s forthcoming novel Taipei. (That is actually what they were talking about when this was photographed, I swear to you, I promise.)

The readers (pictured above + author of Flatscreen Adam Wilson) read, but not from this pretty number I found perusing the shelves while enjoying some boxed wine.

It was time to head back on the deplorable MBTA subway system, locally dubbed, simply, the T, to get to Jamaica Plain for the Publishing Genius/Submittable/HTMLGiant-sponsored Literature Party, hosted by none other than our very own Adam Robinson.

I saw many nice, young, new and familiar faces, but frequently found myself returning to the very exclusive back room, one of more than a few perks reserved for the HTMLGiant regular.

Here, I ran into contributor Stephen Tully Dierks, who added a Tab to his red wine with traditional Midwestern flare!

But this too, as all good things do, had to come to an end. We were cabbed (s/o to Elaine Sun for calling it) to an apartment in Cambridge, where I reluctantly drifted into a sleep only babies may know. I awoke to the fond sight of poets sharing.

Then we went back to the book fair and saw some books, then watched the Murray State / Belmont game and went to sleep and went back to New York. It was an AWP to remember.