ARCHIVE FOR Nicole Miller

 

I arrived in Keflavik at four in the morning on April 8th, midnight in Boston, and tottered through immigration. The officers on duty beckoned me through with a wave.

“How was your flight? Good? Good! Welcome to Iceland. We hope you enjoy yourself here.”

They were a chipper pair, sunny golden-haired young men in beige shirts that tightened around the biceps. They stamped my passport in front of a window brown with the whale-back of mountains just before dawn.

During the Ides of March, as the wind howled and the flakes swirled outside my attic-study, I was faced by a dilemma: to go or not to go to AWP? Since my time as an MFA student, AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) had impressed me as the mother of all writing conferences: heaving at 10,000 participants, it has been known to overrun its host city for four days, engorging entire downtowns