AWP can deliver on some of its promises. If you can keep calm and carry on, if you can acknowledge the hysteria without becoming hysterical yourself, if you can avoid eye-contact with the thousands, yet have conversations with the few, AWP can be magical.

We all have doubts, and we need to dive into them and feel them and examine them and work through them. Hiding from them or denying them only causes them to fester in our soul.

Explaining his love for one story, James Wood wrote that it's the kind you want to read aloud to someone. If I had to pick a few stories that meet Wood's assessment, one of them would have to be Salinger's tender For Esme With Love and Squalor.