Thank you.

To everyone who showed up at my reading on Friday, thank you very much for making the conference a success for me and for making me feel supported. It was a really great day for me, and you all probably have heard or received individual thanks from me.

To those of you unable to attend, I will write about what happened here when I wrap my head around all of it and when I receive the hundreds of photos that my mom took. (I think she had me pose and big plastic smile with everyone in the room. Usually, as she was doing this, Lupo was standing right behind her and the camera, laughing at me.)

I think I may title her entire photo series according to what she told me to do, "Here, Benjie, stand here in your suit with your program ...," "Stand here with your father and brother... ," "Now stand here with your classmates ..."

(This morning, Mom called me up to brainstorm ideas for the one-man-show that she's "always" told me that I should do, usually when she wants me to make fun of someone who's annoyed her, like I'm her comic hitman. Of course, she never wants to hear my ideas. Instead, she just tells me what she thinks is funny and tells me I should "come up with something" about that.)

My hope, going into the conference, was that I would get a chance to do the sort of program that would really entertain my regular readers and friends who've supported me, in addition to gaining some new attention for my work, and I think that it was as successful as I was hoping for. Additionally, I appreciated the opportunity to tallk about my class at the Margaret Mitchell House and acknowledge my writing professor in front of a group of her peers, and I hope I made them proud while bringing more attention to our fledgling program. I think I maybe did.

Anyway, I really want to look forward from this event more than reflect on it, though it is a great memory, so I'm going to start working on some new stuff, maybe for the blog or maybe just long-form essays.