Does Alyson Sinclair sleep? We had to keep asking ourselves as we chatted it up with Alyson from the floor of AWP (Association of Writing and Writing Program)’s Conference and Bookfair. She’s done it all when it comes to the writing world—bouncing between the bureaucracy of big-four publishers—um, she sent faxes to Seamus Heaney?—to the hustle and bustle world (emphasis on the hustle) of independent presses. Currently, Alyson is the Owner/Publisher at The Rumpus and founder of Nectar Literary, a boutique publicity and communications firm for authors, independent presses, and literary organizations of all ilk. Making literary community might just be the crux of our conversation. After learning that hunker-down-and-drink-tea-all-day-with-page-turny-manuscripts editorial roles are not the default at an eye-opening internship, she turned to publicity. Connecting authors to the broader writing ecosystem thrilled her. Publicity and pitching media, in Alyson’s eyes, is a fascinating form of problem solving. Her insight comes from a wide range of experiences in all corners of our ecosystem, spanning from soliciting advertising at a magazine, to setting off individually in the convoluted publishing universe, to coexisting with other literary collectives that share the same mission. Let’s just say—both before and after soaking in this conversation—Bloomsday is a certified Alyson Sinclair fangirl.

Published Date: October 26, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare Podcast by Bloomsie Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for third year and have invited a [inaudible 00:00:16] guest that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Speaker 2:

We are very lucky to have Alyson Sinclair on the show today. She has worked at FSG, City Lights, McSweeney's, you've repped authors from Alice James Books, which we are a fan of them. I don't know if they're a fan of ours. And a Strange Object and Impossibly Beck somehow. So you have some experience in this strange world of publishing, both with the big four and more considerably in the independent world of publishing as a publicist and the current owner publisher in charge of all the business at the Rumpus. So you've done a couple things. I'm tired just reading that list.

Alyson Sinclair:

Me too.

Speaker 2:

I don't think it's the extent of all of it, either.

Phuc Luu:

No, it's not exhaustive.

Speaker 2:

It's a small portion. So thanks for being here.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2:

You're here today in your capacity as publisher at The Rumpus correct? And that's a beloved online lit mag, if you're not familiar. In fact, some of the contributors we've had on the show today have contributed to The Rumpus. But I wanted to ask you, I think first with other outlets going under RIP, Catapults, just a sad one, Astra, The Believer went dark, then somehow resurrected itself. I'd like to know what you see as the major barriers to publishing outfits, be it print or online right now, and then maybe ways to overcome them or the ways that The Rumpus is overcoming them?

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, I think the major barriers, the one that's existed for all time, and it's money, and resources, and capacity, and a lot of volunteer hours going into probably 99% of the people at AWPs journals that are here right now.

For us, we're trying to figure out a way to diversify our funding resources. We just got fiscal sponsorship in September, so that allows us to apply for grants for the first time. Even though The Rumpus has been around since 2009, it's always been independently run, not connected to any bigger organization, bigger publisher, university, like a lot of literary magazines are. So it's always been pretty scrappy, and the revenues come from some advertising. We have a few program subscription programs. We have a book club for prose, one for poetry. We have letters in the mail from authors, where we commission an author every month. We send actually two every month to write a non-promotional letter that has a creative prompt in it, and we send those to subscribers, and hopefully it brings them a little bit of joy to have something physical and maybe some inspiration to do their own work. So that's been how we've made money in the past. Conferences are definitely a break even at best situation.

Speaker 2:

You're not just raking in piles of cash over there at The Rumpus table? I thought that's what was happening.

Phuc Luu:

I saw those bags of money under the table.

Alyson Sinclair:

Oh, yeah. They're under the table for sure.

Phuc Luu:

They're spilling out. Yeah, there's dollar signs on them.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. I think I heard a joke a couple years ago that we're all passing around the same $20 bill. That's actually pretty accurate if we marked it.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah. Yeah. It'll make the rounds.

Speaker 2:

I like it. I like it. Accurate. That's 100% accurate.

Alyson Sinclair:

So the ways we're trying to solve the money problem at least, or make progress toward it, is from the fiscal sponsorship allowing us to apply for grants. We got our first one from CLMP.

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Alyson Sinclair:

Very. We love them.

Speaker 2:

You just missed the CLMP program directors on right in front of you.

Alyson Sinclair:

Is it Mary?

Speaker 2:

Chelsea Turn.

Alyson Sinclair:

Oh, Chelsea. Chelsea's wonderful. It's such a good resource for independent presses. Even someone that's been around for a long time, I feel like they've gotten really thoughtful guests and topics every month to check out, and I learn from them for sure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Oh, me. Yeah. Same here every day. So was that part of your, when you took over the mantle, then that was part of your strategic plan to go out and do the fiscal sponsorship and start pursuing that arena avenue?

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, fiscal sponsorship, so we could immediately apply for some grants. We also knew, even when you apply for a grant, it's not like it happens in a month. It usually happens in the next year. It's a long game for sure. We of course would love to have some big donors. You know, if anybody is super rich?

Phuc Luu:

Yeah, come on here.

Alyson Sinclair:

Come on over.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah, right here to this table.

Speaker 2:

You know what's silly, Alyson, is we've been doing this podcast for a while now and we haven't just put up a sign that's like, "Hey, right here. All the major patrons of the arts who have a ton of money that they would like to invest, please see Alyson, please see Kate." Why didn't we just do that?

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. Please. Can we have a rich person speed dating kind of patron?

Speaker 2:

This is the kind of content I looking for.

Phu Luu:

Yeah. They sit down.

Speaker 2:

This is the content I didn't know I need.

Phuc Luu:

We'll read them some poetry.

Alyson Sinclair:

I'm ready. Like a shark tank, but-

Phuc Luu:

They can write us a check.

Alyson Sinclair:

But don't want anything in return.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah, I know. They'll get art in return.

Alyson Sinclair:

Sure. Sure.

Speaker 2:

Instead of you're fired, it's you're hired. Like come on. Let's do it. Let's go. We matched.

Alyson Sinclair:

1% of the prestige that we earned this year goes to you.

Phuc Luu:

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to close the laptop. We just solved it. Forget it. Interview over, let's go get to work.

Alyson Sinclair:

That was part of it. And then we also launched a membership program, which is pretty similar to a Patreon style model, but we're doing it with our own platform versus giving it to someone else, because it is kind of scary. Their fees could change at any moment. They could decide that they could just not exist. So it's better to keep your content, or in my opinion, it's better to keep your content and keep your contacts, too, close to you. So we launched that at AWP last year in a soft way and then have ramped that up. And so far we have about 400 members with the goal of one day getting to 1000, 3000, which sounds like a big number, but really it isn't. It's less than 2% to 3% of the people that come to the website every month. We would be golden. And we'd rather do that than try to court really big donors. Because that's the thing, if you're not a rich person, usually don't know other rich people to give you money. And that's just not the motto we're probably going to operate off of.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That was one of the most eye-opening experiences of our sort of nonprofit journey was like, you have to have money to make money. You've got to start with, even grant writing. The other part I understood, you got to have some seed money to start the press or whatever, but the grant writing, it was like, "Okay, what is your fiscal health of your organization?" I'm like, "We just started."

Phuc Luu:

We have no health.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Phuc Luu:

We're anemic.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's nascent. What do you want?

Alyson Sinclair:

What are your demographics? You just walk around the room. Are you my audience?

Phuc Luu:

Do you support me? Do you support me?

Speaker 2:

I do. Support me. Oh my gosh. I'm showing myself, my DEI statement right now. We agree. Yeah. Yeah. It's a journey. So we need either more rich people or I can hear a lot of sensibility in what you're saying, that if you've got that website, if you have that sort of level of engagement on your website, it's feasible. It's reachable. Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. And our memberships start at $7 a month or 77 a year, and we give people unique content. We give them behind the scenes interviews with our editors so they can get hopefully a richer experience. And we know a lot of our readers are also writers, also people who end up contributing to us one day. So we hope that it also helps them learn.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Right. Right. For sure. One of the things that we do on the podcast is demystify a lot of the publishing process and also the myriad paths people take towards publication and the ways that you can engage in a literary career that aren't necessarily writing the great American novel. And so personally, I wanted to know, your bio says a lot about the things that you've done and your eclectic taste, but also your ability to leverage skill sets in different ways. And so I'd like to hear, if you don't mind sharing a little bit about your personal journey from MFA student, to intern, to McSweeney's, and the places that you've been that helped you land where you are now?

Alyson Sinclair:

Sure. Yeah. I think, like a lot of people in this space, you probably start as an English major and you're like, "Oh, I love to read. How can I make this my life somehow?" And people are like, "Oh, maybe you should teach," or that's the default. I don't know if people still say that, but they were when I was around.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Alyson Sinclair:

So I was lucky, I went to a small college in Charleston, South Carolina. I'm originally from South Carolina. And it's a public school called the College of Charleston. And we, at the time, had the literary magazine, Crazy Horse. And so I got my first publishing internship experience as a student. And that was really eyeopening and helpful to be able to read through slush piles and see both commission work and things that were coming in cold. And I just had really a lot of people, great mentor as an undergrad who encouraged me to go get my MFA in poetry.

And while I was in grad school, I interned at Gray Wolf, started a literary magazine for the grad students, helped bring back a literary magazine for the undergrads. And at Gray Wolf especially, it was a rotational internship, so I worked in all the different departments, development, editorial, publicity, marketing. So I got to see all the sides of it.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

And I know a lot of people think editorial is kind of the default path they want to take, but I was like, "I really like reading books when they're done. I like them when they're polished."

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of wisdom in that, Alyson.

Alyson Sinclair:

And I also like the position of publicity, or it appealed to me because I saw the way it connected the book and the author to all the different parts of the community, because you think about reaching out to librarians, to venues for them to do readings, you think about partnering with conversationalists, you pitch media. It's kind of a problem solving scenario that I really got excited about and I was like, "Oh, how does the ecosystem all work together?" And I think that probably that very first internship informed me from then on out. I was just super curious about how different departments work together, and working at a big publishing house to start with at FSG was a great and wonderful experience. I got to work with giant name poets and use of Kuminaca, Seamus Heaney. Seamus Heaney used to send me faxes.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my gosh.

Phuc Luu:

Wow.

Speaker 2:

I know.

Alyson Sinclair:

That's because He didn't email.

Phuc Luu:

And then how would you receive these faxes, then?

Alyson Sinclair:

FSG still had a fax machine.

Speaker 2:

A fax machine.

Phuc Luu:

Really?

Alyson Sinclair:

Oh yeah. This was the early aux.

Phuc Luu:

Oh, okay. Okay.

Alyson Sinclair:

I must look younger than I am.

Phuc Luu:

Yes. Yes. I can't tell.

Alyson Sinclair:

Great.

Phuc:

I didn't know those things existed still.

Speaker 2:

Right? Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

It's still a mystery to me. Those are the most confusing machines to me in the world.

Speaker 2:

If you only had one of those faxes, there would be at least 60 people in a room who would pay some amount of money for that fax from Seamus Heaney.

Alyson Sinclair:

Probably. They were all like, "No, thank you." I was like, "Do you want to do this publicity?" And it was like, "I'm busy." I'm like, "Yeah, okay. You are."

Speaker 2:

You're Seamus Heaney and you live in Ireland.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, exactly. There's a time difference. You don't want to do this.

Speaker 2:

And also, you're busy figuring out the fax machine to send me.

Alyson Sinclair:

Exactly.

Phuc:

Which side does this paper go in here?

Alyson Sinclair:

I don't understand. How do you get someone's real writing? How does that work? I still don't understand. Okay, I'm really digressing here.

Speaker 2:

No, I did it. It's my fault. I latched onto the idea of Seamus Heany in his Irish cottage, sending a fax. And then my brain shut down and the podcast was open. Okay, so you were at FSG. You got really cool experience.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, but moving from that very, like, "Your job is publicity. This is all of your job."

Speaker 2:

This is your slate of authors. Make sure people know who they are.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, exactly. It's very, very structured. And then after that, I moved to City Lights and McSweeney's, which are both really small presses, and so it was just kind of an all hands on deck. We don't necessarily have a resource for sending hundreds of galleys out. Now you need to email everybody first, which after the pandemic, it made a lot more sense, because no one was in their office anyway.

Speaker 2:

And I imagine you're like, "Email? No fax machine? Let's do it. I can send a million."

Alyson Sinclair:

My gosh. I'm going to BCC everybody.

Speaker 2:

And those were those early days at McSweeney's?

Alyson Sinclair:

Early days? It was when McSweeney's still, well now they have the Believer again, but at MCs Sweeney's, I was the sole, I was the publicity department. And we were publishing 30 books a year, and we had the Believer, the Quarterly, Lucky Peach, and we were doing Grantland, which was like the Bill Simmons, ESPN Sports literary quarterly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. RIP Grantland as well.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. Also, Grantland.

Speaker 2:

God damn it.

Alyson Sinclair:

Maybe it's me.

Speaker 2:

No, no, it's not you. I'm just saying I'm sad about that. Shout out to Lucky Peach. Just so you guys get the backstory, I sent Alyson an email early to try to convince her to come on this little show of ours and just told her, I just basically fan girled and said, "I love all the things that you've ever done. Will you come on your show and talk about this cool trajectory your life has had?" And she was like, "Why do you know all this stuff?"

Alyson Sinclair:

I respected it, actually.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate that. Thank you. But Lucky Peach was also a favorite of mine.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so you're doing that. You were just the one, so you're the reason I know about Lucky Peach, basically.

Alyson Sinclair:

Let's be real. They have amazing authors and they have a great reputation. They make gorgeous books. Dave Eggers is obviously a celebrity himself at this point, but has been for a long time.

Speaker 2:

Right. And then you went from there-

Alyson Sinclair:

To being a freelance publicist.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And what was that like? And is Nectar Literary Agency still going strong?

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, still going strong.

Speaker 2:

Still doing that?

Alyson Sinclair:

I have two people that work for me. I still do some projects on my own, but I have a lot more help, and we divide and conquer and take the leads on different projects as we go. We have an ongoing relationship with Alice James, so we do all their lists for the most part for the past couple years.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's fantastic.

Alyson Sinclair:

And then it's kind of a piecemeal from there. We have people across the board, from Random House to a much smaller press will hire us. We work a lot with Coffee House, Gray Wolf. We worked for a long time with the Center for the Art of Translation. We usually have an annual project with the Academy of American Poets. We've done the Lambda Literary Awards. We're going to do the Alto Awards this year. So it's just a wide mix of things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Are you sleeping? Do you ever sleep? This sounds like a lot that you're doing.

Alyson Sinclair:

Anybody wants to bring an eye mask by the table, I'll take it.

Speaker 2:

What's the takeaway, then, for someone who a certain piece of this story appeals to them? What do you say, how do I pursue this? What if this is something, what if I really dig publicity and I want to be helpful to an independent press that I'm a fan of?

Alyson Sinclair:

How would they get started as a publicist?

Speaker 2:

Sure. Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

I think there's all kinds of journeys. I think that the way it worked when I came up was everyone told you you had to have an internship, and that's pretty rough, especially if you're in a bigger city and it's an unpaid internship.

Speaker 2:

When you need to eat food.

Alyson Sinclair:

You need to eat food. That's not a-

Phuc:

Do you like lunch?

Speaker 2:

Do you like eating lunch?

Phuc:

Sorry. It's an inside joke.

Alyson Sinclair:

It's fine. Which I think that there is some things that have changed about that where people are now understanding they need to pay interns, and especially bigger publishers need to compensate people for their work, because that's what's made this industry not very diverse and not very equitable. And we wear down people who don't have family money or resources.

Speaker 2:

Independent means.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, independent means, or a partner that has money. That's just not the situation that I came from, and I feel lucky that I did my internship, even though it was not paid at the time. Gray Wolff does pay, I believe. Well, I don't want to speak out of turn. I'm not sure if they pay. But I think because I was in Minneapolis, it was less expensive. I was in grad school, where I was teaching, so I was getting paid to teach, and then I had another job at a record job, so I just was able to piece things together.

Speaker 2:

Cobble it together. Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

But I think now people can come from other places. I definitely recommend the path of being an indie bookseller. I think that's my favorite kind of person to hire and to work with, because they know how to talk about books, and they know what people are drawn to, and they just practice all day.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's not practice at that point, it's like second nature.

Phuc:

It's natural.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to hand sell the hell out of these books.

Phuc:

Yeah. I can make you want a book by the time we're done.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's great. I love it. I'm thinking about a friend of ours who worked at an independent bookstore in Houston and just snagged a great job at Coffee House.

Alyson Sinclair:

Oh, Mark?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Doing the thing that he's so good at, right?

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. He is so good.

Speaker 2:

The other thing I was thinking about, too, is the pursuit of nonprofit management and development. I know there are tons of people who need good grant writers, and if you have the benefit of a board that's working to retain some of those grant revenue streams, then you can start paying a development person. And we need development people who have a heart for the arts. So that would be another way that I didn't even think about, because I think we come from Books first or English majors or whatever it is. Anyway, that's really a good insight.

Alyson Sinclair:

Or just whatever. You can continue to have another job. I think it's hard to just stop doing anything that makes income and volunteer or be an intern, but there's tons of presses here that are always looking for readers, and I know we are constantly looking for readers to go through our slush pile, and that might be a starting point to understand how the process works and how the ecosystem works.

Speaker 2:

For sure.

Alyson Sinclair:

That's a couple hours a week versus you have to dedicate a semester or a year to not getting paid and being in an office for 40 hours.

Speaker 2:

Right. Did you happen to see, well, we just had Chelsea here to talk about CLNP, and I'm thinking about the development of that organization from whatever they started with, 200 organizations in the 90s, and now we're at 1000. So there's been lots of growth, particularly for mission-driven presses or mission-driven magazines, or your mast head says you're creating space for risk-taking voices. But now there's so many more of us, but I still feel, I don't know if you feel the same way, but I still feel like we're still fighting over the same piece of the pie.

These are huge questions, and it's completely unfair for me to just like, "Can you solve this problem? But they're the things that I stay up at night thinking about, and I'm curious your approach to that question? We're all here vying for our presses to do well and our authors to do well. I think one of the things Rumpus and Nectar is doing is you guys are really relational. Your contributors want to stay contributing to The Rumpus, and you're clearly doing good work for the publicity side for Nectar with Alice James. And so I guess, is that where you're doing things well and what do you see for the future of this, for the bigger group of us out here hoping for a same sort of relational experience?

Alyson Sinclair:

I'm not sure I followed that thread. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2:

Oh, no, that's fine. That's fine. It's the end of the day, and I think maybe I lost the thread. But I'm curious about us all out here vying for the same grant money or the donors, what you take from your experience at The Rumpus that the rest of us could emulate or try to do?

Alyson Sinclair:

I'm not sure I have a really great answer for this. It feels like an existential crisis, honestly.

Speaker 2:

It does.

Alyson Sinclair:

But I think one thing that I always hope to do is be really open and collaborative with other organizations and other people, and none of us have figured it out. Maybe some people who figured it out, but I think a lot of us-

Speaker 2:

Those are the people with the bags of money under their tables that they're hiding?

Phuc:

Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

A lot of us are trying to figure it out, and we are not really in competition with each other, but we don't necessarily talk to each other as much as we could. I think CLMP is one of those beacons of community where they have things like a listserv where you can help each other problem solve, and they are thinking bigger picture of how they can provide resources for a lot of people. I think being involved in those kind of communities and wherever you are locally, like going to your local bookstore and attending events, taking writing workshops in your community or online workshops, there's lots of ways that you can build that. And just the idea of always trying to both give and receive.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

There's so many writers here that you hope there are equal number of readers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Well, we see that on Saturday when the public shows up, right?

Phuc:

Yeah. There are more readers than there are writers.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

We're in a weird fishbowl this weekend.

Phuc:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Sure. For sure. We're all bumping up against each other

Alyson Sinclair:

And it's overwhelming and it can feel competitive.

Speaker 2:

Frenetic.

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. You can see your table might not have a bunch of people at one moment and the other table does, and you're like, "What am I doing wrong?"

Speaker 2:

It's the display, isn't it?

Phuc:

Yeah. We need more coasters.

Alyson Sinclair:

More stickers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, stickers, flowers, farm animals.

Alyson Sinclair:

I saw some booty shorts, too.

Phuc:

That might get people.

Alyson Sinclair:

That might be it. Maybe if it's in Houston, we can bust stuff down. It's a little chilly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Phuc:

Booty shorts.

Speaker 2:

Did you see those, Phuc, they say poetry on the butt?

Phuc:

No, I totally missed that.

Alyson Sinclair:

Oh, well I got a pair.

Speaker 2:

Oh, booty shorts.

Alyson Sinclair:

That's how I wanted to end this.

Phuc:

You weren't expecting booty shorts at this booth?

Alyson Sinclair:

Yeah. It's a secret word.

Speaker 2:

That's it. The word of the day. Oh, my word. Oh, my gosh. Alyson, it has been a pleasure to talk to you and build community with you. I hope we can keep chatting and be in relationship. Before we go, I need to know the most AWP thing you heard. Day two is coming to a close. We've heard some doozies. We've heard some good ones.

Phuc:

I know that there's some you have to keep in your back, those booty short pockets, but what are some that you can share on there?

Alyson Sinclair:

I'm definitely censoring my first one. The second pick is not as good. I've had a few people give me lists of people they are avoiding.

Phuc:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Alyson Sinclair:

And they're like, "If you see this person-"

Speaker 2:

I just need you to have this list in case, and just give me the sign.

Alyson Sinclair:

Turn. And I've done that myself already one time, look the other way.

Phuc:

Turn into the corner, slowly kind of robotically.

Speaker 2:

You put 14,000 introverted people who can be extroverted on occasion in a room together, and some things are going to happen. Some awkwardness is going to happen. So I can see that. That's a good one.

Alyson Sinclair:

I want to hear other people's answers to this.

Speaker 2:

There's been some things happening in the elevator. So what was the last one? Oh, someone came in and the door shut and they were like, "I've got coat envy in a big way."

Alyson Sinclair:

Oh yeah. Big coat envy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, big coat envy. Oh, this was a good one. Everyone knows librarians make the best lovers. I was like, "Everyone?" Now I got librarian envy.

Alyson Sinclair:

Too bad this isn't ALA. Come on. That was a real insider joke, guys.

Phuc:

Yeah. Yeah. There could be hot bed of-

Speaker 2:

You know you're at a AWP when the punchline is the American Library Association.

Alyson Sinclair:

We love you so much.

Speaker 2:

We do love you.

Alyson Sinclair:

We stand with you hard.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And apparently you make excellent lovers, so we love you even more.

Alyson Sinclair:

We can't shut the libraries down, or really a lot of people are going to be out of a good time.

Phuc:

Yeah, exactly. For a good time, go to the library.

Speaker 2:

Call the ALA. That's the AWP bathroom break meeting.

Phuc:

Yeah, I saw it in the restroom.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my gosh. We did talk about serious stuff today, but we also had a very good time. I really appreciate your time.

Alyson Sinclair:

Thank you so much for asking me. I'm not usually on the receiving end of the attention, so it's awkward.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's nice to have you.

Phuc:

Yeah, we need it once in a while.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Alyson Sinclair:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Alyson Sinclair:

For the greater good, for The Rumpus, not for myself.

Phuc:

Yeah. Yeah. For the people.

Alyson Sinclair:

For the people, always.

Phuc:

Thank you, Alyson.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, Alyson.

Alyson Sinclair:

Thank you.

Phuc:

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary, hosted by Kate Martin Williams, Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc. Our trustee and hardworking intern is Elena Welsh, with special thanks to Juanita Lester and the AWP staff, without whom this would not be possible.