Missing Magic at PNWA 2025

I was going to make this a video. For my last few in-person events, I’ve done travelogue-style videos on my YouTube channel designed to generate some fun content for fans and give a backstage look at what it’s like to be a professional author. I even recorded an introduction and a day one check-in. But after that, I stopped recording. The emotions were just too raw, and I decided that I needed the distance and mindfulness in writing a blog post to share my full feelings about my experience at the 2025 conference for the Pacific Northwest Writers Association.

PNWA Was My Birthplace as an Author

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I owe my career as an author, instructor, and editor to PNWA. I detailed part of this journey in a blog article I wrote several years ago, here. But for various reasons I stopped attending PNWA’s annual literary conference and pursued my career elsewhere. I published more books, won an international book award, joined the Northwest Editors Guild, and got long-term gigs teaching creative writing for a series of colleges and other organizations. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I was shopping a series of webinars around and decided to reach out to PNWA again. One thing led to another, and eventually I was invited to return to their conference, this time as a master class instructor.

This All Feels So Familiar

Returning to PNWA was surreal. Within an hour of arriving, I saw nearly every friend I could remember last seeing at a PNWA event. It was so strange, as if they had been frozen in time right along with the rest of my PNWA memories.

“It feels like the quality of PNWA’s conferences have been steadily dropping,” commented one friend, who then added with a retrospective tone, “Then again, I’m the one who’s been coming every year for more than fifteen years. Maybe it’s on me for never changing.”

Maybe.

It wasn’t just the attendees that hadn’t changed, though. The PNWA board was largely unchanged from what I remembered nearly twenty years ago. Careful listening (or just plain eavesdropping) told me that there were a lot of people who wished there could be some new blood with new ideas and new ways of doing things. The longer I stayed at the conference, the more I saw what they might have meant.

The World Has Passed Us By

The sense of sameness even extended to the material presented and the way it was presented, particularly when it came to the subject of traditional vs. self-publishing. To be fair, I didn’t attend every workshop, and this year could have been a fluke. But in my experience, except for my own master class, the subject of self-publishing and the precarious state of the traditional publishing industry wasn’t even acknowledged until Jane Friedman’s excellent closing keynote address. Throughout the rest of the conference though, you could have easily imagined that you had stepped back in time twenty years.

“Once you get that literary agent, that’s when your life as an author will really begin!” gushed one presenter.

Guess that means my authorial life has still yet to begin.

Don’t get me wrong. While I am a self-published author, I am not a traditional publishing anarchist. I was actually excited when Jane Friedman, the closing keynote speaker, said that of the top fifty money-making authors with self-published titles, all of them have literary agents. At a certain point, it just becomes unfeasible for a single person to manage an expanding business, no matter what that business is, and self-publishing is no different. In fact, one of my primary goals in attending this conference was to make connections with agents in the hopes of exploring traditional publishing for some of my unpublished works.

But that’s also part of my point. Mixing self-publishing and traditional publishing. Not living in the past. Not pretending that New York is still Mecca, and we’re all still praying towards it five times a day in hopes we are shown mercy by the literary agents and publishers on high. Authors have autonomy, and pretending that they don’t is a relic of the past.

Silence…

I readily admit that a great deal of my reaction to the conference was colored by my own nostalgia. There’s so much that’s different now that’s outside of the organizers’ control. The lingering social effects of Covid. The worsening financial situation for so many people in our region and nation. But whatever the reasons, it was simply a fact that the conference felt distant, quiet, even empty compared to what it had once been.

The most knowledgeable writing instructor I’ve ever known spoke to an empty classroom with just me and one other student.

The agent and editor panel which used to be broken into two sessions with over forty speakers now featured a modest ten.

Even the keynote speaker was zoomed in for a Q&A rather than a rousing speech.

Unfair as it was for me to compare, I couldn’t help it. This year’s conference felt silent.

…But Perhaps Silence is Golden

While this post may seem critical or even harsh, that’s not my intention. This is as much an indictment on me expecting something from my past to live-up to near mythical standards it had in my memory. And maybe that’s where these images belong. In my memory.

It was wonderful to reconnect with friends, particularly as they shared in triumphs and victories that I had gained both in the time since we had last seen each other and at this very conference.

“Lindsay,” said one such friend, “I’ve known you for years. I know everything you’ve done in chasing this dream. You’ve paid your dues. You deserve these good things happening to you now.”

And the thing is, that sort of statement can’t come from a new acquaintance. Did I spend the conference networking and schmoozing? Somewhat, but I spent most of my time connecting with people who know me like nobody else can know me. They remember the kid with a partial first draft and a dream, and they celebrated with me as I continue to chase that dream. Maybe the conference was quiet, but if it had been too loud, I wouldn’t have heard the soft whispers of memory from all those long years ago.