Jalal Alamgir and Joshua Ferris at the AWP

We drove over to the AWP Conference at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on a rainy Saturday morning in Washington, D.C.

Jalal Alamgir gave the first reading we saw. He appeared on a panel of Bangladeshi writers, in this case four Americans born in Bangladesh who write about the country of their birth, except that Alamgir was born in Pakistan, if I remember correctly. He read a story about a woman who steals a fish from the son of a fishmonger while the boy is guarding his father’s catch. It was a simple and beautiful tale, captivating from the first sentence, and with a wonderful turn in the story at just the right moment. There were maybe 20 people in the small conference room. Near the end, a worker from the hotel came through the door behind the panelists and picked up their empty plastic water bottles and replaced them. He worked as if the room were empty, making no acknowledgment of the proceedings and no apologies for his interruption. After the panel ended, we hung around to tell Alamgir how much we loved his story. He told us he had been a little nervous. “I’m just starting to write fiction,” he said. “This was actually my first public reading.”

At noon, we walked into the Marriott Ballroom, which is massive, literally the size of an aircraft hangar. I am not exaggerating. It really is an aircraft hangar that has been carpeted, paneled, and hung with drapes. We were there to see Jennifer Egan, Joshua Ferris, Rick Moody, and Benjamin Percy.

The scene could not have been more different than the one we saw that morning and still have taken place in the same hotel. The hangar-sized ballroom was half-way filled, there were probably a thousand people in the audience. The writers were introduced by the president of the speaking agency that represented them. She was the epitome of wealth and class, and looked something like a wax statue of herself: perfect skin, a red jacket, pearls. The line of silver in her brunette hair looked decorative, almost like an accessory. The writers read from a stage the size of a flatbed trailer. They stood on a riser that allowed them to see over a tall wooden podium emblazoned with the AWP seal. Behind them, a giant tarpaulin banner announced the academic and literary sponsors of the conference. The set-up made the writers tower over us, and had the effect of turning them into gods or, at the very least, imposing figures of literary authority.

Jennifer Egan read an excerpt of A Visit from the Goon Squad that was beautifully written but very sad, and that she said she chose because it was the only piece in the book that could stand on its own. Rick Moody and Ben Percy read extended excerpts filled with beautiful descriptive writing but not much action. Moody read a passage from The Four Fingers of Death about the last whooping crane on earth, and another passage about the night sky over Tucson. Percy read two excerpts from his novel The Wilding, one in which an Iraq War veteran recalled scenes of terror he’d witnessed in Ramadi (I think) and another in which a grizzly pressed its nose against the wall of a boy’s nylon tent. As is customary, Egan, Moody, and Percy all gave introductions that explained the characters, the story, and the point of view from which the passages they were about to read were told.

Joshua Ferris read a story that needed no introduction, and so he didn’t offer one, except to say “I’m going to read a story I’m still working on, which is a stupid thing to do, but I just wanted to do it, so here it is.” Like the story Jalal Alamgir read that morning, Ferris’ story was simple, elegant, entirely self-contained, and came with a beautiful and perfectly-timed turn in its plot. It was about a man’s attempt to help his neighbor, who seemed to be in trouble, and what his effort said about his intentions and his understanding of the world.

Two panels, on what might be considered opposite ends of the AWP spectrum. One in a small conference room, sparsely but enthusiastically attended, about expatriate Bangladeshis trying to shape a narrative of their homeland. The other in an airplane hangar pretending to be a ballroom, massively attended by a receptive and engaged but hardly exuberant audience, about mainstream American fiction, a genre that couldn’t be more familiar.

Each panel produced one truly memorable story, one story you could take home with you, and think about all day, and that had the power to change your life. Ferris’ story was hilarious and sad. Alamgir’s was simply beautiful, like a jewel. But in the most important respects they were the same. They both told a story of an incident that touched on the mysteries of the world — what it means to be alive, how little we know about others and ourselves, and how enduringly difficult it is to bridge the differences between us and find our common ground.