Using my hands to organize my mind

I have all this stuff–tangible and intangible–from the past few days at AWP.  Big ideas from conversations and panels and little realizations from spending a good amount of time inside my own head.  And I’d like to chart it out and keep it in one place.  Because the process itself is part of what I’m trying to unravel–and here, the process is meeting really great minds talking about the craft of writing and its place in healing.  But in this super compressed format, the conversations don’t all get to be continuous.  Fortunately all of these people are writers.  So I have access to more of these incredible minds through their work, and through the writing they identified as parts of their individual journeys.  And I don’t want to forget any of it, my thoughts, their words, the chronology of the conversations that made this arc for me.  Do grown-ups not make summer camp style scrapbooks of their experiences at professional conferences?  If that’s true, I don’t even want to know any grown ups.  This will be the table for a few days.  It’s cool, we can balance our plates on our laps.

Oh–are you too grown for that too?  Good thing I’m the boss around here, or nothing would be awesome.