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Not so long ago, I was convalescing from yet another back injury, feeling not a little bit sorry for myself, and digging deep—and I mean deep—into my back catalogue of heretofore un-listened-to podcasts, when I came across an old Sound of Young America episode (a great podcast, by the way, as is its newer incarnation Bullseye with Jesse Thorn) wherein John Hodgman interviews George R.R. Martin. Topics covered in the interview include: old Avengers comics (in particular, the life and death of the Avenger Wonder Man), J.R.R. Tolkien, historical novels, and the prospect of Harper Lee ever writing To Kill a Mockingbird 2. And eventually the conversation turned to the very topic of fans and fandom, not the least because Martin has a complicated relationship with his own.

Fans are great, Hodgman and Martin agreed, about ninety-percent of the time. But sometimes—ten percent, let’s say—fans can be contentious. They can be possessive and confrontational. They can be pains in the ass. There’s a reason, after all, why “fanboy” has become such a derogatory term. But isn’t it flattering, asked Hodgman, to know that you’ve created something about which other people care so much and feel so much a part? It is, said Martin, but often it’s a flattery he could do without. Then Hodgman said something that really struck me. It was a prescriptive statement, though I think it was also meant to complicate. I understood it as a question, of sorts. “Not all fans are writers,” he said, “but all writers are fans.”

Is that true? Are we all—all of us writers—fans? Fan-like, do we not passionately—sometimes even obsessively—engage with our subjects? Do we not write in order to gain access and understanding? To be able to become part of the greater whole? But what about the freighted and fraught side of fandom? When our desire for access and intimacy creates a debit or comes at some other cost?

I put the question, as it were, to a variety of writers who I both admire and count myself a fan of. I asked them to describe their best or most interesting or most transformative experiences as fans. As the answers came back, I discovered another distinct and weirdly interesting pleasure: that of being a fan listening to fans talking about being fans.

[Ed. Note- Bryan received so many great answers that we decided to break up what once was intended as a single feature and turn it into a regular column.]

T.C. Boyle (San Miguel): While writers are fans, they are also insanely jealous of other writers, who are, after all, less their compatriots than competitors. Writers must also be protective of their fragile psyches while in the throes of their own work, and fandom is often counterproductive. Better the dark bar, anonymous strangers, the pulp of our banal society. So, in short, I will choose to talk about my first artistic influence, one that hit me when I was a teenager and unconnected in even the slightest way to literature, which was then, for me, simply a variety of the torture known as junior high.

That first influence was John Coltrane, who remains one of my gods and heroes to this day. I then wanted to be a musician, but the music we played in school (like the books we were required to read), left me cold. Then, in the underground way of friends turning one another on, somebody–some angel–induced me to listen to Coltrane. I was transformed. For the first time in my life I related deeply to an artform and an artist. This enabled me to drive my parents and the neighbors absolutely carpet-chewing mad as I blew along, windows open wide summer and winter both, freeing my soul even as I strove (unsuccessfully, for the most part) to absorb and replicate the master’s genius.  I listen to him today, often while working, and if I still can’t even begin to unravel what he is doing with his scales and key changes, I like to think that his soul speaks to mine and propels my own riffs and rhythms.

Amelia Gray (Threats): I have long made an ass out of myself in front of writers I admire. There is the time I offered my compliments in a strong whiskey breath to Vanessa Place; the time I got myself lost the hill country of Texas with Aimee Bender in my passenger seat; the time I handed Richard Ford a thrift-store copy of Independence Day to sign, described the plot of my first novel to him in one nervous breath, and nearly fainted. The very first time I interacted with a writer was when I was 22 and Tobias Wolff had just read his short story “Bullet in the Brain” to an appreciative crowd at Arizona State. I waited for twenty minutes in the signing line and then told him, because I could think of nothing better, that I was going to read the story out loud to my roommates. I did not have roommates. Why did I lie to Tobias Wolff? I am certain he knew.

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The week after AWP is a time to reflect. A moment to catch you breath, detox, and assess a convention unlike any other in the literary world.

Like many of us, you are still probably trying to digest the awesomeness that was Dana Spiotta and Don DeLillo reading from their first novels, or the bewitchment that occurs when Ann Carson does anything. Riffling through your newly acquired 15 tote bags, perhaps you feel overwhelmed by just how many awesome new journals you discovered, their covers speaking to you over the cries of your partner who can’t believe you spent another $100 on “important snapshots of our age.” Or maybe you are still bemoaning the fact that you didn’t get the chance to track down an editor who has championed your work, or conversely, are still steaming from the fact that said editor referenced a story about chickens when talking with you, even though your novel concerns a dystopian genocide.

Did you have an awkward encounter you now regret? Don’t fear, that’s the AWP version of a tramp stamp. If you are an editor/publisher/teacher/guru who drunkenly articulated the power you hold over people while downing Fireballs in the hotel lobby, an apologetic note with a funny video that further explains your behavior will go along way in smoothing things over.

If you are a disgruntled writer/ex-intern who cornered an editor/publisher/teacher/guru and dispensed with a diatribe about how you are overflowing with so much freaking talent that, should it somehow all come out at once, it would flood Boston like it was 1919, then congratulations, you are officially “that AWP guy” (never in the history of AWP has this award been given to a woman). Like your brothers before you, may you take your talents to network television.

The one universal topic of conversation in Boston (besides the hotel bar’s decision to sex things up with a velvet rope and a wait list) seemed to be the annual VIDA numbers that were announced just prior to the conference. For those of you who don’t know (shame!), VIDA is an organization that “seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities.” As part of their commitment to exploring gender equality in publishing, they regularly report on the amount of male/female writers that appear in specific print journals. During the course of the weekend, Tin House received a lot of love for their VIDA pie chart, which displayed an across-the-board commitment to publishing great authors no matter their sex.

Like any good AWP reflection, we bask in the glow of our successes and look forward to ways in which we can improve ourselves post-conference. Case in point, our karaoke gender numbers. Here’s a look at our playlist from our most recent reader party.

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That’s 28 male artists to 12 female artists (though it could be argued that Adam Duritz has the soul of a siren).

I guess what I am trying to say is that no matter how successful or disastrous your AWP experience was, it is important to remember that one weekend does not make for a career. Unless you’re “that guy.”

Lance Cleland is the director of the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop. He sings a mean Dusty Springfield. 

In the war between man and the natural world, it would appear, judging from Brin Levinson’s unpeopled, postapocalyptic cityscapes, nature has won. Levinson’s worlds—washed in dour grays, ochre, and sepia brown—suggest the landscape before us is already becoming a relic. The brightest colors, the occasional burst of blue sky that breaks out from behind cloud-crowded sky, the flash of red graffiti on a rhino, pop off the canvas.

You can see the influence that Portland’s industrial areas and older architecture have had on Levinson, particularly the city’s multiple bridges—Hawthorne, the Steel Bridge, St. Johns—near which the deer and the zebra roam, while wildebeests graze in the city’s Chinatown, and beneath an underpass in a switching yard, a tagged walrus, big as a train car, appears to rest his weary flippers. With the skyline of the deserted city in the distance, an abandoned ship lists in a nearly dry riverbed, a pair of elephants posing like refugees from Noah’s Ark. There is something comic in this, as in the image of a giant white rabbit apparently about to topple a water tower. Outside of the city, dirigibles as big as whales glide past a pretty blue Victorian house, while in the foreground a gold bird, beak wide open, is either belting out a song or a warning.

“I combine fragments of realism and imagination in my images to create a world balanced on the edge of familiar and foreign,” Levinson says. “I attempt to create a dreamlike scene of one suspended moment and leave an open-endedness to the story.”

On top of this incredible cover, we’re also thrilled to announce that we’re now able to fulfill digital subscriptions to the magazine. Every new print subscription comes with access to the digital version, which you can enjoy alone for $19.95. This has been a long time coming and we hope you’ll continue to enjoy the magazine in whatever format you prefer.

Your password must contain at least one number.

It’s a bad idea to put a 1 after a typical word or phrase. Awesome1, for instance, is not awesome, nor is it accurate. Killme2 is a weak password.

Password should contain at least one lower case letter.

Password should be between 6 and 20 characters, which is long, or much longer, we suppose, than some of us can imagine, or that many of us need. Perhaps your version of safety requires even more characters? We do not yet know.

Password should not include your phone number, an email address, the same as your user name, or a name you use only with your closest friends, or indeed, the name of your child, or the child you do not yet have, or perhaps the child you will never have, nor the name of that girlfriend you can’t quite find yet on Facebook, perhaps she has a new last name? In any case, don’t use her name either — or that cutesy thing she used to call you in Chicago — you should just move on. It’s over.

Password shouldn’t include too many special characters, such as $ or ? or WTF, because why are you bothering, for instance, to attempt to set a password for your dormant, underused frequent flyer account anyway? You barely travel, except for various hungover flights from that dreadful Marine Terminal at LaGuardia — a swampy, metallic building, with all the water bugs and an old guy named Marty who was employee of the month but the airline magazine photo editors couldn’t get their shit together soon enough to take a decent photo of the guy, just a blurry snapshot of an old man bending over a suitcase, thinning hair and a smile with too much gum — and you, seeking to establish a password, merely take a flight from that terminal every few years to fly back to Illinois, to visit the relatives down-state, but really you wish you could just stay in grey Chicago, riding the train around the lake, trying to remember what went wrong. Perhaps, with enough miles, if you got your shit together, you could fly somewhere weird and international, like on Air Iberia or Fly Saudi or Jet North Korea, but alas, all you can manage is to sign up finally up for some frequent flyer miles, which is actually a process that is in doubt — because first you still need a sufficient password — and after that, you might finally redeem that flight from last January. Actually, no. Flight credits expire 12 months from the ticketed date. Too late. Give it up. Someone will steal them anyway.

Password should contain at least one upper case letter.

Password must be written by you.

Password doesn’t care if you aren’t who you want to be, or if you don’t fly often enough, or if you forget to claim your credits or comb your hair or call your mom or get a wife or a decent job or care much about anything.

Password will open doors to you that were previously closed.

If you do it right, your password will be yours alone.

A good password is forever.

Until you change it in four weeks, which is what we recommend.

Nathan Deuel lives in Beirut and is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Tampa. He has written essays for The New York Times, GQ, Salon, Slate, The Awl, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Previously, he was an editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.

The earliest recorded stories are war stories. Some forty thousand years ago, people painted their tales of hunting buffalo and elk and battling fellow humans on the walls of caves. As soon as we could put pen to paper, we recorded for posterity how armies crossed seas and mountains and deserts to clash swords with other men, for glory and in memory of the fallen. We may have forgotten how our great-great-grandparents met and fell in love, but we remember that our great-great-grandpa fought at the battle of Normandy. Everyone has a war story. Why? Because war equals conflict and conflict equals story. It has always fallen to our storytellers, poets, and reporters to show us who we are and help us make sense of the senseless. So it has been, so it will always be.

In this issue, Anthony Doerr takes readers behind the lines of the Hitler Youth during World War II, while Phil Klay depicts the harrowing chaos of Afghanistan. Will Mackin ruminates on receiving care packages before a big offensive on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and Paris editor Heather Hartley interviews veteran foreign correspondent Janine di Giovanni about her experiences in multiple war zones, from Palestine to Bosnia, Somalia to Kosovo. Colum McCann, in an excerpt from his new novel, Transatlantic, portrays the seemingly unresolvable quagmire of the Irish “Troubles” and how American Senator George Mitchell helped pave the way to peace. But not all wars are fought in the trenches. Jim Shepard, a master at depicting domestic warfare, brilliantly marshals a cast of characters through their dysfunctions in “Wall-to-Wall Counseling.” And Matthew Specktor, meantime, goes behind the façade of glamorous Hollywood as he steps into the bunker with titan agents who are waging all-out war on the studios, and each other.

Sun Tsu, who wrote The Art of War some sixteen hundred years ago, instructed, “There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.” Let us hope that our leaders listen to our storytellers.

On top of all this incredible content, we’re also thrilled to announce that we’re now able to fulfill digital subscriptions to the magazine. Every new print subscription comes with access to the digital version, which you can enjoy alone for $19.95. This has been a long time coming and we hope you’ll continue to enjoy the magazine in whatever format you prefer.