classes!

Excited about my spring classes:

Fiction workshop (novel in stories)
Creative Writing for Kids (get to work with high school students)
Blood Melodrama (crime fiction/noir)
and a single credit class taught by visiting prof Larry Sutin



Now I'm ready for this semester to end so the next one can start.

So. Balancing SCHOOL and RELATIONSHIP.

Stayed in this evening writing papers and stuff when what I wanted to do was go out (yes it would have involved ice cream and some excitement over a letterpress). But because I stayed in and did this work, I have all tomorrow free to hang out with boyfriend.

I keep looking for ways to reorganize my time. Less drinking, sure. Don't go out, sure. Don't have that nap, okay. Wake up earlier, no problem. I just keep feeling like there must be some time SOMEWHERE that can be allocated for schoolwork or writing. Time, where are you?

oh schoool

Without sounding whiny, I'm counting the days until xmas break (at which point I will have almost a month and a half off from school).

I love school. Truly I do. But I also like having time to read what I want to read and to write and REVISE. There is very little revising going on this semester. I have all my work-shopped stories paper clipped together for easy reference later. And the poems.

And the poems. Well there won't be much revising going on there, because I haven't written things I like much for poetry class. I know this isn't the class's fault. This isn't my well intentioned professor's fault. It's mine. I can't write poetry if I know its going to be held up to some sort of academic standard. (For some reason I have no problem writing things that I like for fiction workshop). But that's okay. I KNOW now.

I'm very ready for my 'teaching' class to end. We're writing a response essay on a an article about AIDS and population control and then passing it off to a classmate so they can practice grading it. My response essay basically says the article was shit because it did not reference dessert items. The footnotes, which contain dessert recipes, take up more than double what the actual 'paper' does.

Observing someone else teach has been helpful though. I kind of feel like I should bake Jessica an apple pie or something for putting up with me observing her so many times this semester. And video taping her.



Oh school.

Bradley Sandssssss

You should probably check out Bradley Sands's book Sorry I ruined your orgy because Bradley Sands is a winner and because it contains a prose poem titled "Today Brandi Wells’ Cat Fell Out of a Tree But He was Not Upset."

I published that delightful poem a while back on my blog!