The stack of books on my storage bench was not successfully read nor did it get smaller of winter break/January term. I'm not so sad - I've been doing things, but also, I'll have all summer to just read and write, so I can look forward to that.
Anyways, I've been MIA. I was in Ohio...working. And after shortly extending my stay in Ohio, I returned to Chicago and didn't leave my house for 5 days. It was a full-on hermit move and I hadn't even realized. The only reason I left was for Writer's Bootcamp and the 6 hours of forced writing jump started all of my creative juices again. I revised some of the smaller pieces I've been working on for submissions and sent those pieces out to my wonderful writing friends from undergrad (shout-out to you guys for wanting to read my work!).
Since then, I've just been prepping for the upcoming semester. Nonfiction Workshop (really, that's what I'm most excited for, of course), Post-Colonial lit (YAS), and Arts Criticism (this could be fun...?) are the courses I'm taking as a venture into this second semester of grad school. Alongside these three courses, I'll also be teaching undergraduate writing! Not so terrifying, but more exhausting in that I've been making a Moodle page for two days, working on a syllabus for months, assignment guidelines for months/weeks, and I won't be finished with all of this until the semester is over. But I love to teach, so how bad could it be (a lot of people have said it's BAD)? Honestly, I feel like I've set my students up for a semester that is...just right. And hopefully, the first day, I can establish the classroom environment that is strong, but flexible and we can all have a good semester. They want to pass and I'd like to teach again, you know?
Moving on...I have old work (my workshop pieces) that desperately need to be revised for submissions and I think it's been long enough since I last looked at and thought about them, so it's almost time. When the semester starts, I'll dust them off and begin revising them. Nothing better than an unhealthy level of stress to motivate me! Maybe I'll get a coloring book too, just for when I push myself too close to the edge.
I've been working on writing the letter-essay and it's difficult AF because how does one write a letter to someone that can be fully and correctly interpreted by the reader? Also the micro-essay because writing short is a skill that I want to learn just so I can twist it into my own contraption. There are a lot of projects I'd like to begin working on this semester and a lot of pieces I'd like to complete. Here's to it all going well.
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