I am really not doing well maintaining this blog at all. But if I can manage a post every two months with my hectic schedule, I feel like that will be just fine.
Year one is done! I somehow have successfully managed to teach an entire semester of first-year writing and fully participate and create in all (well, most) of my classes. Since it's May, it's been nice to see so many of my friends and so many people I know succeeding and achieving, be it graduation or receiving awards or like me, completing another year of school.
This semester
Arts Criticism: I tested the waters writing in a new nonfiction form, which is that of the criticism kind. I wrote book reviews, conducted interviews/Q&As, and wrote cultural-critical hybrid pieces. This class really pushed my boundaries and even led me to getting a freelancing gig wit NewCity Lit (a Chicago publication), an interview with a Pulitzer Prize winner, an interview and acquaintanceship with a very cool, very smart poet/professor at the school, and challenged me to write short. For a class that I was no excited for in the beginning (not a big fan of book reviews, but they are necessary), it turned out to be my favorite class to attend by far due to the conversations and discussions about the field and genre and the success of my peers.
Workshop: Workshopping with a MacArthur genius is terrifying for the first five weeks, maybe 7 of the total 15. By the last two months though, we had him laughing every class and things weren't as stressful. Working on a single piece the entire class was new and it really taught me a lot about language, editing, and revising and how to perform those skills on my own work as well as I do for others. My essay (which was on breasts) certainly evolved over the course of the semester and ended up in a good place, so hopefully this summer, I'll have an opportunity to work on that and revise it further.
Lit: This class was a struggle. I'm not going to talk about it, in fact, that's how irritating it became. But, I challenged myself to write a paper on how Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart can be read as a womanist text due to the roles women play throughout the novel, which is an argument that was very difficult to make and to believe in, but somehow I did it. It was a rookie move to write a paper on a book I really liked though. Still waiting on that grade.
Recent Publications:
- Mario Walks In on Peach and Bowser - a (flash?) fiction/poem-y thing I wrote in undergrad, which was recently published in the 10th issue of FREEZERAY Poetry.
- Book Review on Mary Kubica's Don't You Cry - another NewCity Lit byline
- ...and several forthcoming pieces that I'll reveal as they're published.
- Find a job (necessary, working on it)
- Write an essay a week (which will come out to about 17 essays this summer)
- Hopefully knock out a few more publications
- Take new head shots/photos
- 2 workshops a month (different group of people, still producing work)
- Read all (or at least half) of the books that I have collected and bought over the past year and a half.
- Figure out and possibly fully plot out my thesis ideas and get started on that terrifying task.
