"I realized that what conspiracy theories are—if they aren’t true—are our way of seeking order, of making sense of the chaos of these terrible events..."
In other news, I am not going to AWP this year. Something about six hours on a plane. And Boston in winter. Also, I'm responsibly wrapping up this quarter's teaching. I'm not an old pro like some people who can take week 9 of a 10-week quarter off without everything falling apart. I jest!
But I am loving my students this quarter. Last week we talked about revising creative work. Something that I do all the time, of course (and obsessively!), but not something I've ever actually thought about procedure-wise. The process of constructing a lesson plan around teaching non-cw majors how to revise creative writing was really instructive. And actually forced me to reimagine two recent poems to their betterment. Accidentally.
I also learned, for example, that I will panic students who hear me say that rarely does anything of mine see the light of day before it has undergone 20-40 revisions. We talked about 3 being the vital low number of revisions: global, paragraph, sentence. (Or in poetry, of course, global, stanza, line.) And then fourteen strategies for paragraph- and sentence-level considerations.
It seems impossible to believe that things are winding down. One quarter left of grad school, round two. Come June I will have one degree in fiction, and this new-minted poetry degree. I feel like I could do it all over again. I like being in school, and hope that the teaching I hope to do in the future allows me to feel in some ways that I'm in that cycle of endless accretion of knowledge.
All I ever want is books and good conversation. Well, a few other things too.
Safe travels y'all.