My Writerly Blog

Which I left to more supremely capable people to actually carry out, as is my habit, of course. When I did my MFA, we had a monthly Student Reading Series, which was created during my time in the program (through none of my own effort), organized entirely by the students, and is still going today, if the listserve is any judge. It was a great time to socialize, talk about our work, our professors, our SOs, our lack thereof...oh, yeah, and to share what we were writing. Uh, there was wine involved. When I found nothing much like that here, I thought "Well that blows. We totally should." And so we did. The NIECI family (NIECI is bigger than we know, but there's just the core family that participates in most of our shindigs) got together to display our wares. We dressed up in our finest frocks and gathered for wine (duh) and a wide display of work, from critical papers and radio shows to short stories and film. We chatted, drank, showed off some more stuff, drank some mor...

You may have noticed few writing or PhD-related posts in the past couple of weeks. That would be because I am currently crushed beneath a dump-truck's worth of student papers to mark. Back to our regularly scheduled program as soon as I can dig myself a hole to survival.

I won a coloring contest in the second grade. The item was a lily, and I won not for my extreme crayon skills, but because I was the only one in the class to use the correct shade: white. No one else had ever seen a lily. Neither had I, for that matter; I was just somewhat more literate than my peers, and had likely seen a picture or read a description of lilies in a book. I'm from New Mexico, you see. Our state color is brown. Apart from a few blooms on a prickly pear cactus, hearty scraggly flowers, or greenhouse-spoiled imports, the desert doesn't do flowers. My favorite flower most of my life has been the Indian Paintbrush, the only colorful wildflower the desert really produces. Even then, it's in spotty patches, so seeing one is akin to the excitement of spotting a rainbow. Boy am I in a different world here. Wales does flowers. In multiples. I live in a tiny village in North Wales, without even a post office or a convenience store. We don't have much in ...

I have a sore throat. For this malady, I requested popsicles, preferably anything resembling Jell-O Pudding Pops (click the link, seriously. It's more than you bargained for). My Australian husband, who has never known the joy of pudding pops or Bill Cosby expounding their benefits (J-E-L-L-O!), got me these: Let's ignore for a moment how creepy I find the whole Jelly Babies phenomenon. I mean, you're eating babies , for chrissake. Stalin didn't even eat babies (AFAIK). Of course, the concept is babies; the reality is they're about the size and shape of a 9-week-old fetus. Even if you aborted a fetus that size, you wouldn't eat it. I hope. But Wobbly Lollies aren't baby/fetus shaped. Rather, they've flown backward in the reproductive process, back through growth phases and cell differentiation. Back through mitosis, through fertilization. Swimming backward through the jelly-lined uterus through the cervix, out the vagina, right back up the ...

Chris Joseph posted today about the Digital Resources for the Arts & Humanities 2009 Conference in Belfast. The abstract submission deadline is two days away, and I sat for an hour trying to come up with something I could present. I suppose I could present the same project I'm offering up to the Great Writing conference here in June. It would definitely be more of a completed work by September. But I'm suffering from an inferiority complex at the moment. I seem to have no problems flaunting my creative package where most of the audience aren't experts in the digital humanities, but the thought of laying my freshman efforts bare for a crowd of digital academics and artists is a little too daunting for me at the moment. So I think I'll hold off on submitting anything, wait for the program to be announced, and try to scrape funds together to simply attend. I'd like to see what else is out there, to see what other artists are doing (part of the conference is...

Yesterday was CEDAR 's third session in Leicester, at De Montfort University's Institute of Creative Technologies . We covered blogging for academics, using Web 2.0 resources for document collaboration, creation, and presentations, and a bit on creative processes. For me, the session wasn't quite as useful as the last one, primarily because I (obviously) already blog, and already use the Web 2.0 resources covered (plus a truckload of others that would take days to discuss in such a seminar format). I think I'm to blame a bit - the last session I didn't have any real expectations, as the topics initially didn't seem at all applicable to my work. When I found applications, I was stoked. This time, the topics seemed catered to my research...but because these aren't necessarily advanced sessions, it was all at a level I've already mastered. So I had higher expectations than I should have had. I did suggest that in the future we might consider breaking ...

I just want to offer a giant upraised middle finger (or an emphatic two-finger salute for you Brits) to the university. Five million pounds. Five million pounds you are offering in studentships to increase postgraduate numbers by 125. None of which are you offering to your CURRENT postgrads, who have worked our asses off and paid you a pretty sum already. None of which are you releasing to the departments to SUPPORT these postgrads, neither in facilities nor staff. You, university, are a large, noxious, goopy pile of excrement. That is all.

New experiences are rad. Scary sometimes, occasionally baffling, often frustrating...but every once in a while, they're just rock-on cool. I lead a seminar for an Intro to New Media course in our department. Part of the seminar is exposing students - who, at an average age of 18 really should be more net-savvy than they are - to various new media applications. These include games (you should have seen the gamers in the class trying to play the old text-based adventures I grew up on. Couldn't get past the first obstacle. Ha!), networking sites, collaborative tools like wikis, and virtual worlds. That's right, we have a whole session dedicated to Second Life. And yes, I get paid for this. But not much. That first session was frustrating for 90% of them: getting a log-in ID, learning to move, adjusting their appearance, learning how to fly, teleport, find locations, find each other. I have a good idea most of them didn't even think about Second Life until a week o...