Showcasing the PGs - Totally My Idea

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 more, set off some campus alarms, patted each other on the back, and got great glimpses into the lives and work of our friends and family.

I loved it. Everyone loved it. Misses AC and JK threw a fabulous party, one I hope we repeat with frequency in the future. I'm so glad I thought of it.

Comments

Did Somebody Offer a Challenge?

Bruce Sterling over at Wired.com posted eighteen of them for Contemporary Literature. It's a skeletal overview: a list of statements without background or exploration of any. I'd like to offer a few brief thoughts on the list, just for my own brainstorming sake. Who knows; there may be eighteen papers in here somewhere. 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. "Contemporary society" is a pretty big blanket, there, Bruce. I think you might mean "contemporary digitally literate culture" - after all, it's only in the Westernized world that we are beginning to share our language and culture through global media such as Facebook and mobile phones. This also assumes a very strict definition of literature: that which is published in print form, presumably a book. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed tex...

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch. My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed ), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit. My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and ...

In which the Apathy Monster is curtailed

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi...

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