mimsy and outgrabe

The REALLY good news? I managed to teach the first two parts of Anna Karenina to my Intro to the Novel class yesterday without having thoroughly re-read the material. And I don't think I screwed up my students! In Kermit the Frog fashion, can I get a big "YAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY . . ." Hello? Anyone? ANYWAY. William Kelley Woolfitt generously published my verbose answers to his interview questions yesterday on his wonderful project, Speaking of Marvels . You can find my specific interview here , but I would recommend scrolling through the site and reading the interviews from all of the other chapbook authors. It's interesting to see inside other people's writing processes. Also, I like that he provides a sample of each poet (or fiction writer's) work at the end of each interview. ALSO, that he interviews authors of fiction chapbooks, and non-fiction chapbooks, which are a little more rare than poetry chaps.  So it was pleasant and exciting to see...

The reading went really well -- a lovely, sizable audience (the IOTA Poetry Series has been going on for well over a decade, and has a dedicated following), and a good opportunity to read poems outside of the context A. and I established with our "Poets on Childlessness and Parenthood" tour. Instead, we could just read poems. I read about 10 minutes from the chapbook and then 10 minutes of poems from the rest of the Fabulous Beast ms, and A. read a lovely selection from his book, Little Songs and Lyrics to Genji .  Here we are in action: (HA!) Isn't this backdrop kind of amazing? Photograph of me and this guy's bald head courtesy of my baby sister, Lil' K. Also, I had a snifter of Bourbon Barrel Stout. Drinking beer out of a snifter is pretentious and really shouldn't be condoned, but sometimes it has to be done. It was worth the risk of looking like an asshole. It was delicious. Beer and poems aside, I'm amazed that I managed to g...

Yup -- still around. This semester's not quite the kick in the pants that last semester was . . . er, YET . . . but it's been keeping me busy. The elements have been conspiring to keep me from seeing my creative writing class. Since this semester began, I've seen them TWICE. And because I'll be away in Virginia this weekend for a reading Sunday night, traveling back on Monday, I'm not holding class until Wednesday. The last I saw them was LAST Wednesday. So when I DO finally meet with them, it will have been two weeks since our previous meeting. Crazy, huh? Of course, the college will cram a whole bunch of make up dates into the last week of school, which will make grading finals absolutely maddening unless I start moving things around on my assignment schedule drastically. Our phones and internet and intranet have been all sorts of compromised by the snow and ice, too, so I haven't had access to my computer files all week. I get to the office and I ...