Class Prep, Teaching, and Playing the Waiting Game (Helllloooooo Sabbatical Letter... Where Are You?)

This week classes began for the spring semester at Stuffolk. It wasn't a bad week. I'm cautiously optimistic about the semester. My students seem engaged and respectful, which would be marked change from at least two of my classes last semester. I have a ton of prep still to do, mostly in making sure the Blackboard course spaces are aligned with the new semester and that my handouts and rubrics and all that junk have been updated.

Our HUM 121 students making a very unofficial Sol LeWitt.

Today I have the privilege of being the "Mystery Reader" at my youngest's preschool in the morning (those kids are the cutest, so it really will be the highlight of my week), followed with a day of writing letters of recommendation for three students. I am behind on lots of different tasks, but there's absolutely nothing I could have done differently. I've been working my ass off for the past few weeks; like, hyper-focused on work. My hope, my aim, is to sacrifice the writing & leisure time I would have normally taken so that subsequent semesters are easier. I'm so tired of scrambling.

I suppose that in the next few weeks I should start sending out my manuscript again. And speaking of submissions, I haven't heard anything about the sabbatical I applied for, but my colleagues are in the same predicament. The college is notoriously slow about this stuff. And I'm super nervous/excited (when I take a minute to actually think) about my residency applications. Because I've never applied to a residency before I have so much more optimism than I have about other kinds of submissions. I know that they're super competitive, but the knowing-before-submitting is of a different quality than the knowing-after-submitting. Once you're rejected, or even accepted, you feel the weight of your competition -- it's something you can acknowledge, if that makes sense. But if you've never applied before, you have no context. It feels like a running across terrain you've never crossed  -- you're aware of every footfall (cause you don't wanna fall on your face) but there's the exhilaration of new surroundings and fresh air. (I suppose, to extend this metaphor, submitting my book manuscript feels more like running around a stuffy indoor track at the same tired gym by this point.)

In the next week, I hope to make some serious progress on my class prep (like, you know, FINISH it) and then move on to writing during the mornings. I want to work on creating more individual poems, but I also have a collaborative project in the works with M.S. this spring -- we're participating in the Brooklyn Art Library's annual Sketchbook Project. We purchased one of their 5x7 sketchbooks, and we're charged with filling it by April 30. In June there will be an exhibition with all of the sketchbooks on display from this year's challenge. M.S. has done this before, but this is my first time participating. We're going to make a text/visual collaboration, which is right in line with what we did last semester (see: New Hive). (We also have a sketchbook that our writing and drawing students will be filling together, which is also exciting.)

Fall used to be my favorite semester, but I think Spring might be winning now -- so many good things. HUM 121, Developing Creative Imagination in the Arts, is equally inspiring and informing, from the research we do for the class to seeing the results when our students engage with the class activities. And then there's the Creative Writing Festival, which has been more or less my baby for the past ten years. Also . . . for some reason it seems like students are better/nicer/more willing to work in the spring. And that makes a world of difference.