mimsy and outgrabe

And here's an interview with Juliana Spahr about the teaching of creative writing. In case I actually have time to reconsider how I approach teaching my CW classes between now and January. Two student conferences today; portfolios in my developmental writing class are being turned in around noon (which always means a high-stress, panic-ridden last class -- but IT'S THE LAST CLASS!); and a last workshop for my composition students before they turn in final papers on Friday.  OH MY GOD WE'RE ALMOST DONE. I could cry.  I probably will cry, with relief. But it'll happen sometime when my tear ducts work again -- sleep deprivation sure dries those suckers out.

I can't stay here because I have to get away from internet blog reading and do some serious organizing for today's set of student conferences, but I wanted to put this link to my friend L.'s blog entry up here so that I could easily revisit it . . . her paragraph at the end about dementia and collapsing boundaries is something I want to meditate on more, particularly as I write my verse play, and think about ways of structuring it, and what "collapsing boundaries" and the "loss of the ability to impose culturally acceptable narratives" can and should mean to my characters.

Oh, hello again. You almost forgot I lived here, right? Me too. In fact, I'm so turned around these days I barely know where I am . . . but life is not so bad. After all, I managed to survive last week, which featured 28 half-hour conferences with students from my creative writing and composition classes. (There would have been more conferences, but a good number of them missed their appointments and rescheduled for this week. Which bodes well for this week!) The weekend did feature a particularly frightening episode, however, in which our 6 month-old lab jumped out of my husband's moving pick up truck (for the record, he was in the cab, in the middle seat -- because our 9 year old lab was hogging up the window -- and his flight through the window was sudden and unexpected and physically difficult and still unexplained . . .  I mean, he comes running back into the house if he so much as sees his own shadow outside, so I don't know why he'd try to chase an animal w...