Here’s the update:
- I’m now 100% definitely going to Seattle for the Clarion Workshop. I’ll fly out on the 17th, and I’m going to try to get a ticket that allows me to stop by my mother’s place on the way back to Korea, six weeks later.
- I’m now in the thick of marking. It’s just not pretty. But one thing that is really making me happy is that a lot of my students seem to have really picked up what I’ve been trying to get them to learn — things like structure in their writing, or a certain kind of critical approach to understanding media, or whatever.
When I mentioned I’d be flying out of Korea on the 17th of June, rightat the end of semester, and that therefore final projects would have to be submitted a week before the end of semester, one of my more conscientious and active students asked me, with notable trepidation, whether I’d actually be leaving the country for good. When I reassured her that I’d be back in August, she seemed relieved, and told me she didn’t want to see a “good professor” leave the University so soon. Which is nice, it alleviates my fears about whether my courses are too heavy/demanding/whatever.
- I’m reading John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on the Craft for Young Writers. You don’t have to be young to appreciate the good points he makes. I was inspired to do so when I noticed that Rudy Rucker mentioned he was reading it on his own blog, and I remembered a professor recommending it to me years ago. I’m certainly not crazy about it, nowhere near becoming a devotee like some of my old classmates, who seemed to have passages in it memorized, but it is a good book.
After that, I’m going to start digging into some of the books by Clarion West Instructors whom I haven’t yet read. I have a nice stack that arrived the other day, and if nothing else, it will give me a better sense of who I am going to be learning with. Some of these authors I’ve never read before, and I feel a bit sheepish about that. But it’s easily rectified, if I can get the time to sit down and read.