Well, the workshop proper, anyway. We’ll still be in touch by email and meeting at cons and whenever we pass through one anothers’ areas, but the Clarion West Workshop proper is finished. Six weeks of intense writing, bonding, and learning from wonderful teachers and classmates is over, and boy am I dazed. I’ll be posting about our last week at Clarion West 2006 in a day or two, when I feel up to it, but I thought I’d note that the workshop is indeed over and I’m now in Saskatoon for a few days, visiting my Mom and whichever siblings …
Category: PERSONAL
Clarion West Week 4
Hey all. Well, Nalo’s gone, and like all of our tutors so far, we miss her. She was sharp in critiques, friendly both in and out of class, and she spent extra time with us outside class, including a special session depicting people of sexualities that may not be exactly like our own — about tackling the heterogeneity that can exist in imaginary worlds, and which can make those worlds more interesting and exciting. But she wasn’t just great on diversity/sexuality-related writing, and it’d be unfortunate if she were typecast as being mostly about that, when in fact, she’s mostly …
Almost there…
YAY! I have finalized all the grades I can tonight — which means all but three grades. Everything else has been submitted, has been marked, and has been shown to the student or will be shown tomorrow. Small adjustments might be required, but nothing earthshaking, well, as long as my luck holds out. (My luck holds out until the moment an adjusted grade affects the curve.) So now, after having finished all of that grading, here’s my to-do list for the next few days: Finalize 3 remaining grades: one for a student presentation to be delivered tomorrow, one for a …
Once, Twice… an Uncle
My baby sister Annie (“Isabella” is her real name, and what she prefers to be called, but I can’t help but call her Annie) should be giving birth to her and her husband Martin’s baby either sometime tonight or sometime tomorrow, Winnipeg Time. This will mean I am uncle for the second time in the last few years. One interesting thing is that nobody knows whether it’s a boy or girl. Everyone seems to be speculating. My nephew thinks it’s a girl. My Dad expressed the same opinion before he passed on. My mother thought it was a boy, at …
AAAAAAAAAAARGH!
You know, I had a bad impression of the Academic Affairs Office where I work even before I was hired. I don’t know what happened, but twice they claimed not to have received my transcripts — transcripts that somehow arrived everywhere else they were sent. Ahem. Well, getting final, official clearance to match the unofficial permission I’ve repearedly to go to Clarion West, this seems to have become well-nigh impossible. Almost. But fill out this one more little paper, and maybe we’ll see. Oh,and this one. And can you fill out that form? And retype this letter, but leave this …
Grading and the Rest of the Tunnel
I’m in the thick of it. I have gotten through about 11 of the 50-odd book/movie-reviews I’m to grade in the next four days, which is not bad. I’m hoping to get through another 20 or so today, leaving ten for tomorrow and ten for Tuesday, which is a national holiday. On Wednesday, I’ll be receiving the Final Essays from my Advanced Composition course, and by that point all the grading for my Public Speaking course should be basically finished… they’re giving their final presentations on Monday and Wednesday of this week, which means my grading will consist mainly of …
Idiotic Verification Systems That Don’t Work
… are starting to annoy me. So despite having booked a flight to Saskatoon from Seattle TWICE, since Lime’s credit card isn’t being processed properly — the verification systems keep ganking on it — I haven’t got any bloody thing booked. This is annoying the living hell out of me.
Ghosts
The weight of expectations is heavy, and in families, heavier than in most places. Old rooms, old hallways, old photographs and corners, that’s where old dust goes to rest undisturbed. The people we’ve lived closest to, and loved in the desperate way that only children know how to love, they always have some of that dust in their eyes. They see so much of the past when they look at us, so much of their own hopes, either realized or unfulfilled; so much of their fears evaded or accepted. We, too, begin to find our eyes failing for all the …
New Feed
I’ve started as of now to have my feeds processed by feedburner. The URI for the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/gordsellar/QdzA but you should be automatically redirected. Still, you may wish to update your subscriptions. UPDATE: The address above has been changed; I accidentally set it as a podcast and intend to have a podcast on a separate feed. So there.
Deadlines are called that for a reason
Many of my students seem to have grasped that deadlines include the word “dead” for a reason. Still, not quite enough of them have grokked it. In my two huge writing classes, I’ve received less than 40 out of 50 final assignments which were due at noon today. Several of the students in my Media English class are still trying changing their minds and plans on a Final Project that’s due a week from today, and several students I met today hadn’t reviewed my comments on essays that they’ve had for a week and are supposed to have rewritten for …