Off to Warrensburg, Missouri

So I DID get up at 3:30, and I finished ALMOST all of the papers - I finished all the papers that came in on time, and timely return of the on-time papers is about all that can be expected of me, don't you think?

My reward: tomorrow I leave for Warrensburg, Missouri, to attend the annual children's literature festival sponsored by Central Missouri State University. It is bliss. It's puzzling that it's bliss, because we work hard, for days, for very little pay, and Warrensburg, Missouri, is hardly a thrilling metropolis. But bliss it is: over 40 (!) authors and illustrators from all over the country, including a concentration of Missouri's finest, and thousands of school children bused in from anywhere within a hundred mile radius (or more). Each author gives four talks a day; each child attends four or five talks a day. And the rest of the time, the authors talk - incessantly - to one another.

Although there are always a few new faces, the majority of the authors attend every year, so we have become once a year festival friends, eager to bring each other up to date on everything that has transpired in the year gone by. We walk for hours, walk for miles and miles, past silos and cows, talking, talking, talking. And then we talk some more. We also have an annual shoe-buying extravaganza at an old-fashioned shoe store on Warrensburg's main drag, which hosts a party in our honor. After the shoe-buying party, we go to the bar at Heroes, and order the Unknown Hero. And then we talk still more.

Sometimes I think that as much as I love the writing itself, I love the company of fellow writers. I love just being part of the world of people who write, and read, and love children's books. I love it so much!

And I'm heading there tomorrow.

Dessert First?

Every day I wake up in the morning and tell myself that TODAY is the day I am going to face grading the papers for my Rousseau class. I tell myself that if only I grade just FIVE of them, I will be so filled with relief at laying down the burden of my procrastination that I will be fired up all day with energy to deal with all my more fun tasks, like, well, writing. But every day, when I have this thought, I find that I can't even make myself get out of bed, let alone grade. So then I tell myself, okay, well, why don't you write for a little while first, and THEN you'll be so fired up with happy energy from writing that you will leap upon those Rousseau papers with delight. And yet, after I finish my writing, that isn't what happens at all. I do feel pleased with myself from writing, but find that I'm now so completely satisfied with what I've accomplished for the day that I have no need or desire to do anything else.

I sense that this might be a problem! But I'm not sure what to do about it. Part of me thinks that maybe it isn't a problem - after all, I'm getting done what I love best and what is most important to creating a flourishing life for myself. Many of my writer friends have the exact opposite problem: they dutifully do everything else first, and then find that they have no time and energy for what they love best. They fill themselves up on what they take to be their meal, and then have no room left for dessert. I have dessert first, justifying this with the thought that in my case, dessert really IS my meal. Writing IS my chief source of nutrition. It's where I get my emotional and spiritual vitamins and minerals.

And yet, those papers still need to be graded. And I do think that if I ever COULD force myself to leap out of bed and do them, I WOULD have that light, airy feeling for the rest of the day.

Luckily, I absolutely have to get the papers back to my students tomorrow. I have no choice. The lack of any choice is also a powerful motivator. So I did force myself to get through TEN of them this afternoon, and tomorrow morning I'll get up, not at 5, or at 4, but at 3:30, and I'll finish the rest. And then I'll feel light and airy for the rest of my life. Or at least until the next set of papers is due.

With any luck, by 9:00 tomorrow morning, I'll have papers graded AND a happy week of writing behind me - dessert/vitamins/minerals AND an obligation crossed off my list. In that order.

Another Interesting Class

I blogged last week about the two classes I observed by faculty nominated for this year's Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award - one class in calculus (!) and another in chemistry - and what I learned from each one. Yesterday I observed a third nominated class. This time I had a better chance of actually understanding what was going on, because it was a class in - writing! Business communication writing, but still, writing. I do know something about writing.

The particular class I observed was on genre - already intriguing, for a business writing class. The instructor's plan was to build toward a discussion of the genre of writing cover letters and resumes (hardly my favorite genre), but this was a day just on genre itself. I came away from it with one big important point.

The teacher asked the students to think of how they use the word "genre" - I could tell that most of them thought that they had never yet used it in their lives. But then he pointed out that we use the word in its adjectival form at least once a week: "generic" - as when we go to the drug store to find a generic drug for our ills, one that has the right ingredients. However, it isn't the ingredients that matter most of all for genre, that is to say, the various conventions we might seek to observe; it's the whole effect, in particular, how something MAKES US FEEL. This is what we care about when we look for the generic drug: not whether the label reveals that the drug contains chemical compound x, or y, but how it will work on us, in is, that is to say, GETTING WELL. And in writing, it's the same: the point is the overall effect, on our overall affect. The reading for the class focused on what its author called "exigence" - the urgent need to which I am responding as I write.

This was my take-away point from his excellent and engaging class. So my new question for myself as I write is: to what urgent need am I responding? If I do succeed in responding to it, then maybe I've done the most important thing a writer ever can do.

If Not, Winter

This is one of the prompts for the Tupelo Press poetry project, based on fragments from Sappho. I'm so in love with this one that I think I could write a poem based on just those three words every day for the rest of my life. I just ordered the book of Sappho fragments which also takes those three words as its title: If Not, Winter.

Here are the three I wrote yesterday:


Do You Love Me?

If not, winter
If yes, spring

If not, feet
If yes, wing

If not, empty
If yes, filled

If not, barren
If yes, tilled

If not, hole
If yes, healed

If not, desert
If yes, field

If not, homeless
If yes, home

If not, silence
If yes, poem


If Not, Winter

Demeter’s daughter, don’t! Not one seed,
However small. Six of them? No!
Spit them out. Here, in my hand.
Leave their bittersweet untasted.
One swallow, and the world lies wasted.


Seasons

If not, winter,
Why not, spring?
The heart has
A calendar within.
After months
Of frozen grief,
On that branch,
A budding leaf.
Here, a crocus,
Only one,
Yellow in
The morning sun.

Back from Cincinnati

I had a lovely time at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics conference in Cincinnati. The second-best part of the conference was going not once, but twice, to Graeter's for ice cream, right across the street from our hotel; both times I had black raspberry chococolate chip and it was scrumptious. The first-best part of the conference was sitting in the gorgeous bar of the gorgeous Hilton Netherland Plaza Hotel (a 1930s art deco gem on the National Register of Historic Places), with beloved former graduate student friends, drinking pomegranate martins and listening to the piano player deliver schmaltzy versions of "Embraceable You" and "More" (which I so loved when I sang it in Girls' Chorus in 10th grade, imagining myself singing it to Dick Thistle: "More - than the greatest love the world has known! This - is the love I give you to you - alone!")

The papers were good, too.

But now I'm home, and I have to return to real life, where there is a distinct absence of Graeter's ice cream (though one of my Facebook friends told me that I can buy it in the freezer aisle at King Soopers - but would that be the same?) and pomegranate martinis. And a distinct presence of heaps and heaps of midterm grading.

Luckily, I also agreed with two other poet friends to take on Tupelo Press's new poetry challenge, this time writing poems where either the title or the first line has to be a fragment from Sappho. Some of the most delicious ones are:

"the one with violets in her lap
"if not, winter"
"no more than the bird with the piercing voice"

I do have to start grading midterms today, but first, Sappho. . .

Off to Cincinnati

I leave today for Cincinnati, where I'll be attending the annual conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). This is one of my favorite conferences, which I attend almost every year. I've taken many graduate students with me, over the years, and now many of them are all grown-up, established in faculty positions all over the country, and sometimes they bring their own graduate students with them to APPE. These are my grand-grad students, the grad students of my grad students.

This year I'll be having a reunion at APPE with Sara (now teaching at University of Washington in Seattle), Rob (now teaching at University of North Texas), and Chris (now teaching at Cal State, Sacramento). We will hear lots of papers, of course, but we'll also have lots of fun. Sara will insist on it.

Sara loves to find the kind of fun that is distinctive to each place we visit. So far, we have to admit, Cincinnati has proved to be, well, somewhat unsatisfying in the fun department. One year we went to a bar, on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, where we thought we could get mint juleps, which we took to be a very Kentucky-ish beverage, but the bartender had never even heard of mint juleps, and the bar itself was . . . let me just say that you would be better off avoiding the Howl at the Moon piano bar. Another year, we set ourselves the mission of sampling Cincinnati's distinctive mix of chili and spaghetti, at Skyline Chili. We still dutifully have some every year, but it isn't really a HUGE treat.

This year our plan is to try Graeter's ice cream, reputed to be Oprah's favorite. Now, I don't think this will have the magical properties of the fairy dust I encountered in January at Alice's Teacup in Manhattan, but Oprah certainly has a magical aura of her own, and perhaps her favorite ice cream will have hitherto unrecognized powers. At the least, eating it should make for a pleasant half hour together with dear friends in Cincinnati.

New Life for March

Today is the first day of March, and on the first day of each month I like to begin a new life. A whole entire new life, overhauling my old life from top to bottom: diet, fitness, finances, the reading of improving literature, and of course, huge and glorious accomplishments re work. I didn't do a new life in February, as I was chiefly in survival mode last month. So I am ready now for a new life with a vengeance!

I made my to-do list for the month last night, in preparation to leap out of bed at an even earlier hour than usual this morning and tackle it joyously. There are 137 items on it. This means that if I do a mere 5 a day, I will have the whole list crossed off by the end of the month, even taking off a few days for the two trips I'll be taking.

Some of the items on the list are very small, but they still need to be done, and I've been avoiding doing them. Having them on the list as tempting, low-hanging fruit is a way to get them finally accomplished. These include: photocopying my midterm exam, sending off a blurb to Barnes & Noble for the writing workshop I'm doing for them in April, organizing the materials I need to do my hideously loathsome FRPA for work (the annual Faculty Report of Professional Activities which we're required to submit every year), and emailing the printer to arrange for the next issue of the University of Maryland's Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, which I've agreed once again to guest-edit.

Some of the items on the list are bigger - but still not too big. I try to break them all down into chunks that shouldn't take more than an hour or two. So I don't put on the list, "Grade all the papers for my Rousseau class, " but "Grade five papers for the Rousseau class" - this appears on the list five separate times as five separate installments of grading. I don't put on the list, "Write chapter eight of my book," but "Write one page of chapter eight" or "Write for one hour on chapter eight." Some of the things on the list are pure fun: attend Christopher's Metro State band concert.

I have crossed off TEN things so far already! Of course, they were the ten puniest. But it was still bliss to cross them off. And today isn't even over! The danger of being too gung-ho about the list is getting burnt out - it's important to pace myself so that I can keep crossing off items at a reasonably steady pace. But right now, I do feel that I'm a roll. I'm roaring into March like a lion.