Skip to main content

75 Essays: Done!

Today I finished grading the last of the first set of 75 essays I needed to grade for my three classes this quarter. I have two English 101 classes and one English 100 class. The English 101 students were analyzing photos; they could pick from this gallery I created using images from Flickr Commons (a very cool collection of photos from libraries, archives, and other institutions all over the world). I change up the gallery a bit from quarter to quarter as this helps eliminate plagiarism and makes the reading/grading process more fun for me as I get to read and think about different images.

So the students got me thinking about photos, and as a result, I remembered to take my camera along when Trish and I went to the Arboretum for a little walk this afternoon. But then I forgot the camera in her truck when we got home, and she's asleep, so I'll have to post photos of autumn leaves in Seattle some other time.

I'm still waiting for my books to arrive from Lulu. They shipped via media mail, which I guess means that they've been riding along in the slow lane in the back of some ancient mail truck? I really need them to arrive in time for the Short Run small press fest next weekend, and I thought I ordered them in plenty of time. They should turn up sometime this week, hopefully tomorrow or Monday!

Oh, and speaking of Short Run, I mounted some collages to have for sale there, too. I focused on ones with comic book images since a lot of the vendors are comics artists. It would be a pretty great thrill to happen to sell a collage. I've sold greeting cards and magnets which incorporate collage work but never just a collage itself as a piece of art.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New Zine and a Fundraiser for Kids in Foster Care

I'm excited to announce a new zine project from Teeny Tiny Press called Thank You . Using the classic Teeny Tiny format of an eight-page, single-sheet zine, Thank You collects a series of thank you notes in the form of poems and very short prose. Issue one includes work (in alphabetical order!) from Maura Alia Badji, X.P. Callahan, Del Ray Cross, Laura-Marie River Victor Nopales, BT Shaw, Eileen Tabios, and Mandy Zeller. To launch this zine, I'm doing a month-long fundraising drive (Aug 9-Sept 10) for Treehouse, a Seattle-based organization that helps kids and young adults in foster care. This is part of a larger back to school fundraising drive from Treehouse. They help kids with clothes, school supplies, books, toys, and much more. If you want a copy of the zine, donate an amount of your choice to Treehouse via https://engage.treehouseforkids.org/teenytinypress , and send me an email or instagram message with your mailing address. Then I'll send you the zine! Thank

Medium.com as a Place to Self-Publish (Kinda)

I started writing on Medium.com in late September of 2021, so I've been writing on the platform for eight full months now. Before I started on the site as a writer, I'd seen Medium articles come up in Google searches now and then, or my students had sometimes referred to articles in their papers. And I'd seen a couple YouTube videos about how Medium pays writers for their writing. Finally I decided to give it a try when I discovered that a lot of people read and share poetry on Medium. I thought it might be a fun way to find a new audience for my work and to meet other writers who are interested in different modes of self-publishing. It's not easy to get paid for your written work as a poet, so I thought it would be interesting to explore the possibilities on Medium. Medium is sort of a hybrid situation in terms of self-publishing. When you post work there, you still own the copyright. But instead of hosting the work on your own website or sharing it in a book or zine

Class Canceled and an Update

I had to cancel the Only Connect class that I was going to run from mid-May to mid-June. In the few years that have passed since I last offered an independently-run online writing class, the world of online classes has changed a lot. Pretty much any class you'd want to take online is available now because of the shift to online since the pandemic began. So it's a lot harder as an instructor to enroll enough students to run an online class since there are a huge amount of options now--and people are also experiencing fatigue with being online, whereas before an online creative writing class was more of a novelty. As for the update, I decided to shift toward offering individualized work with writers instead. I plan to build a new website in the weeks ahead and post more information about this. I'm offering individualized feedback and writing assignments for anyone who wants to work one on one with me on their writing. If this is something that interests you, please zip m