so i am into my last year of my MFA and i am doing a bit of frantic rearranging of my life in order to make room for all that writing i am supposed to be doing/ want to be doing. i am making big cuts in the amount of socializing i do because i am feeling the need to just go deeply inward and into my creative space and really see what this book wants to say. juliana spahr is my thesis director and leslie scalapino is my reader, so i'm set up with some truly fabulous female minds to work with. things are going really well tho, as always, i do believe i have been assigned more work than is humanly possible (if one works, which i do) to complete. i have been doing big sessions on feeling good about myself despite the fact that i never seem to finish all of my homework. that said, i LOOOOOVE my classes! queer poetics w rebekah edwards makes my brain bigger every single week. i have a poetry workshop w juliana spahr and a lot of other talented people. and cynthia scheinberg's theories and strategies of teaching writing sounded boring to me but is actually quite political and thus FASCinating to me. i feel pretty damn certain i am on the right path - i'm gonna be a teacher, folks!
i am tutoring in the writing center at mills which is challenging and terrifying in all sorts of yummy ways. i love helping a student get her thoughts down on paper but the grammar aspect is more daunting than i can relay to u in a single blog. i'm working really hard to not feel stupid all the time; putting the rules of grammar into words is more difficult than i had imagined. my swimming class is a nice contradiction but is challenging in other ways, too. i am noticing just how little body awareness i have cultivated in my life and it is really hard to get my body to do what i tell it to! but when i get frustrated, i just flap around like i did as a kid and do a couple of underwater handstands and i feel much better. i love being in the water. and it has been great for my still-healing ankle, too.
i am doing part-time work with blue shield of california foundation again, on a temp assignment, as well as a touch of nanny work which i am thinking i need to drop due to the low pay and time commitment. it works out to less than $10 per hour when i subtract travel cost and time. i'm thinking that 6 hours a week would be much better spent writing.
oh, and i am reading in the "soulful series" at mills this tuesday evening at 5:15 in the bender room if anyone is able to make it out.
that's about it for now, but i will be making much more frequent use of this blog, i promise, so please do check back often. big love:m
