A ridiculous amount of good news for one day

I got an email from Oslo University last night, asking if I wanted to teach a course on colonial and postcolonial literature in the spring. I emailed them ages and ages ago, and they said they didn’t have anything at the moment but they’d keep me in mind. I hadn’t expected to hear from them [...]

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School’s out

I felt a bit sad after my class today. It really has been lovely being involved with these students in this way. The relationship between teachers and students is a unique one. I have been a student for most of my life (eek – eight years of university education), so it is nice to see [...]

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Why you should read Francis Webb (with a medievalist interlude)

Because he’s different from anything you’ve ever read, or ever will read. Because he fools you into thinking he’s naive or obtuse before you realise he’s something else altogether. Because he knits his stanzas together with rhyme schemes so cleverly that you don’t even know they’re there. Because – just sometimes – his words make [...]

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Teaching Rainbows

The last two days have been a blur of marking essays and seminar preparation. I felt quite irritable about marking the essays because they pulled me away from the last stages of fixing up my chapter. But it has been interesting to see what my students are capable of (one essay in particular was utterly [...]

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And this was a good week

The view from our kitchen.
I met with my supervisors on Wednesday, and they liked my chapter!!! This is my last chapter. It was pretty tough to write and I was worried they’d tear it apart. Instead they said all kinds of nice things like I’m streaming ahead on my own now, they’re happy to sit [...]

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Stammerer

I once wrote a poem that went like this:

i know the cruelty of consonantsthe sweep deep swishof sss-ss-ssss, the fish gapingvowels
BURST!
BURST!
i want to floatsoft drifting word-seaslide through meaningweightless/fluid/bright
BUT
Kookaburra laughKcKckkccckkKcckkchelicopter wings whirringshatter air
you guess my wordssteal
RIP
from my throat
CUT
with clear tongueprecise mouth, cruel
my wordschoking, knocking, flappingdying moths
stillborn

This was ten years ago. I was [...]

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Lots of good stuff

Pink clouds above the red terrace.
I am very excited. On Monday it finally started to sink in that I’m going to Australia. I’m heading down to London tomorrow night, and we fly out on Sunday. We have a day and a night in LA, and six days in New Zealand with my parents, before heading [...]

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Teaching structure

I only have two writing workshops left to teach, and I’ve been wondering how helpful they actually are. They must at least be a bit helpful, because (most of the time) the students turn up, and it’s entirely voluntary. Because of the workshop format, we don’t have time to give a lot of one on [...]

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Teaching, writing, learning

Teaching is a lot of fun. At the moment I’m leading a weekly essay writing workshop. It’s great fun on two levels: preparing for the class each week, and interacting with the students. On the weekend I got together two pages of dot-points of what I thought was most important about essay writing. They seemed [...]

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