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Ironic as it may be, being in a graduate writing program and actually writing seem to be antithetical. Looking at my submission stats for 2008 I discovered that they’re way, way down: 26 subs for the year, down from a career-high 51 in 2007 and 39 in 2006. Worse, it’s really the same batch of stories going round and round without a lot of fresh stuff mixed in to liven things up.

The problem is one of balance. The struggle is to find time to prepare for the classes I’m taking as well as for the class I’m teaching. Add to this the admin position I hold and the time I’m dedicating to preparing for my preliminary exams next year and the brain is getting close to maxed out. Then subtract time for eating, sleeping, and commuting (8 hours—the equivalent of a full workday lost) and there’s not a lot left over for the time consuming process of proper manuscript preparation and submission.

The situation is also worsened by the fact that I’ve spent the last couple summers working on a novel rather than cranking out new short stories. I do have a set of stories that need some final revisions before they go but it’s a real challenge to carve out the time necessary to get them up to snuff, and I see no good reason (and plenty of bad ones) to send out sub-par work just to pump up my number of subs and feel good about sending stuff out.

Impatience is probably the word for what I’m experiencing. The Ph.D. program I’m in is intentionally front-loaded, meaning they pile on the work in the first couple years so you can have the remaining years to work on your writing. I’ve also been advised to rearrange my workload to reflect these priorities, in this order: my writing, my classes, my teaching. Maybe it’s because I’m a perfectionist, or maybe it’s because my writing doesn’t have the immediacy of the other two, but I can’t allow myself to do that.

And this has been my least-favorite semester thus far. The required “teaching composition” course I’m taking is a lot of work, preparing for classes for the first time is a lot of work, keeping track of administrative details for my part-time job is a lot of work, and I’m on the road more than ever. I’m done with required coursework next semester and should have my prelims behind me by next Thanksgiving, so things should relax a little by then. School-wise anyway…

I’m almost done with Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman on audio and I’ve been enjoying it. I found out relatively early that this collection of short stories demands your complete attention and isn’t the best choice for audio, but as long as I can focus on it (read: not at 6:00 AM while driving to school) then everything is okay. If I’m prone to daydreaming or needing to split my attention, I lose what’s going on almost immediately.

I guess what I find most interesting is how I really enjoy some stories (the title story, “Chance Traveller,” “A Folklore for My Generation,” “Tony Takitani,” and others) and how some really fall flat (”Aeroplane” and “The Ice Man”) as they feel too straightforward, almost allegorical. Still, there are far more hits than misses here and I plan on moving to Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore next.

Current Mood: Okay |

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I finished Harry Matthew’s The Journalist yesterday and quite enjoyed it although, like many books in my restrictions and obstructions class, it wouldn’t appeal to a broad audience. The central idea is that the narrator has suffered a breakdown of some sort and has decided to write a journal to track the events of his life. He is having an affair with his brother-in-law’s wife, his son is acting strangely, and he’s stuck in a dull job. Early on, he stops taking his lorarzepan, and as the medication wears off, his paranoia increases and he begins obsessively detailing the minutia of his life in his journal and develops an impossibly complex categorization to track his thoughts, feelings, dreams, and “objective” statements. As I said in class, I liked the book’s strong database aesthetic.

I also picked up a number of books from Half-Price books last weekend, all of which will be on my Ph.D. preliminary exams: The Tin Drum, Dorderlands/La Frontera, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Song of Solomon, and House of Spirits. I also checked out from the library Magic(al) Realism: A New Critical Idiom by Maggie Bowers (which looks concise), and Magic Realism: Theory, History, and Community by Zaomra et al. (which looks comprehensive). These two critical books should help me flesh out my “major” area, which is mostly going to be classics of “magical realism” and contemporary fantasy/slipstream.

I also received my mid-term evaluations for the composition course I’m teaching and the results were very positive. There were a few blase’ responses, but the only sharp comments were directed at the assignments (which I have no control over) and the format of the course (small group discussion, large group discussion, and paper writing…is that really a fair criticism of a course entitled “Introduction to College Writing”?).

Otherwise, my semester works like this: busy Monday, crushed on Tuesday, recover Wednesday, suffer Thursday, work like hell Friday, recover Saturday/Sunday. All things being equal, I prefer a steady schedule that keeps me busy rather than this peak-valley-peak-valley routine, which absolutely exhausts me.

The ankle is feeling almost back to normal after rolling it Saturday—a four-day turnaround, about par for the course. I will probably give indoor a go on Monday, so wish me luck…

Current Mood: Sure |
Currently Listening To - The Hold Steady - “Almost Killed Me”

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So, Spurs ditched the magic Juande in favor of ‘Arry Redknapp. I think axing Ramos was the right move because he clearly did not command the respect of the players, winning a grand total of four league games while in charge. In one game, ‘Arry accumulated more points than Ramos did in eight. And as most sensible people realized, Spurs are now three points (one more win) from pulling out of the drop zone—provided other teams keep losing. I think three out of Bolton, Fulham, Stoke, and West Brom will get relegated. It’s early days, but I can see Newcastle and Spurs muscling out enough points over the long haul to get to the comfort zone before spring. (Speaking of which, can you believe Hull? You’d have to think 40 points would keep you safe, and they’re already half-way there in just 9 games with 29 more to play.)

I’m pretty excited about Liverpool beating Chelski today, and hope to high heaven that they’ll still be contenders come January. A certain Ars* lead the table for long periods last fall before falling apart in the New Year, so early results do not guarantee late returns. Still, it’s better to win than lose…

Back to ‘Arry Redknapp for a second, it’s an appointment that seems solid but doesn’t get the heart racing. He generally has had a galvanizing effect for the teams he’s managed, but he’s also been dodgy in the transfer market. Spurs savior? Not hardly. At least he should keep them up. Emphasis on should.

In good news, last weekend Man City United spanked the opposition 8-2 on a lovely, sunny afternoon. Yesterday however, we lost 1-0 on a cold, windy day on an abomination of a field that had a serious slant to it and a huge patch of mud in the center of the park. The conditions were almost unplayable and I figured it would either be 0-0 or someone would score on a fluke or mistake, and unfortunately that’s what happened. Our keeper slipped throwing the ball into play and it landed at the feet of one of their strikers, who popped it into the empty net and then celebrated like he’d actually done something incredible. We went on to miss about three chances that were nearly as easy, only to see our strikers get in each others way (twice) and blaze over the bar from a ridiculous position.

Worst of all, I rolled my ankle getting shoved over in a mud patch and will be hobbled for a week or so. (sigh) Titanium breakaway ankles…

You can say what you want about MLS’ two-conference system and the playoffs (I often say they’re dumb) but it does set the stage for some pretty good late-season drama. Colorado vs. Real Salt Lake was a perfect example. Because Amy trumped me on the remote, we ended up watching some real estate shows and, during the commercials, I’d seen that the Rapids went up 1-0. I figured that while we were watching Trading Spaces, two things would happen: either Colorado would score another goal and ice the game, or they wouldn’t. Turns out they wouldn’t, which led to frenetic last ten minutes that I did get to watch, including RSL’s dramatic and late, late equalizer that saw them go through to the playoffs for their very first time. Good stuff.

On the writing front, I was boosted by the news that a friend of mine who has a boatload of sales to highly respected literary mags says he sends out his stories to about twenty markets at the same time. In the same conversation, he said he was amazed that I had the publications I did from sending out my stories one at a time, due to the restriction most f/sf markets have on not accepting simultaneous subs.

This is certainly good news and helps me get my head around how to succeed in the lit mag world. I typically get very cordial, personal rejections from the f/sf mags I submit to and rarely, if ever, get so much as a hand-written “thanks” on the form rejections I get from lit mags. Rather than taking this personally, I’m guessing I just need to cast nets a little farther and a little wider.

Who has time for reading books in grad school? My reading list is way down this semester for a variety of reasons, mostly because my time is devoured by teaching and my admin position, and my reading time is dedicated to articles, not books. In a word, this sucks. I have a long list of stuff I want to read but it will have to wait.

Current Mood: Bleh |
Currently Listening To - The Hold Steady - “Almost Killed Me”

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Every once in awhile you read a book that somehow warps your perspective. On everything. I’m about half done with Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, which we’re reading for my restrictions & obstructions writing workshop, and I adore it.

I don’t know what it is—it’s certainly not a novel, but calling the individual “chapters” pieces of flash fiction doesn’t seem right either. All these chapters (rarely more than a page or two) do cohere under their section titles, but in a very strange way. Marcus is doing some semantic world-building here, creating a new world through warping language. I have a feeling I will be coming back to this book about a thousand more times in my life.

Enough about me. Here’s one entitled “Snoring, Accidental Sleep” as an example:

Snoring, language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence. The snoring person can be stuffed with cool air to slow the delivery of its language, but perspiration froths at key points on the hips and back when artificial air is introduced, and thus the sleep becomes sketchy and riddled with noise. It is often best to cull the sleeper forth from static communication by responding to its snores with apneic barks—sounds produced without air. The effect of the barks is to isolate each aspect of the snore sound by slowing down the delivery—riding the sleeper until the snore breaks into separate words. Decoders should sit on the bed and jostle the sleeper’s stomach. This further dispatches the clusters that often form when the sleeper speaks all at once (snores). The decoder is then better able to decipher the word blocks. When analyzed, the messages are often simple. Pull me out, they say, the water has risen to the base of my neck.

Put about 40 of those together under headings like God, House, and The Society and you have this book. I should also point out that each section also has a list of terms to better help you (?) understand the text. Terms like:

* shirt of noise Garment, fabric, or residue that absorbs and holds sound, storing messages for journeys. Its loudness cannot be soothed. It can destroy the member which inhabits it.

* Nitzel’s Gamble The act or technique of filling the lungs with water. The chance was first taken by the Nitzel in Green River.

*Jennifer The inability to see. Partial blindness in regards to hands. To jennifer is to feign blindness. The diseases resulting from these acts are called jennies.

I am quite positive that this book isn’t for everyone. But if you read these and found them strange, dense, and fascinating, then consider buying the book. I turn pages in a state of wonder, and that’s no mean feat.

Current Mood: Happy |

We’re having student conferences this week (15-20 minutes per student, 20 students) in lieu of classes, so I arranged the appointments on Mon-Tues-Fri so I’ve had Wed and Thurs at home and man, has it been lovely. The difference between driving three days a week versus four is pretty significant and I’ve gotten a lot done with that extra time. It’s amazing how getting just a little more sleep and getting a little more time away from driving reaps generous rewards in terms of alertness and productivity.

In case you hadn’t noticed the trend, check out my “Current Mood” history for the last couple weeks:

9/22 - Current Mood: Zzzzzzzz |
9/17 - Current Mood: Pretty Goo…zzzzzzzzzzzz |
9/14 - Current Mood: To Continue a Theme, Tired |
9/13 - Current Mood: Victorious but Beat |
9/12 - Current Mood: Pleased |
9/12 - Current Mood: Okay, But Tired |

I’m really enjoying the teaching and I think the students are learning, which is a good thing. The course on composition teaching theory is pretty frustrating at times since practically everything we read is counter intuitive (and is not how any of us were ever taught). The general theory is that the instructor must constantly push against being an “authority” (on anything, really) and always push the students to explore, struggle, and discover on their own. Again, generally speaking, any sort of directive or qualitative remark (i.e. “You should change this confusing sentence”) closes down ways of thinking, limits possibilities, and reconfirms hierarchies of student/teacher and novice/expert.

Of course, running against this is the fact that most of us instructors are twice as old as the average freshman and have learned a thing or two ourselves about reading and writing given that we are all, you know, Ph.D. students in English. While in theory I appreciate the idea of making these students to struggle to figure out how they can write better, I also think it’s silly to pretend that 1) an institutional student/teacher hierarchy doesn’t already exist (and will exist as long as teachers submit grades) and 2) that sometimes a student will be helped more by just being told something straight-up rather than always redirecting them into avenues of flailing and frustration.

I also feel that a lot of this theory we’re reading is to keep us honest, so we don’t stand before the class and expound Writing’s Necessary Truths from on high. But often it sets you to feel as though nothing you’re doing is “right,” even though I also understand that this frustration and struggling to come to terms with how to teach college composition is also part of the comp program’s master plan: make the student question, reassess, find his or her own way of making meaning. Only in this instance, I am the student.

Just because I recognize this doesn’t mean I have to like it though, or even buy into it.

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I’ve been putting in some serious work trying to develop a book list for my preliminary exam, which looks like I will be taking next fall or spring. Originally I intended to do Modern Fiction as my major area and Native American Literature and Slipstream/New Wave Fabulism/New Weird as my minors. A few things have changed.

First, I wanted to focus more on world literature so I included a mess of Latin American writers along with a few Asian and African works that all loosely fall under the umbrella of “magic realism.” That meant booting some of the American and Europeans. In addition, as I’ve been reading Brian McHale’s excellent Postmodernist Fiction I’ve learned that a lot of the books I like comfortably fall under the even broader category of postmodernist writing. Then a faculty member suggested that the “slipstream” minor might seem to similar to the major area, and that I should consider a minor that takes advantage of my computer/web skills and my interest in visual aspects of storytelling.

The “new” minor looks to be something along the lines of Visual Narratives, Hypertext, and Textuality. This means looking at non-traditional books like House of Leaves and A Humument, e-texts like Patchwork Girl and Afternoon, A Story, and probably some graphic novels. Overall, this possibility excites me.

Anyway, that’s a long post to make up for weeks of relative inactivity.

Oh, my O-30 team Mad City United leaped to the top of the league with a 3-0 win last Thursday, putting us at 3-0-0 on the season with a +13 goal difference. Alas, I wasn’t there since it was a weeknight game, but I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s match after a week’s layoff.

Current Mood: Good (and not that tired) |

I finished reading my first audio book of the academic year, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate—and don’t let the post title fool you, I did listen in English, not Spanish. I thought it was okay.

I am planning on plowing through a lot of staples of Latin American magical realism in the next year, and Esquivel (Mexico) is definitely on that list. Without any doubt, all the book’s highlights are sections that prominently feature the supernatural goings-on that define magical realism, but if you take those parts away then the book is a pretty standard story. I would have appreciated more twists and turns, though I did like some of the weird compressions of time that Esquivel employs.

The novel’s subtext bothered me though. Tita, the protagonist, is very critical of the family tradition that says the youngest daughter must take care of the mother until her death, and thus cannot marry; however, she isn’t critical at all of “giving her heart” to either of her suitors, both of whom “want her to be his.” Esquivel doesn’t trouble the concept that women belong to men, and Tita’s central concerns don’t go further than 1) facing a life without a man, and 2) choosing which man to give herself to.

Granted, historical conditions may not have allowed for many other options, but Esquivel could have portrayed Tita as being conflicted or upset regarding the narrow avenue of choices available to her. Worse, the truly self-sufficient woman in the novel is Mama Elena, who is seen as gruff, unforgiving, and generally nasty. Even Tita’s sister who ends up being a leader in the revolutionary army is always mentioned alongside her captain-lover.

Getting away from gender, there are some other ugly things going on. As if in punishment for her severeness, Mama Elena is crippled and therefore helpless and dependent in her last days. One of Tita’s sisters is punished by becoming overweight and cursed with bad breath and flatulence. Another sister, who is of mixed blood as her mother had relations with an escaped American slave, winds up being a prostitute. While it’s not prominent, the suggestion here is that a person gets paid back for their “nature,” as though all disabled are weak, as though being overweight equates to being a glutton, as though being a crossblood automatically dooms one to a none-too-pleasant destiny.

Again, the story takes place in the late 19th century and I have no doubt that these biases existed—but the book was published in 1989, and I prefer contemporary authors to challenge these biases rather than reconfirm them.

Current Mood: Okay, But Tired |

It’s that time again to post the classes I’m taking and what I’ll be reading and working on in the coming months. Classes don’t officially start until September 2nd but in reality they’ve already begun, as we had a mini-class for the teaching composition course and I have to have a book read for my other class that meets on Tuesday.

For readers not in the know, I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at UW-Milwaukee. This year I lucked out by landing a 25% Creative Writing Program Assistant job and a 25% Teaching Assistant position, which means I teach one composition class instead of two (that other 50% goes to finishing coursework) and I’m locked into the PA/TA position for the year. I’m also guaranteed an additional four years of TA funding.

The classes with brief descriptions and reading lists after the break:

ENG 701 - Teaching College Composition
ENG 813 - Fiction Workshop: Obstructions and Restrictions

Overall, this semester is somewhat daunting but doable.
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I just finished Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction and really got a lot out of it. A professor recommended this book to our class and since I’m theory-weak, I figured I would check it out. Culler not only explains what theory is and isn’t, he also succinctly explains how and why theory came about and gives examples of appropriate application. Interestingly, Culler only goes over the different schools of theory in a brief index (structuralism vs. post-structuralism vs. deconstruction, etc.) as if to illustrate they are both important yet not the focus of literary studies in and of themselves. There is no One Theory to rule them all, One Theory to find them, One Theory to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, regardless of how some scholars make it seem.

I hadn’t heard of the “Very Brief Introduction” series until we read the one on Dada and Surrealism for class last semester, but I really like them. They’re like the For Dummies series or Complete Idiot’s Guides, except of course the “Very Brief Introductions” treat the reader as an intelligent specimen trying to come to grips with a specific academic topic rather than, say, gardening. They’re loaded with suggestions for further reading and extremely helpful for those of us who are constantly being made to felt as if we don’t know everything about Subject X then we know nothing at all.

The complete list makes for compelling reading in itself and more than a few titles have caught my eye: the ones on postmodernism and the Spanish Civil War are both topics I know a little about but would like to know more, and want recommendations for further reading. Check this series out.

I had two 20 GB iPods that died on me. One gave me the sad iPod and sounded like a spice grinder when you fired it up, the other formatted itself one day and then refused to mount in iTunes. I did my due diligence and tried all sorts of diagnostics and restores but came up with nothing. I had two expensive paperweights on my hand.

Happily, I got about $26 for the pair of them via BuyMyTronics.com, a company that buys dead electronic equipment. Filling out the form was very simple, I shipped them off, and received my PayPal payment today. It was quick, easy, and painless, and after shipping I came away with a $21 profit from a couple of devices that were going to be thrown out. Now let’s see, don’t I have a dead cell phone around here somewhere…

I’ve been listening to a lot of The Hold Steady since hanging out with my brothers in Minnesota. I thought they were okay at first, but they’ve really grown on me. It’s refreshing to hear a band sing about the Midwest for once.

Current Mood: Fine |

Well, I’ll finish Zane Grey’s classic Western Riders of the Purple Sage today. Overall, I thought the book was okay. Not great, not terrible, not recommended. I liked it a lot better than The Virginian and its overt claims about the frontier and the man who tamed it, and even though ROTPS has a more complicated plot and more interesting characters, there’s still a lot left to be desired, at least for this reader.

Lessons I learned from Zane Grey (but already knew anyway):

* Chekov’s gun must not be so large as to obscure the rest of the wall. Mention that Balancing Rock could some day fall and block the entrance to Surprise Valley once and you’re golden. Even twice is fine, since it’s such an imposing natural feature that such a comment would come naturally to anyone upon first seeing it. On the eighth mentioning, the reader is beginning to suspect that Balancing Rock may not be in the same place at the end of the novel that it was at the start, and when the cowboy hero Lassiter mentions that as young man he used to love to push boulders down the side of mountains just to see them fall… well, let’s just say that old Zane maybe tipped his hand a little too much for the ending to be a surprise.

* The same goes for one of the least surprising “mysteries” of the novel, the relationship between the rustler Oldring and the infamous Black Rider, a young girl named Bess. It’s fairly clear that Bess and Bern Venters (cowboy hero junior) are going to wind up as a couple when they reenact the roles of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden during their time together in Surprise Valley. Yet when Venters asks her, “What were you to Oldring?” trying to get to the nature of their relationship, Bess blushes. Let’s think about this. Oldring is an older man, Bess is a young woman. They had a close bond, and Oldring kept the rest of his rustlers away from her. So that means either Bess must be Oldring’s one and only… syphilis-encrusted whore? Or no, maybe there’s another cleaner (and patently obvious) option to explain their relationship. Again, less than a big surprise here.

* Here’s something that The Viriginian did right that ROTPS gets absolutely wrong: when you spend most of the novel building towards a confrontation, it’s a good idea to actually show that confrontation. Wister handles the duel between the Virginian and his nemesis rather well actually, fully painting the scene without showing the graphic violence that would have offended his gentle readers in 1902. Lassiter in ROTPS actually has two showdowns, yet both of them are told after the fact, once by a bystander, and the second by Lassiter himself. Second-hand information can be a good plot device, but at the novel’s dramatic conclusion? Not so much.

Despite these flaws, you do have to respect the first badass cowboy clad in black and willing to blow just about anyone’s teeth out the back of their head with his giant pistols. (In a brief side note, it would be fun to do a find/replace on the word “gun” and substitute the word “penis” in this book just to see how it reads—as Jane Withersteen takes Venters’ guns from him only for him to take them back as he becomes a man, and how Lassiter won’t let Jane take his gun from him and won’t let the child play with them, in addition to all the other various gun waving and brandishing that goes on in the novel).

Speaking of the Western, in reading some criticism on Cormac McCarthy I’ve noticed the works of critic Richard Slotkin mentioned a number of times and his books sound fascinating: Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890, and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Unfortunately, they each happen to be about 700 pages long (no exaggeration) but I would imagine that I’ll be reading at least one of them sometime soon.

Current Mood: Fine |

Okay FSC, something needs to be done about the show you’re airing entitled, “English Premier League Classics.” Man City vs. Bolton? Tottenham vs. Reading? Can’t you just call it “shite games from last year” and be done with it?

Yes, I am eagerly awaiting the start of the new season and the flurry of transfers that are bound to happen in the next three weeks. So I don’t have to bring myself to watching any such “classics.”

I’m reading Literary Theory: A Very Brief Introduction and hope to finish that and Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton before the start of the semester. The Very Short Introduction series is very good, and I really like how the author of this one, Jonathan Culler, goes out of his way to say things like this:

“Theory is thus a source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstagings: ‘What you haven’t read Lacan? How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject?’ Or ‘how can you write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault’s account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization of women’s bodies and Gayatri Spivak’s demonstration of the role of colonialism in the construction of the metropolitan subject>’ At times, theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence condemning you to hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion of one task will bring not respite but further difficult assignments (’Spivak? Yes, but have you read Benita Parry’s critique of Spivak and her response?’)” (39-40)

That last bit sums up some graduate classes (and some students) pretty well. It’s the upstaging that bristles, but I also think it’s also somewhat natural. I know I have been guilty of challenging (or even correcting) my classmates’ comments about genres they know little about—for instance, off-base notions of what constitutes fantasy or science fiction nowadays. It’s not to be a know-it-all but rather to correct misinformation before it can spread.

I’ve also come to appreciate that a large part of being an academic is sticking to what you know. Two classes is all it takes for a legitimate minor field for the Ph.D. (about 20-30 books plus hefty criticism) but a lot of times, in a field like Native American Lit, that’s about 20-30 books more than the person you may be talking to at some given time. Professors naturally pull their classes back to their areas of expertise—for instance, if they’re interested in broad topics like “law” or “the city” then they apply those to the curriculum, regardless if it’s 18th Century English Novel or 20th Century American Postmodernism. But think about it: if you had to stand in front of a room full of people and talk (or at least start or referee conversations), wouldn’t you want it to be in your comfort zone?

Along with this, I’ve come to grips with what it means to be a Creative Writing Ph.D. It means, more or less, what you know that others don’t (or know less about) is how fiction, non-fiction, and poetry “work” on a technical level, and how things get published in today’s world. That’s it. I don’t need to rake myself over the coals grappling with Spivak and Foucault and Derrida because that’s not what I’m eventually going to be hired for. As a couple professors have said about theory for creative writers, “Use it as much as it helps you, but don’t let it get in the way.”

Pretty good advice, I have to say. Of course, the ability to at least understand conversations about literary theory is pretty much expected for any Ph.D. in English (as well it should be) but I find myself on much more natural ground talking about writing technique than literary theory. Which is yet another sign that I’m probably in the right program after all…

Current Mood: Bushed |