All Systems Go!

An update on my summer plans. I've been officially rostered on to the schedule of events for Teens at the Glen Ellyn Public Library  -- my writing workshop has been given the green light and I'm going to be teaching a (hopefully largish) group of teens how to improve their writing the last week in June and the first three weeks of July!

I don't have words for how excited I am!


I've also got some of my freinds lined up to make some short YouTube videos on what they're now doing as writers in College. I've got a comm major who's also in my book arts class now and one of my other English major friends who is involved in our poetry club and our school newspaper! (By the way, if you're an English major friend of mine and you're reading this, email me to talk about doing one of these videos, too!)

We're winding down to our last week of the semester here at CSB; several of my friends have just returned from London where they were studying abroad. It's hard to believe I've been home from Ireland for a whole semester now -- one of my freinds brought back a a whole lot of Digestives, which I practically lived on last semester, and they really brought me back.

Today I learned two new book bindings, one of which I'm going to be using for my final book project, which is going to be printed saturday and bound sunday. Tomorrow I'm turning in a semester's worth of writing prompts and four finished essays for my Writing Essays class. Sometime between now and next Wednesday I'm writing five lesson plans for a unit I just finished timelining this morning. I had no idea how good it feels to have at least a vague idea of how you're going to fill two and a half weeks of classes. And I have a really awesome final project planned!

There hasn't been a lot of time for free writing during all of this -- I posted my one and only Percy Jackson fic to great acclaim last week and I think it's been nominated for an award. I really hope it wins -- I've never been nominated for an online award before. Work is still progressing bit by bit on my Life of Godfrey piece, and I'm hoping I have some time in the carride on the way home to brainstorm a little bit.

Safe and Sound At School Again

I had the amazing and somewhat predictable revelation yesterday as I was paying my social calls (yes, I pay social calls, so very 19th century of me) that I am now AN UPPERCLASSMAN. Well, Upperclasswoman, really, but we can argue for inclusive language later. One of my friends is a Residence Assistant (RA) in one of the sophomore dorms and I went to go visit her. On my way, I had to walk through the building I lived in last year, and I realized, as I was walking the same route I usually had to walk to get to my friends' rooms last year, that I was a Junior, and that, theoretically speaking, I did not belong in this building.

It was WILD.

So I'm back at the always beautiful Saint Ben's, getting ready for my first day of classes. I've got a lot of good ones this semester, and hopefully the things I'm studying will contribute a lot to the content of this blog. Today I have Mid-Level Literature and Language Pedagogy, which is a big and complicated name for a class in which they are going to teach me how to teach English (very exciting, very scary at the same time) and Writing Essays, a class where they will...teach me how to write essays. That one kind of explains itself.

Hopefully Pedagogy will supply me with a lot of interesting topics on how english is being taught today and how online literacy is changing the face of reading in our society, a topic which this blog and this blogger are uniquely positioned to describe. And Writing Essays, one hopes, will also help this blog pull itself together in the way of cohesive points and arguments.

Tomorrow I have only one class during the day, the class I am taking to fulfill my art requirement. While this blog pulls me forward further into the electronic age, the age when the demise of newsprint and hard copy seems to be on every publisher's mind, my art class will pull me back. It is called Art of the Printed Book, and I will be setting type, inking presses, researching the history of print and cutting woodblocks to my heart's content all semester long. I'm super excited and I hope that between those three classes, my night class, and my 10 hours a week at the library I'll be able to keep myself occupied.

If not -- well, you'll be seeing a lot more posts on this blog. I've got some good ideas in the days to come, including my theory on why I have writer's block and a review of some biopics about famous writing types!

End of Semester

My friend Matt put finals week very eloquently the other day:

Finals week is for everyone else -- for English majors, finals week is the week BEFORE finals when they turn in their final papers.
(For more on Matt, check out his Blesis -- Blog for my Thesis -- here)

So very true. So, in lieu of a real post, an excerpt from the paper I'm working on now, my second-to-last Post Colonial Lit paper.

In the great Literature family, we could say that Post-colonialism is something like the middle child, trying to stand up to the reputation of their older, more recognized sibling while at the same time trying to strike out on their own to form a new reputation altogether.[1] Trapped by accepted modes of transmission for stories, both in terms of language and form, Postcolonial authors still continue trying to tell stories that are relevant to them and counteract the last generation’s misinformation. This has been the case in all of the seven postcolonial novels we have read so far this semester, authors trying to tell stories that are relevant to themselves, their people and place, and their causes. Such is also the case in Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago, a 2007 novel about the lives of Egyptian immigrants and some of the Americans in their lives living and working in and around the city of Chicago. Throughout his novel, Aswany uses many of the same techniques the authors we read in class did to make a point about how we think we understand life and minority populations in the United States.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gives us a wonderful example not only of middle child trying to step beyond older child’s shadow, but middle child openly making fun of the whole concept of the western construction of novels. With his absurdly omnipotent Saleem, the young man narrating the story with a healthy helping of god-like panache who takes credit for everything that happens to anyone in the story, Rushdie suggests that one person is insufficient to knowing the whole story, and that many perspectives are needed both to relate the story and also provide connections between all of the characters. That Saleem should be responsible for all events, large and small, is almost laughable. Rushdie’s other lesson in this book is that, at the same time one person cannot know a whole story, a single character cannot be a story unto themselves, and many characters are needed to fully form a cohesive tale. Saleem makes himself into the embodiment of the country of India, just as older sibling’s novels once made other main characters into the embodiments of virtue or experience, held up for the world to see and compare to. Saleem cannot possibly be India, and the experiences of the west’s chosen main characters cannot possibly be everyone’s. Aswany uses both of these concepts to a certain extent in Chicago – realizing that one person cannot know the whole story, he distributes the experiences of the story between many people, providing the necessary perspectives to fully understand the events. And none of these characters are the stereotypes the western audience is accustomed to seeing in their literature – the women are not submissive and veiled (or at least, they do not seem so), the men are neither feminine no brutish, and their culture is not one that wants to blow America to smithereens. Aswany uses his diverse and different cast to show his readers that the story of ‘the immigrant experience’ cannot be shown by one voice alone, just as Rushdie shows India’s story cannot be told by one voice alone either.

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[1] I am aware that the ‘older/ younger’ divide is a poor choice of words. Certainly the argument can be made (and proven) that non-western literature has been around for generations longer than western literature. However, the west refuses to see it that way, (the entire reason we have this divide in the first place) and so, for the purposes of this paper, the categories will remain as I have named them.