Writing life-- books and AP courses...

The writing life is a strange thing, eh? 

I have had a few poems accepted lately (and an even number rejected), but the big surprise came two days ago in the form of an email at ten o'clock at night: my second chapbook is going to be published! Same publisher as before, but since the entries to the contest were read blind by an independent judge, it does not seem that they chose my manuscript because of prior association. I didn't win the contest (alas), but my work was one of eight non-placing books that were chosen for publication. I'll take it. I have no idea what the timeline looks like this go-around, but last time it was about eighteen months. Which is good-- I'm still reeling a little from the release of What to Keep. I'm still hoping to do some readings, but I have not been pushing that lately, what with school things and so on. I should be more aggressive, but there's only so much time in the day/week/month.

So, the new chapbook is titled Relearning the Body, and it's a different sort of collection entirely; one that focuses, at least in large part, about some of the things we learn about our aging selves as women. The title poem, oddly enough, is one of the ones that have been accepted lately, and I received word that it should be up online in mid-September. That's a good time, I think-- by then, the early stages of hey, I have a book coming out may be in full swing.

In other writing-ish news, I think I've finally appeased all of the parties (administration, mainly) and I will have a slightly new teaching schedule in the next school year. I'm going to the AP training in July so that I can legitimately teach AP Language and AP Literature. Neither have been on my personal radar, but it makes the school rank better on those data-driven ranking things. I will be teaching a new course, though, Writing About Literature, which is also a dual-credit course. That is something I'm super excited about. I teach those strategies anyhow in all of my classes, but this one will be specifically geared to reading, discussing, and learning how to dig into a work without damaging it or one's understandings of it. 

Nifty, eh? And I tweaked College Comp I to accommodate AP Language. I'm adding in some of that same analysis, and we'll be focusing on two texts: Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. After almost four decades, I have learned one thing: if I don't shake things up, I get bored, and that never goes well for my students. 

That all said, I'm off to work. Have a good day!

C