Playing Catsup

Hello my friends! Here at Casa Peeler everything is focused on gearing up for the coming semester! Over Spring 2010, I’ll be teaching two sections of ENG 115, which is a rhetoric/composition course. Unlike the ENG 105 I have taught up until now, however, this course is based in English Literature. This means that I get to teach the art of writing as part of the discipline of English Lit and, more specifically, means that I get to teach MORE LITERATURE! Yay!

In this class, I’ll be teaching a lot of my canonical favorites. For example, I love me some “baby, we’re gonna die so we should go ahead and DOOOO EEEEET” poetry by Marvell and Donne. I allude to one of these poems in Tempest Rising. Anybody know which one and where? We’ll also be reading Oedipus Rex (poor Jocasta!) and my favorite Shakespeare play, Othello (“Put out the light and then put out the light…”). We’ve also go some Hemingway and Chopin on offer, amongst many others. I’m really psyched to get away from ENG 105 and to teach some of my favorite non-Modernist lit to eager (to sleep) Freshman. They’re not gonna know what hit ’em. 😉

I’m also teaching a night class of my ENG 215, which is an Intro to Fiction course for non-majors. I LOVE teaching this class, it’s my favorite, and it’s so fun to teach it at night. I love my “traditional” (meaning young) students, but teaching this class to a room full of more mature students, who’ve had some real life experience, is very rewarding in a very different way. With a room of nineteen year olds, it’s introducing them to ideas they haven’t necessarily lived through (fear of mortality, the decay of love or marriage or both, the passing of youth, etc.). This is very fun, and presents its own rewards and challenges, but teaching a night class (where the students are usually older) means the class is more of a conversation than a lecture.

Finally, I’m teaching Modern Poetry. All I have to say is AAAAAAAAGH. While my background is Modernism, and I have read the hell out of Pound and Eliot, a lot of this material is going to be as new to me as it is to the students. This situation is always challenging, obviously, but it’s also so rewarding. I like learning as much as I do teaching, and these sorts of classes are a great opportunity for me to branch out a bit.

So that’s my life for the next few months, in a nutshell.

Writing wise, I just mailed off the final pass edits for Tracking the Tempest to Orbit! Yay! She’s going to look GORGEOUS. Here’s some piccys:

IMG_0363 IMG_0364 IMG_0362

The last picture is of the wee teaser of Tempest’s Legacy! Exciting!

So that’s me done with book two. A fact that boggles my mind, on a number of levels, but that’s okay. I’m used to feeling a bit boggled. 😉

Posted by Nicole Peeler

Author, Professor, Lover, Fighter

9 thoughts on “Playing Catsup”

  1. @NicolePeeler It's gonna be a great semester! Looking forward to reports about how it's going.

  2. This sounds so cool. I often wish I had went into teaching, but then I slap myself for regretting things I can't change plus I'm happy. Okay, that was an odd ramble… I can't wait to read the new book! On the poetry– I've read Eliot, but not Pound for some bizarre reason. I am now inspired to visit the library and pick up both of them! My Psuedo Emo Teen is a junior and has taken his AP Lit class this year already. It's so cool talking about literature with him. Thanks for the update.

  3. Now that is one busy semester. 🙂 I did manage one fiction class in my engineering career. We got to read Frankenstein, how much fun is that…plus, it tends to me more interesting than deciding which train will reach city X first if 1 is traveling 50mph….AAGHHH!!!

    BTW, love the interview at the League, but the Ikea's in the South are much different than ours in the midwest. Interesting mideval theme

  4. Literary allusion in Tempest Rising: Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," at the end of Chapter Ten! ("World enough and time…")

    I love it!

  5. Excellent job, A. J.! 🙂 Well done!

    Had we but world enough, and time . . . 😉

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