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:

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.