How can it already be the last Saturday in July?
Soon it will be time to shift our collective attention to autumn. This week began the shift, with my dean contacting me to rearrange my schedule--but it was a good phone call, the kind where I end up with a better schedule. I have not always been that lucky, and I am grateful.
Soon it will be time to read something new--I got Alison Bechdel's latest book from the library last night. But in some ways, it will be a return to the old. Sure it's not officially the dykes to look out for who are all grown up now. But I suspect it will be like visiting old college friends.
I am hoping that much of my autumn will feel like revisiting old literary friends from college days. I spent part of this week trying to remember the name of a book that came out when I was last teaching this literature, a book about the women of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. Yesterday it just popped into my head: A Passionate Sisterhood. And lo and behold, the public library has it! I've requested it and should be able to get it before I need to teach the material.
I remember loving it so much that I bought my own copy back in the early days of this century and promptly never taught that literature of the early days of the British Romantic era much again. Did I keep the book when we moved 3 years ago? I can imagine thinking my days of teaching that literature had come and gone and getting rid of it. I can also imagine that I kept it for sentimental reasons.
I am wondering if this fall will also feel like a time when I meet up with my old creative writing self. Clearly I am not going to write a novel--or even take notes on a novel--this summer. But maybe teaching a creative writing class will inspire me in new ways, or in old ways. I'd be grateful for either.
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