Running, Running, Running into National Poetry Month and Holy Week: An Unfinished Post

It's the kind of week where I feel like I'm running, running, running.  Even though I have a plan for my classes, there's still prep work to do, and I'm behind in my grading.  It's Holy Week, so I have two sermons, not my usual one.  It's a good kind of tired I'm feeling, since I like everything I'm doing, but tiredness is tiredness.

Let me record a few fragments, so that I don't lose them.

--It is National Poetry Month.  I will probably not do as much as I have in past years.  But I will mention it to my English students.  Maybe I shouldn't--I didn't mention Women's History Month or Black History Month.

--Yesterday I did my communal poetry project with my English 102 class, a project that I first described in this blog post.  I can't always tell what my students are thinking, and yesterday, although I tried to have class conversation after the creating of the poems and my reading of them, they were stonily quiet.  So I decided to have them write about the process.  I was surprised by how many students enjoyed it.  I do realize that some of them might have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, but I think that some of them were genuine.  It's good to remember that I might be misinterpreting my students' silence.  Across the classes that I teach, semester after semester, I don't find students wanting to be verbal in class.  It does seem like a generational shift.

--Yesterday I heard about a different kind of writing process, the Frederick Buechner Writing Competition.  I was particularly intrigued by the wide range of types of writing the judges will consider, but this passage made me decide to enter: "The editorial board will give special consideration to pieces that discuss Buechner’s work and themes, to literary and theological essays, and to sermons — the written sermon being an undervalued art form that was particularly close to Frederick Buechner’s heart."  So I decided to enter:  more in this blog post.  

--I've been thinking about the life of a sermon writer.  Some sermons are so much easier than others--and it's often not the ones I would have thought would be easier, back before I was writing sermons every week.  And it's interesting to think about how writing a weekly blog post about the Sunday Gospel text is different from a sermon.  My blog posts are usually half the length of a sermon, and for much of my blogging, I've been able to assume that no one would be reading my blog.  Sermons are so different.

--My congregation in Bristol, TN is the most attentive group of listeners I've ever had, more so than students certainly, but also more so than other congregations.