A Week of Interviews and Contracts

It has been a whirlwind week, and I'm not talking about the "will he or won't he" tariff chaos.  It's been a week where I have multiple seminary assignments due--from here on out, they will be more spread out.  I do think that if I was smart, I would go ahead and get the final projects done, and maybe I will.

I had an interview this week.  On Tuesday, I interviewed to be part of the Summer 2025 cohort of the CPE program at the Asheville VA Hospital.  I wasn't sure what to expect--after all, it's not like a job interview, where people are trying to determine if they want me to be part of their lives for what could be a long time.  

My mom sent me this e-mail, which I thought was charming in so many ways:  "Hope all goes well. You are a dynamite young lady who can ace this interview. Keep us posted! Mom."  It's been a long time since anyone called me a dynamite young lady--I certainly don't feel young anymore.

The interview went well, I thought.  It was the kind of interview where I could tell that the three people on the interview team had read my extensive application materials and thought about them and come up with incisive questions.  I answered them honestly.  The interview lasted 45 minutes, so there could have been plenty of places where I stumbled.

For example, they asked me what I hoped to learn outside of skills, what kind of self development did I hope to experience, and I said that I wanted to learn more about how to be present to people with problems that aren't fixable. I felt like it was a good answer, but they might have found it problematic.

Happily, they must have found more about me to like than reject.  Yesterday, the day after the interview, I sent a thank you e-mail, and I got a reply offering me a spot.  I wrote back to say yes.  

You might be asking why I am doing CPE this summer--aren't I graduating?  Yes, I am on schedule to graduate with my MDiv degree, but I still have requirements to complete before I am eligible for ordination.  One of them is CPE, a kind of chaplaincy training.

I also got my teaching contract for next year, signed it, and made some inquiries about health insurance.  Happily, our health insurance continues through the summer, even though technically I'm between contracts for a few months.  It is so nice to be at a place where I'm treated well.

Here it is Thursday, and it feels like I should be done with my tasks for the week.  But I still have two papers due today to finish, and seminary class tonight,  along with teaching tasks--and it's time to start thinking about my sermon for Sunday.

Well, let me get to it.  The weather seems iffy, so I'll get a walk in.

Sketching Progress

Because my writing time is limited this morning, let me post about my sketching progress.  Back in January, I made three intentions.  One of them was this:  "I have lots of ways to improve my ability to sketch a lifelike human, but I want to concentrate on faces (both from the front and profile) and hands, and not in isolation, but as part of the figures that I draw."

I'm still not great at drawing humans out of my imagination, but I've practiced by sketching humans that appear in catalogs.  Here's what I did back in January:

Here's a close up of my sketch, done with a .3 tip black pen.

Here's the original:

And here's what I did last night.  I spent roughly the same amount of time on each sketch, the January one and last night's:

Last night I used colored pens.

I'm using pens with a .5 tip (black and red) and a .1 tip (brown and burgundy).  Here's the original:

I'm pleased with my efforts.  What pleases me even more is that I reached for a sketchbook last night, as I brought my busy day to a close.

National Poetry Month Begins

It is April 1--I am astonished that it is April, astonished that the semester at Spartanburg Methodist College is almost over, astonished that the year is one quarter over, astonished that I will be done with my MDiv degree in a month.  It is National Poetry Month, and this year, like many years, I will not be writing a poem a day.

In the early days of this year, I was writing a poem a day or every other day.  I felt ideas coursing through me, and I wrote them down.  I hope to experience that situation again, but it won't be in April.  At this point, most of my creative energy needs to be directed to my seminary papers.  I don't have regrets--that writing feeds my soul and energizes me in the same way writing a poem does.

Still, I would like to get back to poetry writing.  I haven't really written much poetry since mid-March.  Let me start jotting down some ideas.  Let me start opening a Word document alongside the other work that I'm doing. 

I would also like to read more poetry.  I've been doing well at doing that; my teaching life, I'm happy to report, has me reading poetry almost daily.  But that teaching ends in three weeks.  Let me plan now, so that I can be more intentional once my classes end.

Five Years of Morning Watch

I haven't spent much time thinking about where I was 5 years ago, as the pandemic launched itself into our lives.  People's photos of the AWP conference gave me a bit of a pandemic anniversary vibe--the last AWP I went to was in San Antonio in 2005, where I was more interested in Super Tuesday results than the early days of the pandemic.  That year, AWP was in early March.  By late March, life had changed dramatically.

I still went in to the office, me and 4 other people in the office who stayed far away from each other.  I still went to church on Sunday mornings, where, for a few Sundays, a core group of us gathered to do parts of the service live and stream it to our members at home.

We also brainstormed other things we could do, like a Compline service. I volunteered to do something in the morning. One of the brainstorming group suggested that in addition to some sort of reading, that we have time for something creative.

At first I thought about choosing the readings, and then I thought, why do this? I have Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours; she's done this work for me. I did the readings for the day, took a five-seven minute pause to do meditation, writing, sketching, yoga, whatever gets us grounded for the day. And then we came back for closing prayer, also from The Divine Hours, and I gave some closing thoughts, a benediction of sorts.  I did the first one on March 31, 2020, and I'm still doing it every morning.

The video is short enough that I think I can add it to this blog post.  Here's the very first episode of Morning Watch to air live, on this day in 2020:

It hasn't changed much. I do show the sketch I'm working on; my dad made a comment that he wanted to see what I was working on, so I started holding the sketch close to the camera.

I've continued to do morning watch, and it's interesting to scroll back through a selection of posts that Facebook gave me when I did a search. Here I am with much longer hair. Here I am in a variety of rooms (the house near the beach, the downtown condo, our Lutheridge house, my seminary apartment, vacation/travel destinations). Here I am with Christmas lights in the back, and here I am almost always with construction happening in the background. I won't link to all those posts, as I'm almost sure it's only interesting to me.

This blog post tells a more complete story of the early days. It also contains this link to the first day when I used Phyllis Tickle's work--on March 30, I had technical difficulties, so I didn't post that broadcast. It's gotten 187 views. Later broadcasts get much fewer views. But I hear from people who find it meaningful, so I'll keep doing it.

To be honest, even if I didn't get encouragement, I'd probably still do it. It helps me to stay faithful to this method of formation.

More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee

Yesterday I graded the daily writing that I had students do on Monday, the day of the quilting bee.  I had decided to have a quilting bee because we were doing a module on Susan Glaspell's one act play, "Trifles" and her short story that she created after the play, "A Jury of Her Peers."  We watched this presentation created by The Edge Ensemble Theater Company, which was filmed in a historic farm house.

Ideas of putting a quilt together by quilting or knotting are integral to the play, and even when I first taught the play in the 90's, students had little to no experience with quilts.  I thought it would be fun to do a quilting bee for the entire Spartanburg Methodist College community, along with my students.  I hoped that students would make connections to the play, but I wasn't sure that they would, so we had continued discussion on Wednesday.

As I graded their daily writings, I was impressed with the connections they made without my insight.  Most of them made the connections about the wrung neck of the bird, the noose, and the knotting done on a quilt, connections that I hoped would be obvious but often aren't.  Several students said that working on the quilts helped them appreciate what a lonely life the farm women in the play had had.   Some of them talked about the stories that quilts show.  Their writing reassured me that the effort to do it was worth it.

I'm at a school where the medieval lit professor has her students make chain mail and illuminated manuscripts, and her efforts made me want to do something similar.  Almost all of the English faculty do more with their classes than have writing assignments, and I'm impressed with the kinds of posters and presentations that they create.  I'm so grateful to be at a place where we all know that there are more ways to assess student learning than in written papers that we keep on file until the next accreditation review.  I've worked in places that discouraged genre-stretching assignments for fear that the accreditors would see them as suspicious.  It is so wonderful to be at a liberal arts college.

I was also happy that other students, faculty, and staff came by.  One young woman sat and finished the knotting on two quilts; on one of them, she did most of the knotting by herself.  I thanked her for her efforts, and she said, "I love sewing.  It reminds me of times I spent helping my auntie."

I have been here on a one year contract, and I'm happy to report that it's been extended another year.  I look forward to having the chance to experiment with ways to make teaching more effective--and since I won't be a seminary student, maybe I'll do more, like being the faculty sponsor for a sewing/fabric arts club.

A Week of Smoke, A Week of Encouragement

It has been a strange week, a wonderful week, a tiring week, a good week overall for me personally but not so much for larger communities.  Let me record a few snippets.

--It's been the week when we've learned that some of the highest federal government folks have been talking on unsecured networks; this week's scandal has been dubbed "Signalgate."  I've been shaking my head, as many people have.  Many of us have had to go through yearly trainings to remind/teach/train us of the importance of keeping secure information secure.  And one doesn't need these trainings--it's common sense.  Grrr.

--It's been a week of other kinds of smoke.  We've had lots of fire in the Carolina mountains.  So far my house is safe, but the smoke is visible, and the air quality is poor.  As I drive back and forth to Spartanburg, I can see huge plumes of smoke in the distance.  We need rain, a few days of soaking (but not torrential!) rain.  More than that, we need the downed trees cleared away, but I'm not sure how that will happen.

--We've had family members in town as one of the next generations scouts wedding venues.  It's been great to be with them.  It was too brief, but brief visits are better than no visits.

--My seminary schedule is a bit strange, with lots of due dates next week.  The good news is that by getting this work done now, I'll have less to do later.  But I am feeling loaded down.

--The two classes that I'm taking have been particularly good this week, so that's a blessing.  And I've gotten good feedback--much needed encouragement, encouragement needed because I'm tired, not because I'm doubting myself.

--It's also been a good teaching week, with encouragement and praise.  It's nice to feel appreciated.  And it's a marvel to be praised for all the things I do, like the quilting bee on Monday.  I've worked at many a place where people would have questioned what any of that had to do with writing an essay, with the insinuation that I should just do my job.  And it's nice to be in a place that has space to do a quilting bee.

--I had students who came to the quilting bee who wanted me to do it again, and one student who wishes I would teach a sewing class.  I wish I had those kind of sewing skills.  I can't take a pattern and cloth and end up with a shirt.

Even though it will be an intense week-end getting next week's seminary tasks done, it will be good to have a day when I'm not driving.  It will be good to have some time to get the work done.

First Thoughts and Pictures after a Quilting Bee

Tomorrow when I have more writing time, I'll write more about the Quilting Bee I arranged for Spartanburg Methodist College on Monday.

I planned to set up in the classroom that is mine for much of Monday, but I couldn't do much advance set up, because of a class in the room.  

At first, it felt like chaos; I didn't expect so many people to come at 10.  But the pictures taken by my dean reassure me that it wasn't as chaotic as it seemed.

After some instruction, students got to do some knotting.

They also had access to my fabric bin, in case they wanted to make their own projects.

Here's a supply table:

I also set up a slide show (which you can view here), but not many people watched it.

All in all, it was a good day.  

I didn't have a break for lunch, and there weren't times when the room was empty except for me.  But that was good too. 

My take-away:  more students were interested than I thought might be.  It was a great change of pace, and students asked me to do it again.