Signs and Signifiers and Keeping a Record

It's been a strange beginning to the work week.  Let me record, so I don't forget.

--I've been in that liminal space where it's time to settle into the semester, yet I could still delay doing that for another few days.  My office hour time has been consumed by meetings and Convocation, so I have yet to get my Brightspace course shells set up.  At this point, it doesn't matter, because the classes meet in person.  Soon, though, it will be time for students to submit work, and I need to get those structures set up.

--I've been trying to decide how to record what I do in class--I'm going to keep a weekly list in my bullet journal, because it will be easier to find it again.  I've also discovered that I need to do a better job of adding handouts to the course shell.  I did none of that in last year's Creative Writing class.  Happily, I recorded a lot of what I did in this blog.

--Last night, I saw a Facebook post that Wesley Seminary created with a “We’re welcoming students back to campus!” motif: tables of breakfast, welcome baskets, happy faces. I am happy for those students, don’t get me wrong. But it does remind me of how my time at seminary was not what I expected, with no one on hand for move in day, no welcome of any kind. We were still social distancing in 2022, so that was part of it. For the 1st part of the semester back in 2022, we wore masks to our in-person classes.

For the most part, I’m still very happy I got to go to seminary, to attend physically in person, for a year. But occasionally, I feel a stunning sadness at all the ways it was so different from what I expected.

--Let me end with a happier memory of this 2nd week's beginning.  I went to the library to pick up my book on hold:  Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad about My Neck.  The librarian touched her neck and said, "This 72 year old librarian feels seen."  

I told her about my idea for my Nonfiction Writing class, which is focusing on the wide variety of personal essays we could write as a way to begin the class.  I'm bringing in Molly Jong-Fast's NYT essay with its realistic assessment of plastic surgery which references the Ephron essay.  I said, "Of course, these students are 19 and 20 years old, and they have gorgeous skin, so I don't know if they can relate to any of this."

The librarian beamed at me and said, "You're going to have a wonderful class.  Those students are so lucky."

We did have a really good class yesterday.  My English 101 and ALP classes were good too.

--In an evening of whiplash, with up and down feelings, I did ask God for a sign, even though I don't really believe God works that way.  I looked at the screen door and saw a perfect, tiny butterfly, so perfect that I wondered if someone had put a butterfly sticker on the screen.  Nope--my spouse took the screen door off the sliding track, and it flew away.

I'm going to see it as a sign of blessing, even if I'm a woman who tells herself that she doesn't believe in signs.

A Week-end in Books and Sermons

It was a good week-end, full of bread baking and writing (sermon and a poem), a good Sunday at church, and some piece work (by which I mean sewing together small scraps).  We watched a lot of Hot Bench, a court TV show that is slightly smarter than all the rest, but only slightly, with the cases which are more small claims court, not life threatening types of situations.

Saturday was an easier day than some Saturdays, because I already had a satisfying sermon draft by Saturday.  I can't always manage that feat, but when I do, I notice how much less stressed I feel on Saturday.  I slept better as Saturday night went into Sunday too.  

I was pleased with how I delivered it too and happy about the last part of the last sentence, which wasn't in the manuscript: "to live into a future where everyone has a place at the table, not under the table." If you'd like to see the sermon, you can watch the recording here, on my YouTube channel.

On Saturday, I went to the library and wandered the stacks; it's a small branch library, so it doesn't take long.  I saw some books from Ann Hood, books I hadn't read.  Once, long ago, she was one of my favorite authors--when did I stop reading her?  I checked out two of her books, and I read The Obituary Writer in one late afternoon and evening.  It's a fairly short book, and an easy read, a book that revolves around 2 characters and their decisions, decisions mostly about love.  I was less interested in the one who lost her love in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but I kept reading.

Last night, I finished Patti Smith's latest, Bread of Angels.  Here's how I described it on the books read list I keep:  Parts were compelling, parts boring, most of it interesting, but not really in the mood for this book, which made me sad and made me wonder if I might should save it until later when I’m more in the mood for childhood creativity in the midst of poverty and adolescent/young adulthood creativity in a variety of hovels and grittiness. But what I really wanted was insight into later middle age creativity and not much of that.

But I might also have written this:  "In other words, it's not Just Kids.  But of course, nothing will ever match that book."

Crazy Quilts and Not So Crazy Inspirations

I did not go back to the Asheville Quilt show yesterday, so I was so happy this morning that a quilting friend of mine made a Facebook post that included this picture of the quilt that captured my imagination, but I neglected to get a picture.

photo by Theresa Blaylock Durden

She also took a picture of the quilter's explanation that tells that the quilt contains ribbons and other ephemera from 4 generations.

It's not a project that I can do at this point--I have not collected these kinds of items from past generations or done much keeping of my own.  We are not a people prone to fripperies and adornments, at least not the kind we attach to clothing ourselves.

People are starting to give me robes, stoles, and clerical shirts after people die.  Perhaps in my later years, a quilt?  I don't want to cut up stoles, at least not the ones I have so far.

Even before I saw this quilt and wrote the above paragraph, I had a line for a poem, which came to me on Thursday:  "I cut my cousin’s clericals."  I wrote down the line because I liked the repetition of the letter c.  Now perhaps a poem will follow. 

Kristin (and Jesus) at the Quilt Show

Yesterday I drove home from teaching, changed clothes, and went to the Asheville Quilt Show with one of my best retreat friends.  I wasn't sure what to expect.  I've gone to many quilt shows, and each one is different in subtle ways.

Yesterday's show was very navigable, with wide spaces in front of each quilt, so I didn't feel too crowded.  People who wanted to linger wouldn't be in the way.  People who were tired had a variety of spaces at the edge of aisles of quilts where chairs were gathered in a circle.  A ring of vendors was at the outer edge--easy to get in and out of, which is not always the case.

As with every quilt show I've attended in the past 25 years, I saw very few hand quilted pieces.  My Florida quilter friend and I used to feel discouraged/outraged about this fact, but now I understand.  If I had money and time, I might send my quilts to a long arm quilter too.

As with every quilt show I've attended in the past 25 years, I was impressed with the variety of quilts:  traditional, experimental, modern, artistic, in both large and small sizes.  There was a quilt that was sort of a log cabin-ish pattern, but with a variety of ribbons, laces, buttons, and other embellishments; the contributor note said that they came from 4 generations of family members.  I wish I had taken a picture.

There was a moment when I wondered about entering my own hand-pieced, hand-quilted pieces.  Might I win a prize, since the competition is so sparse?  But my hand quilting is not likely to please the judges.  These days, my piecing is wonderful/intriguing/non-traditional/sloppy.  I do enough quilting to keep it all together, and it doesn't take as much as traditionalists tell us.

At the end of the afternoon, my friend and I went to the Moose Cafe.  I ordered NC mountain trout, not realizing that the frying would be more like a deep-fry than a pan fry.  I probably would have been happy with all sides.  Honestly, having the complementary biscuits with apple butter that were plunked down on the table when we first sat down would have been enough.

This morning, I woke up wanting to go back to the show.  I didn't take many pictures.  

The ones that are here are pictures that I took to text to others.  I also woke with the small, red, travel Janome machine in my thoughts.  And then, a line popped into my head, Jesus buying that machine, and during the last hours, I've been working on a poem about Jesus at the quilt show.

Here's my favorite part so far:

Jesus remembers the women
in his life who did the constant
work of repair:
his mother who kept
every scrap and transformed
them into safety and warmth.
Martha did the mending
after all the other work of the day.
Mary Magdalen taught
them all the value of adornment.

The poem is not finished yet, but I'm happy with the directions it might be going.  More to the point, I'm happy to have a poem coming into existence, a poem whose inspiration that I didn't even perceive yesterday.

First Week of School: The More Things Change

It's an interesting moment in time to be teaching first year students.  I mean that in a broad sense, but I also mean it in a "teaching the first week of classes during this particular week in August of 2026."  Let me unpack that statement a bit:

--Tuesday March 11 was our first day of classes.  It was also my first day as an Associate Professor on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College, which I wrote about in this blog post.  Just before I went to my first class of the Fall 2026 semester, I read this article in The Atlantic about a professor leaving his tenure track job.  His college, Bates College in Maine, is in many ways completely unlike mine.  The beginning of the article made me think I was reading the complaints of an incredibly privileged man who got a teaching job right out of grad school, but it's more nuanced than that.

Here's the 5th paragraph (the nuanced part comes much later):  "When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like 'watching the last dinosaur being born.' It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor."

Most teachers I know are somewhere in between:  certainly not prestigious institutions, but not adjunct work either.

--As I drove home on Wednesday, I listened to this episode of On Point, which talked about reading, both in light of the state of Texas requirements announced very recently, and in terms of whether or not children are reading whole books at all.  It made me nostalgic for my own days of reading in elementary school and made me think about what we read in high school, where we did read whole books and plays.

I don't assign many whole books these days, and I feel mostly good about it--but the show made me wonder if I'm right.

--My students will be doing more writing, the old-fashioned kind with pens and paper.  Most of my department colleagues are also shifting back to paper.

I came across this Substack post that talked about what writers should be doing to prove that they did their own creative writing, should a publisher feel the need to have a writer justify their work.  As a poet, I'm not too concerned.  The post did point out how much formal writing, the old-fashioned kind that academics learn to write, will be flagged as AI generated.  Here's what the author did:  

"I ran my PhD thesis. Atmospheric physics, submitted in 2010, at a point when the technology being accused of writing it was more than a decade from public release. Running it through a detector in 2026 returns around 70%.

A physics thesis is exactly the careful, formal, low-perplexity register that the Stanford study found classifiers flag.

A detector tells you one thing: that a piece of text resembles a statistical distribution. The question in the room is who wrote it, and no detector has ever answered that one."

--This week is also a week with more articles about AI run amok, a week when at least one more experimental AI agent got out of the boundaries/cage/safeguards.  My apocalyptic brain immediately thought of a future when we look back and laugh/rage/cry at the obsession with student/writer cheating and ignoring the much larger threat.

--It's strange being at a school where most of us haven't seen each other since early May, and I haven't seen students since late April.  It's not strange to me when students return looking different.  They are in late adolescence after all.  But some of my colleagues are notably thinner.  Maybe it's having time off in summer, but one colleague did tell me that she'd been taking a GLP-1 drug (another new technology reshaping our lives), and it was transformative.

I had hoped to be somewhat thinner when I returned to school, but I'm happy with feeling healthier.

Conclusion;  In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same:  I always want to return as a transformed version of myself--transformed in a good way--if I haven't seen people in awhile.  And yet, I'm seeing changes underway that may completely reshape the world, in the way that the atomic bomb did, and the way the end of the Soviet Union did.

Thirty-Eight Years Married

Today we celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary--38 years! It feels like just a blip.  Here is one of my favorite pictures of us, a picture taken at the March 2026 wedding of our nephew, who was born in 1993:

This morning in 1988, we'd have been in Greenwood, South Carolina. I'd have slept in the house that used to be a parsonage where my grandfather served a congregation for many years. Thirty years ago in that house, my grandmother ironed my wedding dress. Below you'll see my grandmother, with my aunt Joyce helping.




Yes, I had a long, white dress. We got married in the same church in Greenwood, South Carolina where my parents had gotten married in 1962, the same church where my grandfather had been the pastor. We had the ceremony at 11:00 in the morning, so that our out of town guests with long travels home would have plenty of time.  We tried to keep the ceremony and the reception relatively simple. For example, we chose daisies for our bouquet. Our reception included sandwiches, so that our out-of-town guests wouldn't have to buy lunch on their way out of town. We had the best wedding cake I've ever had.

In many ways, we're still that same couple: we try to keep life simple, while at the same time, keeping a commitment to hospitality. We are hyper-aware of our blessings, and the fact that much of the world will never taste the extravagance of a wedding cake. But we don't deprive ourselves--we stop to admire the daisies.

Here you see a picture of us on this day in 1988, and the two of us at our 25th anniversary dinner:

Here's my final thought for an anniversary morning. I'd expand the thought to include not just our spouses but also our friends and colleagues and family members.

Second Day of Fall Semester

Yesterday was a good first day of class at Spartanburg Methodist College, and not just for me.  Everyone I talked to yesterday mentioned the good energy on campus.

Of course, the first day of a semester is usually wonderful--and fall semester is best.  Yesterday was no exception.

My heavy duty teaching days are Mondays and Wednesdays, so today will be a bit more structured.  Yesterday I went to my Creative Writing class and then did some work for today's classes during my office hours.

I was hanging out in my office even beyond office hours while my spouse finished his day working on the fixer-upper house.  We traveled down together, he dropped me off, and then at the end of our separate days, we traveled back to our mountain house.

We are in that time of summer where I don't feel hungry for anything in particular, but I do feel hungry.  We stopped at Publix, the grocery store which makes our favorite fried chicken, and I grabbed the last box of 8 pieces.  We spent the evening watching TV and eating chicken.

Yesterday I didn't have class until 12:15, but today's teaching starts at 9, so I'll need to be on the road by 7:15 or 7:30--so let me get ready for my morning walk.

It's darker than I would like it to be, but I have lights for my shoes, and we'll see how it goes.  MWF will be the days when I stop by the Lutheridge weight room to do some work on the weight machines--at least that's my plan until we've moved into the fixer-upper house.

Let me begin.