Love Poem in Strips

Some of my more interesting teaching ideas come when I get towards the end of what I have planned, and there's still a lot of class time left.  Some days, I just finish.  Some days I come up with something else because I've already let the class go early in the last week or two, and I don't want students to start to expect it.

Yesterday I went to my Creative Writing class with worksheets, along with two sonnets:  a traditional love sonnet by Constable and "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun" by Shakespeare.  In a 102 class several semesters ago, I created a Love Imagery Generator Worksheet:

Love Poem Imagery Generator


My love is like _____________________________________________________.

My beloved’s eyes are like ____________________________________________.

My beloved’s skin is like ______________________________________________.

My beloved’s personality is like ____________________________________________.

My beloved’s hair is like _________________________________________________.

I love my beloved the same way I love _____________________________________.

My beloved’s cooking is like ___________________________________________.

My beloved’s hands are like __________________________________________.

My beloved’s voice is like ______________________________________________.


We filled in the sheets; I encouraged them to feel free to make up a fictional beloved.  In fact, I advised it might work better as a fictional experiment.

I had taken out parts to make a new worksheet, and we tried making a love poem to a non-human, like a car or a phone or a pet:  My beloved's _________ is like ________.

By design, I had extra worksheets which I cut into strips.  I gave everyone 6 strips and had them fill in the blanks.  They could use the worksheets they'd already filled in or create something new.

I had planned to have them paste strips to pink paper on tables around the edge of the room, but I realized we'd end class 30-40 minutes early if I went with my original plan--not good.  So I pasted three strips per paper, strips I took from each student, with space in between.  I divided them into 2 groups of 4, with 2 pink sheets per table.  They worked in groups, or pairs, to put additional strips on the paper, which took 15-20 minutes longer than each student pasting strips would have taken.  On the 5th sheet of paper, I put more strips in a random way--students were working more than I anticipated to have the poems make sense and/or flow.

Before I read them, I asked what they expected.  Then I read them.  They were a mix of things:  intriguing imagery, cliches, weirdness that did and did not work.  It might have been interesting to have them take each poem and try to go deeper.  I thought that the completely random poem was no better or worse than the poems they took more care creating, but I didn't tell them that.

I had them take pictures of the poems, just in case they wanted them later.  They will be taking one of the poetry projects we've done and revise, plus a short process piece:  a love poem, a photo with haiku, and either a villanelle or a triolet are the options.

I'm so pleased with how this class session went--my students were engaged, even though I could tell that some of them were mildly frustrated at times or perhaps baffled is more accurate--or both.  They worked together, even though they weren't sure what they were doing.  We all seemed to leave in a good mood, astonished at what we had created--or maybe it was just me who was astonished.

Inkspire and Other Events of the Week

I am tired this morning--it's a good tired because of a more intense week of good stuff, but a good tired is still tired.  Let me collect some fragments before they float away:

--One of my colleagues at Spartanburg Methodist College has been bringing in watermelon from her garden, which seems miraculous to me.  I've never been able to grow the larger, slower produce:  winter gourds/squash or melons.  I've been feasting on melons that someone else has cut up for me--a real treat.

--I was asked to be part of the search committee to find a new, full-time Speech hire.  I said yes, and I have no regrets:  as our provost said, it's one of the more important tasks that a college does.  But it will take a lot of time, and just thinking about it makes me tired (in a good way, but still tired).

--I am part of a student's Capstone project, and yesterday was her first event with me as a guest speaker.

It went really well.  It was a small group, but they were attentive.  I decided to talk about blocks and distractions that might keep us from writing and some techniques for dealing with those.  It was nothing earthshattering:  write in smaller increments--10 minutes a day can lead to having 150 to 300 pages in the course of a year.

--I love this broader view picture, the Inkspire event among many other events:

I love being part of a college that has so many events happening.

--Yesterday was a pizza party for Humanities majors, and we got good turnout.  Delightful!  But also tiring.

--In the midst of all of these events yesterday, I was sad to hear about the death of Annie Dillard.  She was not one of my writing/reading touchstones.  I remember a college summer of commuting when I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I had heard so much about--but I was underwhelmed.  I felt the same way about all of her work, and I feel weird about that, with so many people whom I respect having a different experience.

--It's the time of the school year when I feel like it's getting harder to stay ahead, especially with copying.  In part, it's because I have a lot of competing ideas for my creative writing classes, and all of them seem worthwhile.

When I want to remember why I tend to do the same thing semester after semester in English 101, it's so that I can devote creative energy to other classes.

--The work on the fixer-upper house has felt more intense.  Last Thursday we rented a floor sander, and now the big spaces are done.  Now we need to get the insides of the closets and the edges near the baseboards.  We're renting a different kind of sander today--here's hoping it makes it easier.

The Ghost in the Machine and the Holy Spirit

In late 2022 and early 2023, I first heard about ChatGPT and the current incarnation(s?) of artificial intelligence, I heard a lot of experts telling us that machines/programs/AI can't learn the way humans can learn.  Then they'd explain the creation process of these technologies and how humans programmed them to learn, and I thought, that process sure sounds the way my students learn.

Now I'm hearing a few people talking about the technology and issues of morality and spirituality.  Granted, more people are talking about how AI might kill us all--this week, at least, more people are talking about those dangers.  I saw one pastor post his notes from a Carey Nieuwhof webinar on AI and the Church and this bit intrigued me:  “AI doesn’t have the Holy Spirit. You have the Holy Spirit. AI doesn’t pray.”

When I was growing up in the 1970's, almost every Christian faith tradition taught that humans were God's supreme creation, the best of the best.  Many of those traditions taught that only humans go to Heaven.  It's a different faith scene now--says this pastor who is thinking about her first blessing of the pets as part of a worship service, at least first as one I've led.

This morning, I find my mind coming back to AI, to our beliefs (hopes?) about how human neurons are superior to silicon neurons.  I think about an NPR show back in the early days of this century that had philosopher Daniel Dennett as part of a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence. He said that he thinks that silicon based life forms (like computers) are eclipsing carbon based life forms (like you and me). Further, he said that computers are using humans to assist in the evolution of computers. The part of me that loves sci-fi was intrigued, and continues to be intrigued. The part of me that doesn't understand machines was horrified at the thought of enabling them to take over the world and enslave us.  The rest of the panel scoffed at Dennett's idea.

Now it seems like prophecy--or that Dennett was keeping up with the research in a much more comprehensive way than most of us.

I am aware of the dangers of anthropomorphizing this technology, and yet I keep thinking of Claude or ChatGPT praying.  What would those prayers sound like?  Would God hear them?  How would God respond?

This morning's pondering took me back to other times when I've tried thinking about God in different ways than I was taught in childhood.  It's made me think of a poem I wrote a long time ago, when I looked up at the pre-dawn sky and thought about how many astronomical objects are cold, hard rocks as far as we can tell. It led to this poem, which has become a renewed favorite of mine, after the spouse of a dear friend told me how it had stuck with him and made him think about the universe differently. It was published in my first chapbook Whistling Past the Graveyard.


Geology, the True Life Science


Our planet—warm, gooey corner
of a cold, lifeless cosmos,
a primordial ooze which forms
the perfect building blocks for life,
a miraculous exception to the universal
rule. The official astronomer’s story.

But perhaps God prefers rocks and minerals.
Why else create such a diverse abundance?
Maybe animals and humans are the experiment
gone horribly wrong, an accident of pumping liquids
surrounded by decaying flesh.

Bones calcify, kidneys form stones, arteries harden
with plaque—instead of medical disaster,
perhaps our bodies move towards their ultimate evolutionary
destiny, seeking God’s pleasure.

A Different Approach to Peer Editing

As a teacher, I have had students do peer editing a variety of ways:  in pairs, in groups of 4-5, as a big group passing papers to the left every ___ minutes, online as a discussion thread, and so on.  My new approach with peer editing in my two different creative writing classes has gone better than any other experience, and it's been so good that I'll try it with my English 101 class next week.

My Creative Writing class is a sophomore level class which attracts all sorts of students, but most do have an interest in Creative Writing.  They're not taking the class just because it's the only one where they could get a seat or the only one offered at a time that works with the rest of the schedule.  My Nonfiction Writing class is an upper level class; students who take that class are English majors for the most part.   

Both classes are much smaller than my 101 class.  The Creative Writing class is 10 students, Nonfiction 8.  My 101 class has 24 students when they all come to class.  

Back to my new approach.  I gave 2 days to peer editing not just one.  On the first day, we sat in a circle, each student with their rough draft.  We did timed readings, roughly 4 minutes per reading, no writing/feedback, pass the draft to the right, repeat.

My theory was that if they had done a quick reading, they could spend less time reading when it came time to give written feedback.

On the second day, I moved the tables so that each table would operate as a station with 2 chairs.  Each station had several copies of the rough draft and peer editing feedback sheets to fill in.  I also gave each writer a sheet where they could ask for specific feedback, which I won't do with my 101 class.

Students could move from station to station, reading at their own pace.  Some students read more slowly, while the ones who read and responded more quickly, could move to other stations.  Each writer got several response sheets, and most writers got responses from every student in the class.  No student sat idle--everyone was engaged on some level during the whole class period.

It was such a success that I'll try it next week with my 101 students.  Will it work?  Stay tuned!

Satisfying Sunday

Yesterday was a fairly good day.  At church, as I was moving through the communion liturgy, I could feel my throat about to crack, and sure enough, I went into a coughing fit.  Because I was at the words of institution, I felt weird about having someone else speak the words--Lutherans believe that only ordained or specially appointed ministers can consecrate the bread and wine.  I think it would have been fine, as long as I was there, but I don't really know how members feel.  So I drank some water, coughed a bit, and powered through.  People were kind.

I have spent most of the week wondering if I'm fighting off a cold:  I'm more tired and less hungry, and my throat has felt a bit scratchy off and on.  And I'm still not here.

I felt good about my sermon, although I'm aware of all the ways it could be improved; you can view it here on my YouTube channel and read it in this blog post).  We spent Sunday afternoon as we usually do, watching other people's sermons from churches where we feel a connection.  No one else preached on the Gospel.

I wanted something else of depth before we reverted to our usual viewing of old TV shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway?  We watched this podcast of David Brooks interviewing philosopher Meghan Sullivan. My spouse and I both have solid liberal arts educations along with graduate degrees, so it wasn't groundbreaking for us, but it felt nourishing.

I did some stitching in the evening so that I stayed awake past 7:15--success!  I'm making smaller squares, the first level of a log cabin square--but they're not all the same size.  I may put them aside and go back to the quilt I'm making for my cousin's first child who graduates from high school this year.

And now, another week:  week 6 at one school, week 3 at another.  We've got sanding to finish at the fixer-upper house.  The work at Faith Lutheran continues.  Onward!

Overscheduled Saturday

Yesterday was an overscheduled Saturday, full of rewarding activities, but almost too full.  I had Zoom calls, one after another, along with a conference call with the church council which was meeting in Bristol, and a phone call to catch up with my sister.  I volunteered at the Lutheridge Camp Store, a frustrating experience because I don't do it often, and can't quickly ring up purchases--we don't have a scanning system, but instead a touch screen where the volunteer clerk must look up items to add them to the cart.

At the end of the afternoon, I pulled out a different sewing project.  I wanted to puzzle through a pattern for a ditty bag; I've said I would make several for a woman who is serving as a chaplain to those who work on boats and ships on the Mississippi River.  I wasn't sure how the drawstrings would work, but they do.  I went ahead and finished the whole thing by hand, even though I had only intended to figure out the drawstring mechanism.

Even though I went to bed very early, which is not unusual for me these days, I'm still a bit tired.  We're at the time in the semester where the early enthusiasm is waning, and yet there is still so much to go.  I have a similar thought about the S'burg fixer-upper house.  We're making progress with floor sanding, but overall, there is still so much to go.

I've also felt a bit of melancholy as all the September 11 remembrances aired:  so much loss with reverberations across the decades.

But let me also remember the joys of recent days, particularly when it comes to working together:  my spouse and I strategizing about renting sanders, church folks figuring out how to help a fellow member, patrons at the camp store waiting patiently.  Let me remember that my students are wonderful and thus, I want to be my best teacher self.

Alternate Apocalypse

Even though my friends tease me for my apocalyptic mindset, my ability to see dystopia lurking around every development, I am not always quick to see immediate, personal danger in world developments.  I remember a leadership team meeting in early February of 2020, when our college president mentioned this strange new sickness in China and maybe we should be thinking about how it might affect us.  I remember saying that it wouldn't be any worse than the flu (my first blog post about the disease is here, January 30, 2020).  I had been aware of various versions of flu and SARS viruses, and I understood worst case scenarios--in other words, I'm not a denier of any sort.  But still, I was the one downplaying the danger.

On September 11, I was getting ready to drive down to the University of Miami to teach my Brit Lit Survey class.  I was still at home, almost ready to walk out the door, with NPR on the radio, when I heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center.  I wondered what part of the navigation on the plane could have gone so terribly wrong, or could it be engine failure?  And then the second plane hit, and I thought, what are the odds of that?

As I drove to Miami, hearing more information and then the Pentagon plane, I kept scanning the skyline for mushroom clouds.  I had spent my life expecting a nuclear attack.  I did wonder if I should turn around and go home.  But not only did I not go home, I taught my first class to the distracted students who came.  By the time of my second class, U of Miami President Donna Shalala had canceled all classes for the day.

I am sure I have mentioned much of this story before, perhaps in different combinations.  I've been blogging since 2008, and that's a lot of anniversaries.  It's hard to believe it's been 25 years.  My onground students weren't born in 2001.

As I think about these 2 historic events, the COVID-19 pandemic and 9/11, the pandemic probably changed more lives of more people I know personally than 9/11.  People made dramatically different decisions once they had gone through that time of pandemic crisis.  If I had been in NYC, if I moved in military circles, perhaps I would have had different experiences.

Or perhaps it has to do with the passage of time.  I do remember always having a gas tank never below empty and always having a case of water in the car.  I remember asking if my school had an emergency plan, and I did take note of various control panels in the building.   Those developments, though, were later, because that school was AiFL, and I didn't start that job until 2002.  I asked about the emergency plan during the days when the federal government would issue color coded threat levels.  Those memories have faded, but pandemic memories are still fresh.

I have always looked for the exits, no matter where I am.  I am the one who says, "If something happens, and I'm in Spartanburg and you're in Arden, we'll meet in Arden."  I'm the one who knows which location is best for surviving various dystopias.

I have been listening to various programs that look back on that day and how it changed us (I particularly like this podcast from The Dispatch).  This blog post seems inadequate.  So let me post a poem.  It's not a 9/11 poem, but a pantoum about preparing for the wrong apocalypse.  I wrote it in 2002 or 2003.

And of course, we haven't prepared for the "wrong"  apocalypse.  Global warming has accelerated, and the world is less safe from nuclear weapons now than we ever were in the cold war years.  History should teach us that unexpected apocalypses are always lurking.

Alternate Apocalypse



We expected mushroom clouds and radiation.
Instead we changed the chemistry of the atmosphere.
Chunks of glaciers break for freedom and sail across the sea.
Ice caps melt, and the sea swallows islands.

Instead we changed the chemistry of the atmosphere,
yet we refuse to believe the evidence of global warming.
Ice caps melt, and the sea swallows islands,
but global warming is just an unproved theory.

Yet we refuse to believe the evidence of global warming.
Temperatures rise farther and earlier in the year,
but global warming is just an unproved theory.
Some years we have no winter.

Temperatures rise farther and earlier in the year.
Old people bake and die forgotten in their homes.
Some years we have no winter;
furious storms hurl themselves across the oceans.

Old people bake and die forgotten in their homes.
Lucky ones huddle together, hiding from the oppressive heat.
Furious storms hurl themselves across the oceans.
We see new diseases stalking continents.

Lucky ones huddle together, hiding from the oppressive heat.
We expected disasters to rain down on us, but not these.
We see new diseases stalking continents.
This was not the apocalypse we envisioned.

We expected disasters to rain down on us, but not these.
We feared nuclear winter, not this relentless warming.
This was not the apocalypse we envisioned.
We expected mushroom clouds and radiation.

Visions and Revisions

It's been a good week, but I feel behind, in the way that I often do once the semester gets underway.  I was shocked yesterday when I wrote in my bullet journal:  "Teaching Plans, Week 5."  Let me capture a few notes from the week:

Writing:

--This week's short story writing made me think of earlier writing I've done.  Very few of my short stories are in my folder of short stories to be sent out in hopes of publication.  So I went back hunting.

I have a few short stories that are set in a specified time:  2027 (the story was written in 2010 or so, but it didn't really need to be set in 2027, from what I could see) and 2076 (did I just have a yen to write a science fiction story?).

And then, I remembered:  I was creating a book of linked short stories.  It's a family saga, and these stories were written with the collection in mind, so I had to be aware of when the characters would have lived.

Now I think I'll take at least one of them and tinker with a new draft.  It will be more effective if the older woman in the hospital is the mother, not the mother-in-law.  I no longer need to explain what a smart phone is.  The revision won't take a lot of work, and I'll keep the original, in case a publisher ever asks me for a collection of linked short stories.

--I also did some poetry rough draft revisions when my two Creative Writing students needed to spend the class time writing.  I had printed the rough drafts in week 1, but never had time to look at them.

Commuting and the Fixer-Upper House

Today we will rent a drum sander to do the floor work.  Here's hoping it goes well.  Yesterday's commute reminded me of why this house was a good idea:  an accident hours before had shut down the interstate, in a place where there's really no other way around.  Our trip home took at least an extra hour, and I was so exhausted that I was dozing in the chair by 7:30 in the evening.

Department Life

We had a department meeting yesterday, and we went over course descriptions, some of which need some gentle revisions.  It was a collaborative vibe, so different from some schools.  I was startled to realize that I have some expertise (teaching experience and publishing) in all the types of classes we teach:  professional writing, creative writing, and literature. 

Teaching Life

My onground classes continue to be a delight.  Usually by week 5, there's at least one student, and sometimes a whole class, who I'm seeing as an aggravation, or one class that's so much more unengaged than the others.  But the chemistry of this term makes me think it may be one of my all-time best.

Quilting Inspirations: A Short Story Draft!

In later years, when I wonder why my blogging fell off a cliff in the past week, let me remember 2 factors.  Tech woes kept me offline or otherwise engaged for several days:  an internet outage one day, followed by my authenticator app not working and then being glitchy.

But I've also been writing a short story!  Once that sentence would not have merited an exclamation point at the end of a sentence, but I haven't written a short story since the piece I wrote for my seminary class in the late fall of 2024.

I had a glimmer of this week's short story during Quilt Camp--a woman who is more of a traditionalist being shocked when her old nemesis wins a best-in-show award at the Asheville Quilt Show.  I keep remembering the quilt I saw at the show which used tiny gear parts for flower blooms; it was a steampunk quilt (imprecise title--update:  it's called "Steampunk Garden," and it was made by Paula Entin which won first place for use of non-traditional materials).

Last week we had writing time in both of my creative writing classes, and I really enjoyed writing with them--and it helped to have an idea.  But then I wanted a finished draft, and by tomorrow, I'll have one.  Hurrah!

The Asheville Quilt Show and our summer Quilt Camp have been giving me all sorts of inspirations.  Just this morning, I thought about my Nancy Drew poem where she decides to go back to teaching (I put the poem in this blog post).  Over the next few days, I'll think about what happens if Nancy Drew decides to start quilting.

Post-Labor Day Shift

It has been an intense few weeks, book-ended by Quilt Camp on one end and Crafts for Christmas on the other end.  I made a quick trip to Columbia, SC for an overnight last Wednesday; I am trying to go once a month to see my grad school friend who had the catastrophic stroke 2 years ago.

I've had tech woes with the authenticator app which allows me to access my online classes, so I feel a bit behind.  That school has just switched its process for attendance verification, which has also left me feeling discombobulated.

It's been a good teaching time, particularly for my 2 Creative Writing classes.  Last week I had the class peer edit a short piece of mine; it's one of the few things I've written that works as both a short story and a piece of creative nonfiction.  Then we wrote together.  I brought my laptop, and I wrote too.  As a result, I have a new short story, one that came to me during Quilt Camp.  I still need an ending, but I expect to have that after I go on my walk. 

This morning, I also have that sad wistfulness that comes from knowing it will be some time before I see these friends again:  neighborhood friends, retreat friends, and grad school friends.  There's also a bit of overwhelm from a fixer-upper house that needs us to take the next step of refinishing the floors.  And there's the ordination overwhelm--I am doing an onground intensive in October, and I have some work to do beforehand, including a Zoom session tonight.

Let me go and walk and remember that all will be well.

A Nancy Drew Poem for Labor Day

Labor Day brings to mind many things for me.  I think of the ways this holiday has changed.  In my lifetime, Labor Day signaled a coming end to the intense heat, with only a week or two left.  But in our time of planetary climate upheaval, no longer.

Labor Day has also signaled fashion choices, like when to put away white clothes and sandals.  But we are no longer bound by these dictates.

Most people have forgotten or never learned about various Labor movements of the 20h century.  We have time off, most of us, in large part because of those movements.

I am thinking of all the workplace poems I've written, poems about workplaces and thankful that I no longer work there, and sad, too, because corporate types destroyed them.

So let me post a different kind of poem, about Nancy Drew, in her retirement returning to the public school classroom.  Nancy Drew wouldn't be teaching college. She'd have had a teacher's certificate from pre-feminist days. And they'd let her teach the kids that were headed to juvenile jails and drop out land--who cares about those kids?

When I wrote it, I thought about a friend's experience teaching those kinds of kids. She was allowed to do basically whatever she wanted, to abandon textbooks and to teach whatever came to her, so long as she kept the kids from hurting each other or the other children in the school.

I thought about Nancy Drew's friends, Bess and George--what happened to them? Could they help Nancy Drew solve the mystery of how to reach these students?

Of course! Bess has started a bakeshop and this generation of students, raised on cooking shows, eat up what she has to offer in the way of old-fashioned home-ec. George, the tomboy, has gone on to become a marine biologist, so she leads field trips into various ecosystems.

 This poem appears my third chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Pre-Drop Outs



Nancy Drew decides she needs new
mysteries to solve, so she returns
to school, to mold young minds.

Long ago, in between cracking cases
involving diaries or letters or maps and solving
secrets in attics and towers, she got a teaching
certificate, as ambitious women did in those days.
Now she calls the school board to see
how she might be of use.

Her credentials, old and out of date,
don't prevent her from taking charge
of the most hopeless classrooms,
the students on a layover
on their journey to juvenile court.

Given tattered textbooks and worksheets without
answer keys, Nancy Drew adopts
a different approach. As always, she calls
on her friends.

Bess runs a bakeshop, so she teaches
the students to cook, a retro home-ec
approach. Nancy Drew's feminist critics
would not approve, but this generation
of students, raised on cooking shows, responds
with rare enthusiasm.

Nancy Drew believes in fresh air and sunshine,
so she recruits her friend George, a marine
biologist, for ideas. George leads
field trips to various ecosystems:
swamp walks and snorkeling and soon
some of the students are ready
for college-track science classes.

These clues to a better future don't prevent
some of her students from sneaking
away to explore more ancient secrets.
She tries to keep them focused on the future,
but she remembers Ned Nickerson
and those cars now considered classics.

She thinks of Ned in the roadster,
and later, her love confined to the hospital bed,
immune from rescue, unable to hear
her whispered pleas.

She kisses the old locket always worn
around her neck and writes the day's lesson
plan on the white board. At the end
of the day, she erases the smeared
lines from the board to leave a blank
space to be filled again in the morning.

Tech Woes, Famous Death Woes

Yesterday was a frustrating day.  On Thursday, I had trouble with the authenticator app that I have to use to get access to my online classes.  On Friday, I had the same trouble, so I thought I'd call the help desk early in the morning before everyone else tried to call.  So, at 4 a.m., I called, and at 5:20, I was able to explain my issue, and a ticket was created.  It left me frazzled all day, and feeling annoyed that I was letting tech troubles get to me.

I thought the problem was solved, but no, this morning, the app is not working again.  Later I will go up the hill to use Lutheridge's wi-fi, to see if the problem is my home wi-fi.  But other than that, I am not going to waste another day on this.

Yesterday afternoon the Crafts for Christmas retreat started.  I haven't had time to make a sample, so I made a small string of bunting.  We ate dinner, and then we did more crafting.  I was feeling tired and still a bit frazzled from the day, so I headed home at 8.  I am sure there were retreat friends that crafted all night.

Yesterday I put together a draft of a sermon.  I was sure it was terrible.  This morning, I read it and thought it wasn't nearly as awful as I worried it was.

Yesterday I had planned to write an appreciation of Gloria Steinhem, who died on Wednesday.  Like others who have died recently, she had a long life; she was 92 when she died.  For many years, I was a subscriber to Ms., the magazine she founded.  In pre-internet years, it was an amazing resource, with more global news than I was getting otherwise, with a wide diversity of alternate visions of what life could be.

This morning, I found out that Cassandra Wilson also died this week. There were several years in the mid to late 90's when I was in love with her voice and her music.  Her version of "Last Train to Clarksville" was revelatory--or so it seemed at the time.

I'm listening to it again as I finish this blog post, and while it may not seem groundbreaking now, it's because so many people have done similar work (taking an old pop standard and making it anew) in the decades since she did it.

I am ready to stop writing tributes--I am hoping for a few weeks with no notable deaths.

Now, let me get ready for another day--creating with friends, one of the best kinds of days!

Swiss Army Knife of the English Department

We've had a major internet outage in my service area overnight, so let me make a quick blog post in case it flickers out again.

On Monday, I made this Facebook post, which has gotten more likes than almost any other Facebook post I've ever made:

My department chair just said I am the Swiss Army knife of the department, in terms of being able to teach such a wide variety of classes, and I have decided this one may be my favorite job descriptor ever: Swiss Army Knife of the English Department!

My department chair is the one who just took over from the old department chair at Spartanburg Methodist College; that department chair took over when the chair who hired me got promoted to Dean of Humanities.

The all-time favorite blog post I've ever made, the one that got the most likes and loves, is the one where I announced I had just applied to Wesley Theological Seminary.  That was back in February of 2021, and it is rather staggering to think about all that has happened since then, both in my personal life, in the life of the nation, and the life of the planet.

Happily, I do not have time for a full catalogue of wins and losses.  But there is always time for gratitude that I found my way here to this small, liberal arts college,  where I am so lucky to have a tenure track job, with a Candidacy Committee who is supportive of my goal to be bi-vocational.

Farewell, Wendell Berry

I was sad to hear of the death of Wendell Berry on Monday.  But why should I be sad?  He was 92 and had lived a good life, mostly on his own terms, from what I could see.  But the death felt like "one of the greats has left us" moments.  I remember reading him in college, so his writing has been with me a long time.

Back in my undergraduate days,  I felt somewhat embarrassed for liking someone whose work was so accessible.  Now, of course, I think it's one of his more important traits.  Berry's work has seemed vital for decades now.

What I value most these days is his ability to never sink into gloom for too long. He manages to sound prophetic (one of the prophet's duties being to call people back to right living, as well as to warn), without setting up a house in the land of the apocalypse. He always comes back to one of his main themes: ". . . hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found. For one thing, though we have caused the earth to be seriously diseased, it is not yet without health. The earth we have before us now is still abounding and beautiful" ("Conservation and Local Economy" from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 11).

He wrote those words almost 20 years ago, and yet, they still have relevance.  Some days, when the news seems unrelentingly bad, it's hard to continue to hope.  But it's one of the more important activities we can undertake.

Here's a passage that reminds us of the miracles which surround us each day:  "Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine--which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes" ("Christianity and the Survival of Creation" from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 103).

That passage made me gasp when I first read it, and it still does.

As I was looking over old blog posts about him, I came across this one that I wrote after reading  Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder.  It made me want to read the book again.  It seems a fitting read for this tim of so much loss of greatness.

The Triune Quilting God

Here we are on the last day of August.  As always, the month has zoomed by, and I feel a looming despair that I didn't get any writing done.  But let me do a more honest record keeping of my poetry writing:

-- 5 rough drafts of varying degrees of completeness.

-- 2 rough drafts revised to intermediate status.

-- One of those rough drafts taken to completion.

And of course, poetry writing isn't the only writing I have done.  As I looked back over my past week of blogging, a new poem began to twinkle at me from the side of my consciousness.  What if Jesus decided to go to Quilt Camp?  I wrote a few lines, and it has potential; I'll return to it later this week.

As I was writing, I wondered if I had already written any poems that show Jesus quilting.  The only one that came to mind was one that wasn't Jesus, but God.  

It's a good day for a poem about God as a quilter, and not just any quilter, but an old woman quilter.  Here's the poem in its entirety. It first appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities.

The Precious Nature of Junk

If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

Quilt Camp Confessions

At one point yesterday evening, as I began to despair at ever getting my huge quilt done, I thought of my grandmother.  When I asked her to teach me to quilt, she snorted and said, "Why would you want to quilt when you can just go to Wal-Mart and buy a blanket for six dollars?"

That price tells you how long ago it was.  And yet, that dismissal remains.  I think of how many people during Quilt Camp were astonished at my quilting by hand, by my quilting at all.  Most people at Quilt Camp send their project to their favorite long arm quilter and pay to have the quilting done.  And then they still need to do the binding to finish the quilt.

At times yesterday, I enjoyed the quilting with the multiple memories the fabric inspired:  the few bits from clothes my grandmother made me, the bit from the quilt I made for my now-grown nephew for his first big boy bed, the various squares put together in slightly different ways, my experiment with smaller and smaller scraps.  I thought of all the various friends who gave me their scraps.

I won't lie:  putting together the quilt top is my favorite part of any project, especially in the early days of a project where I don't have to worry as much about how it will all come together into a unified whole.

I was also running on fumes for much of yesterday:  I didn't sleep well because of achiness that comes from quilting for hours in strange positions, staffing the camp store, and an afternoon planning meeting that went long.  By evening, I was despairing, having not made the progress I was anticipating.

I still have some quilting time this morning, and I'm already at the point where I need to be, the point where I can finish the quilt from my living room.  It's the center part that needs to be stabilized before the rest can be done--and that part is much easier done the way I did it over the past two days.

I'm grateful to have had this time, but also a bit sad that I had to be so focused on this one project.  Of course, the next Quilt Camp is only 2 months away, so I don't need to feel sad at all.

First Full Day of Summer 2026 Quilt Camp

I've spent part of the summer finishing the process of putting together the quilt top for the quilt I hoped to be assembling during Summer 2026 Quilt Camp at Lutheridge.  

We've also been going back and forth on the size of the bed we plan to have once we move into the Spartanburg fixer-upper house we bought back in May.  We've finally decided on a king size bed, so I sewed the last panel back to the quilt top; back in July, I had taken that panel off when we changed our minds from king back to queen. Now we're fairly sure it will be a king size bed that we will buy. 

On my way to work on Tuesday, I stopped at Foam and Fabric--they sell wide fabric for quilt backs, and I decided that it was worth the cost so that I didn't have to sew the back together.

Yesterday morning, I was ready to start quilting.  Because Summer Quilt Camp has less attendance than other times of the year, I was able to use extra tables to make the quilting of the king size quilt easier.  I spread out the backing fabric and then the batting and then spent time figuring out how to position the top.

I spent yesterday quilting the middle of the quilt.  I wanted to make sure I got that part stabilized in case I couldn't complete the project during this retreat.

People dropped by my station to take a closer look.  Before I close up the project, I thought that I, too, should preserve a closer look.  I'm not only quilting by hand, but I also sewed the whole top by hand.

It's a lot of sewing, but it's usually done when I'm watching T.V.  or chatting.  It's often part of my self-soothing tool kit, which doing it by machine would not be.  I've also done other projects along the way.  It's taken a long time, but I haven't really noticed.

This morning, I went back to past blog posts, and here's the one where I see the project that inspired me, back in the Fall 2022 Quilt Camp.  By January, I had made some progress, documented in this blog post.    Along the way, a friend showed me that I didn't need sashing between the squares, and that decision made the assembly of the top much more fun.

I spent one Quilt Camp putting squares together on design boards in search of the perfect flow of colors, which I then sewed together, only to realize that I didn't really have enough for a queen size bed.  I sewed more squares, and when I returned to the project, I put squares together into long panels more randomly, which worked just as well.

Quilting is never my favorite part of the project, at least not bed-size projects.  It's hard on the fingers and the back--and other muscles too.  But with this project, I've had an unexpected benefit:  the chance to return to all those squares, to marvel at the differences in scraps included, to delight in all the colors and fabrics in this quilt.

Onward to Day 2!

Farewell, Tim Curry

And now, a day after Dolly Parton's death, comes news of the death of Tim Curry.  Like so many, my earliest memories of Tim Curry are as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I didn't see that movie until my sophomore year of college, but I was aware of it in high school.

I was a drama club kid, so of course I was aware of the show.  But I was also a teenager with a strict curfew of 11 p.m., so I was not going to midnight movies in high school.  My parents wanted to protect me, and with the wisdom that comes with age, I'm grateful that they were paying attention.

When I finally saw the movie, I was baffled.  And every time I've seen it, I've been baffled.  I've loved the first part of the movie, but then it all falls apart once the butchery begins.  In later years, the "seduction" scenes leave me feeling a bit ill--no means no, even if you're needing shelter on a stormy night.

Despite the problems with the movie, Curry's talent shines through.  My favorite role of his was his stint on Roseanne.  Roseanne Barr is now a problematic figure, but that show was boundary breaking in all sorts of ways that don't have much in common with the boundaries that Barr breaks now.

I've seen various articles about the career of Tim Curry, and I'm amazed at what wide range he had.  But really, I shouldn't be amazed.  The two roles that I remember him for show that range:  an outrageous cross-dressing alien and a working class guy dating a mouthy woman (Nancy on Roseanne, played by Sandra Bernhard).

Time is short, and soon I need to open the Faith Center at Lutheridge for the first full day of Quilt Camp, so let me conclude with one of the most quotable lines from The Rocky Horror Picture Show:  "Don't dream it, be it."

Farewell, Dolly Parton

I'm as sad as everyone about the death of Dolly Parton.  Let me record a few thoughts:

--I'm glad that I was a child in the 70's, that my mom listened to A.M. radio, which meant I heard all kinds of music, including Dolly Parton's songs, both old and new.  The radio stations of my childhood played anything, so you could hear a Dolly Parton song, then a Beatles song, then an old Elvis song, sprinkled with modern pop by groups like Bread, the Carpenters, and so on.

Modern algorithms would not have sent Dolly Parton music my way.  But I must confess that it has taken me many decades to appreciate her music, and I still wouldn't choose her music for a long drive or an evening at home.

--I didn't see her acting during my childhood.  I didn't see 9 to 5 until a few years ago.  I did love Steel Magnolias.

--I've never been to Dollywood.  I would go, if I won tickets.

--I'm not an expert on business, but from my outsider view, she seemed to have business smarts that most of us will never possess.  She know how to capitalize on success while always seeming/being sincere in her enthusiasm.  That skill probably can't be taught in Business school.

--In terms of gender and presentation, she always intrigued me.  There have been years when I was frustrated and annoyed by her over the top femaleness.  Let me just be blunt:  the attention to her breasts was so offputting to me.  As I got older, her costumes intrigued me--the woman liked what she liked, and she loved sparkles.  

As I've gotten older, I've been in awe of all the ways she worked the system without losing her soul.  But I've also been sad about how hard it must have been for her, and about how many others did not survive, which wasn't her fault.

And I've been happy about how she blazed a trail for others--and then kept making sure the trail stayed clear (and to stretch the metaphor, she went back and made roads).

--Her songwriting skills -- wow.  I was amazed at how many songs she wrote.  I loved when she was interviewed and would talk about her creative process, about grabbing inspiration when it came and writing it down on scraps of paper, even the barf bag on an airplane.  

--Her musician skills -- wow.  She played with so many people through the years, and the fact that she could do so speaks to her singing skills, her skills on so many instruments, her expansive vision of what music could and should do.

--She didn't always talk openly about her faith.  Sure, she talked about the faith of her childhood.  I'd have liked to have known more about her grown up faith.

--Of course, she showed us that faith by all the people she helped, by the life she lived.

--Her philanthropy has always been what impressed me most about her.  She gave back, above and beyond, in so many ways, and much of what she did, we will never know about.

--And she continued to do good until the very end, in all the ways she was doing good:  music, support of other artists, business, philanthropy.  Her continued vibrance is why so many of us are feeling sad.  

Whirlwinds: Teaching Days and Apprentices

Yesterday was one of those teaching days where I had plans going into the day, with back up plans because I wasn't sure the original plans would work, and then I went with the original.  Let me explain, in case it's useful:

--I had planned to do peer editing with my English 101 class.  I got rough drafts by e-mail, and then I couldn't open most of them, even when students tried to give me editing/access permissions.  Grr.  Some of the students sent in their rough drafts other ways, but I wasn't sure that everyone got the message.

So I went into Monday thinking I'd do Wednesday's lesson (intros, conclusions, and transitions) yesterday if I didn't have the rough drafts.  I was almost sure I was going to do that.  But I printed the rough drafts that arrived over the week-end, and lo and behold, I had them all.  So I shifted back to the original plan, and we did peer editing.

--I hadn't done the speed writing with objects week 1 writing with my nonfiction writing class, and I thought I would do that yesterday.  I knew that one student would be absent, and I wondered if the whole class might be there on Wednesday, if I should wait.  But I also feel we're now in the point of the semester where on any given day, someone will be absent.

We've been in a reading intensive time in that class, so I thought it was good to mix it up a bit.  So I went with the plan:  writing about objects on Monday, one more essay on Wednesday, along with planning for rough draft writing.  But I didn't make that decision until literal moments before the class started.

It went really well, much like the experience I blogged about last week. But unlike last week, I put random collections of objects on the tables.  I did that primarily because there was no time to set up the room before students got there because I have my assigned writing center hour from 11-noon, and the class starts at noon.

My teaching day felt hectic--no down time at all.  I am thinking I need to rethink my office hours, but in some ways, I'm not sure there's a great alternative that works with our current housing, with my spouse commuting down with me to work on our fixer-upper house.

We were both exhausted yesterday, so we settled in to watch The Apprentice.  When the movie first came out, I had no interest in seeing it, but as is often the case with biopics, I slowly changed my mind as I heard other people talk about the movie (interviews and reviews and passing remarks).  It was an amazing piece of work, intriguing to see how the characters made us believe that they were the actual characters that have come to loom so large.  But it was also a good choice for last night because it didn't require much intellectual work--it's not a complicated movie.

I remembered hearing interviews when the movie came out, and so now I'm listening to them again.  I first thought about seeing the movie when I heard the lead actor interviewed on NPR--astonishing to see that I heard that interview back in February of 2025.  Time just zooms along.

Satisfying Sunday: Worship/Cookout in the Pavilion and Reading in the Evening

 Yesterday, I made this Facebook post which sums up my Sunday morning:

"We had a great morning at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church, where I preached on Matthew 16 and ended my sermon by asking us to think about how our lives themselves are gospels that testify to the identity of Jesus and his role in our lives. We had a hamburger/hotdog lunch in the pavilion, with delicious food and nourishing fellowship. I'm not sure how the morning could have been much better, short of winning a lottery amount that would let us solve the shortage of affordable housing in the area and provide quality health care for all."

To see a recording of my sermon, go here to my YouTube channel.  To read the manuscript, go to this blog post.

The afternoon was also good.  I did a bit of sewing, caught up on chores, and got ready for the week.  In the evening, my spouse was listening to old Hank Williams songs, and I read--a delight!

I read most of Tara Menon's Under Water last night.  I read a bit of it earlier in the day, in the just after midnight moments of Sunday, where it confused me at first.  It took me a bit of time to realize the narrative is shifting back and forth in time, mainly from 2004 to 2012, but also back to earlier childhood years of the narrator.  I read the Acknowledgements and figured out the tsunami angle. When I picked up the book, I thought it was more of a future apocalypse kind of novel, but it’s a different kind of climate catastrophe novel.

At first it seems like a slight book. But it packs a powerful punch—about a woman who undergoes two catastrophes, the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

And now, a new week--a week that ends in Quilt Camp.  Let me get ready.

Scrappy Houses

One of the beautiful things about social media is the inspirations that might come on any random day, and not even from people we know.  This morning, a post from a human I don't know (Jim Hankins) came across my Facebook feed.  Here's what the larger quilt looks like:

I might have scrolled on by, if I hadn't read the poster's description of each block as little houses made of scraps, one for each day of the year.  And perhaps more than houses--when I look, I'm also seeing trees.  Here's a close up:

Hmm.  Could I do this without paper piecing?  Stay tuned!

Random Objects in the Creative Writing Classroom

I've written before about using objects as writing prompts (see this blog post for explanation and pictures).  Usually I spread objects out on a table and have students pick one.  We do a variety of types of writing:  description, writing in the voice of the object, free associating to access memories based on the object.  It works well across writing classes.

In my Creative Writing class, half the students have had me in other classes, so I wanted to do a different approach, but still use objects.  We meet in one of the larger classrooms, so I had an idea.  I got to the classroom early and was happy to see that the room was set up with tables in the middle and a ring of tables around the edge of the room.  I decided to use 12 of them as stations.

At first I thought I would put one object per table, and then I thought it would be more interesting to have several objects.  Some tables had connected objects:  for example, on one table I put Christmas ornaments, a Christmas card, a packet of replacement bulbs for a strand of holiday lights.  On another, I kept the objects from the natural world:  3 feathers, a pine cone, and some shells.  Other tables were more random collections.

I was also pleased with how many tactile experiences they could have.  I had two felted pieces, along with chunks of wood and chunks of asphalt.  The cross made out of palm stalks and the waxy, half-burnt candle gave different sensations.  I put out broken strings of beads and broken pottery.

I told students that they would need paper and something to write with, or they could take laptops to write on.  They all chose paper, and I told them to make sure they had enough paper.

Students sat at a table and had 30 seconds to look at the objects.  Then they wrote for 3 minutes.  They could write about the object or write in the voice of the characters we created in past class sessions or explore their own memories.  I wasn't looking at their writing, so they had plenty of latitude, as long as they kept writing.

After three minutes, they moved to the next table, a process which went smoothly.  At the end, I had them read all the writing they had done, marking any that had potential.  I reminded them that they could go deeper, but I wasn't requiring it.  For me, it's too much policing, having students write for 20-30 minutes.

My students seemed to really like the process.  They talked about how many ideas it generated and how much fun it was to write about random objects.  They also talked about their wonder at what all was waiting to be written about--and I reminded them that we live in a world of random objects, so whenever they feel blocked, they should remember this technique.

It's been a really good teaching week, and this experience was one of the highlights.

Endorsed!

I thought about making a Facebook post that said "Endorsed!"  But most people wouldn't know what I meant--they'd rightly ask, "Endorsed by whom?"

On Wednesday, I met for an Endorsement panel for Candidacy in the Southeastern Synod for the ELCA, the more inclusive expression of the Lutheran church in the U.S.  I had already written a 39 page Endorsement essay, which was really 7 writing prompts, which had me do a mix of new writing and including papers written for classes.  So I had already answered a lot of questions that the Candidacy Committee might have had:  why do you want to be Lutheran or why do you want to be ordained or how do you understand Luther's theology for our time?

We talked about some of those answers, of course.  But we spent more time talking about my experiences as a creative/artistic person and as a minister at a small, country church in Bristol, TN.  It was a wonderful experience:  I felt affirmed and supported the whole way through.

I know that I am lucky.  I've heard the Candidacy horror stories, stories across denominations.  My experience was much more like a really deep, really nourishing conversation during a retreat where the real world won't intrude.

I'll probably write more about this experience in weeks to come.  I didn't want to write about the Wed. conversation before I got word about the decision of the larger Candidacy Committee that met yesterday.

By late afternoon, I got the word by way of e-mail:  "Congratulations! The candidacy committee overwhelmingly approved you for endorsement!"

What does this mean? It's the last phase before Ordination. I have an internship to do, which will be at Faith Lutheran, where I am their Synod Appointed Minister. It will be from Advent to Easter. I will meet with the Committee in April, with ordination expected shortly after.

The synod is very supportive of my need to be bi-vocational, as I am now on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College.

Speaking of teaching, let me shift my attention--one last day of teaching to do this week, and if I go now, I can get a quick walk in before the commuting and the teaching.

A Good Stretch of Poetry Days

The past few days have been a good poetry days, in a more well-rounded sense--by which I mean, I've been doing more than just writing down a line or two.  Let me capture what a good stretch of poetry days looks like:

--A few months ago, I had an idea for a poem, Jesus buying a fixer-upper of a house.  I didn't do anything with this idea since I first had it (in late April, as evidenced by this blog post).  But this week, I returned to it, and I'm really delighted with the surprises that the poem offers.

--Yesterday, I read a volume of poems.  My students were working through a time management module and had to enter due dates into calendars and planners.  I thought they would blaze through the assignment, but only a few of them did.  I went back to my office to get something to read.

--That book was Donna Vorreyer's Unrivered.  What an amazing book!  Vorreyer explores themes of aging and the natural world and relationships, and many of her poems have theological imagery and ideas that I didn't expect.  She's also skilled at a variety of forms.  It's a book that demands a re-read, which I hope to do soon.

--I read most of the book in one sitting, and I returned to read the rest of it later in the afternoon.  It's always a very different experience to read an entire collection in one day, and I'm glad I did it yesterday.

--I had a late afternoon phone call after the Endorsement Panel yesterday.  I was invited to be the official poet, a poet laureate of sorts, of the Southeastern Synod's Synod Assembly.  What a cool possibility!

--My mom heard me say that I was invited to be poet laureate of the Synod, which would also be an interesting possibility.

--This morning I returned to my poem about Jesus working on the fixer-upper.  Here's what I wrote, a stanza which surprised me--I didn't know I was going to write it until the lines flowed out:

Jesus wipes down every surface,
scrubbing when necessary.
He paints the walls in a soothing
version of the color that first flooded
the world when God said,
“Let there be light.”

Wednesday Fragments: Zoom Sessions and Wrong Pronged Plugs

I feel a bit frazzled today.  Let me record some snapshots:

--I meet with my Candidacy Committee today for an Endorsement Panel.  I have completed the huge writing project, and the people involved know me on some level.  I'm not nervous, exactly, but I'm taking it seriously.  During my upcoming walk, I'll try to anticipate questions.

--The meeting is a Zoom session, but I've still given a lot of thought to my clothes and jewelry.

--Yesterday we did some work at the house.  My spouse moved the fridge away from the window to the spot where it will live, and it works.  Hurrah.  

--We discovered the electricians rewired the 220 plug for the stove as a 4 prong plug.  The stove that came with the house is 3 prong.  It's our fault, in a way.  We got a call asking us whether we wanted 3 or 4 prong plugs for 220, and we didn't think about the stove.

--At first I was annoyed with us for not being more forward looking.  But the stove is in rough shape, so I bounced to, "Well, I'll just buy myself a lovely new stove."  We had planned to do that, but not until next year when we remodeled the kitchen.

--I am starting to feel a bit worried about money.  I have no reason to feel worried.  But my fretfulness doesn't always correspond to reality.  

--I just did a quick search.  There are adapters, and they do seem safe.  Or are they?  Maybe I'll just go with my original plan.  And we could switch to gas.  

--Let me remember that the stove started smoking as we tested burners and the oven.  It was likely because of crud on it.  Let me remember that the oven door doesn't have a handle.

O.K., enough of fragments.  Let me go for a walk and gather my thoughts towards the work of the day:  teaching and the Candidacy Committee conversation.

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.