Saturday Fragments: Weather, Walking, and Apples

It has been a good week overall, yet I still arrive at this Saturday feeling a bit fragmented.  Let me capture a few fragments:

--I am still trying to decide if my apple comparing review exercise in my Nonfiction Writing class was effective.  In some ways, it was:  we had a great conversation about the apples, but we're still in the process of translating that experience to the writing of reviews.

--I haven't done as much walking this week--we've had several very rainy mornings, and while I don't mind walking in the rain, I worry more about walking in rain in the dark, as I must do with my MWF schedule.

--While I haven't done much poetry revising, I've been revising a short story I found in my files.  It didn't need much revising, so I don't know how much I should be patting myself on the back.

--We've had the arrival of our first cool weather--finally!  I want to bake, but I'm also aware of how many calories my fall favorites contain and how much time some of them take to create.

--I decided to do some tasks out of order this morning.  I went on a full moon walk--lovely!

--Yesterday was a day that many folks were celebrating Dolly Parton.  My spouse found 2 possible movies for us to watch.  I wasn't really up for 9 to 5.  Instead, we watched Straight Talk (1992), where Dolly plays a woman who leaves a bad boyfriend and heads off to interesting adventures in Chicago, some of which involve James Woods, who plays a newspaper guy.  Lots of unbelievable plot twists, but I didn't really care.

--My spouse and I both agreed that this movie is Dolly at her most physically lovely.  Her personality, lovely as always, blazes through this movie, which made it particularly perfect.

--We are almost at the 2 year anniversary of Hurricane Helene.  Two years ago today, I went down the market to Spartanburg Methodist College, hoping to finish up student conferences.  On my way home, driving through rain that seemed normal, I got a weather alert on my phone, telling me about a flash flood warning, urging me to seek higher ground.  I had just driven across a mountain and assumed the alert was for someone else, since I was in a car on the Interstate (I 26).  A day later, that part of the Interstate would be under water.

--And now there are new houses and apartment buildings being built on that land that flooded.  Maybe it was a hundred year flood, and those structures will be safe.  I am doubtful.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

All Our Cells: Cars, Monastic, and Other

Yesterday was a good day--we all headed to Bristol for church in our separate cars and lunch afterward.  The classy brunch place was closed because of some kitchen malfunction, so we went to a different downtown hotel for a different lunch experience.

Happily, they had both a breakfast and a lunch menu; it could have been worse.

Today I head down I 26 in a different direction towards Columbia.  A grad school friend had a catastrophic stroke 2 years ago, and she's in a skilled nursing unit in Columbia.  I try to get down to see her every 4-6 weeks.  After that visit, I'll swing by the house of another grad school friend.

This morning I was thinking about cells, the Julian of Norwich kind, and cars, the modern cell and wondering about poem possibilities, even though I'm sure I've used that imagery before.  I'll post the poem, but that doesn't mean I won't revisit this idea.  After all, I wrote the poem a long time ago, during a different time of commuting to adjunct jobs in South Florida.  What does it mean to be doing this driving now, as an older woman?  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here's the older poem, first published in my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard:

My Habit, My Hairshirt


A modern day anchoress, I commit
myself to my car. In my moving cell,
I sing constantly and pray without ceasing.

I dedicate myself to our modern religion
of hectic pace. I rush from one location to another,
showing my devotion in twelve hour increments.

No time for contemplation, the anathema
to the modern ascetic. I flog
myself with my cell phone and briefcase.

Occasionally, a heretical urge lures
me, a siren song urging me to slow down,
tempting me to tame my frantic schedule.

But no Gnostic visions for me. I race
through another week in the grip of my Daytimer,
my habit, my hairshirt.

Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons.  I often go back to re-read old blog posts--by often, I mean at least two or three times a week.  I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about.  This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called "The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday"; I haven't finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.

This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week.  And yes, that's one of my new year's aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026).  But that's the joy of early July--there's still time to adjust my trajectory.

Speaking of inspirations, during my driving to the grocery store yesterday, on NPR's Fresh Air, I heard an interview with romance writer Kennedy Ryan.  She's the first African American to win the RITA, the highest romance writing award.  I started thinking about romance novels and wish fulfillment and the voices and faces that aren't characters in romance novels.  I thought about older women characters who might get one last shot at their dreams coming true.  Romance novels need an obstacle, and the inability to see oneself as romance worthy could be that obstacle.  Another potent one would be that one dream is coming true, and the inability to believe that multiple dreams could come true at once.

If I wrote romance novels with older female protagonists, I'd approach it as alternate life Kristin explorations.  But I was also attracted to this idea, from yesterday's interview, about creating an imaginary town, a place that becomes an escape, like all those clergy novels of the 90's.

Before I head out on my morning walk to beat the coming heat, let me also record this snippet from last year's blog post on this day:  "I wonder where we will be at the halfway point of next summer. Hopefully I will be meeting with my candidacy committee to proceed to endorsement, which is usually a halfway point to ordination, but in my case, I'm doing things a bit out of order. At Lutheran seminaries, students would do CPE much earlier, often in the summer after the first year, and then they'd get to endorsement sometime in the following year, before internship (year 3 of seminary) and the last year of seminary."

Last year Kristin had no idea how much would have changed and for the better.  My candidacy has now transferred to a different synod, which means I can progress towards ordination more quickly.  A year ago, I was expecting to have to do a part-time internship which would last two years, in addition to needing additional seminary classes, which would mean that summer of 2028 would be the earliest I could be ordained.  Now I am on track to be ordained in the first half of 2027.

Last year Kristin had hopes that she might get a tenure track job at Spartanburg Methodist College, but she would have assumed that it probably couldn't happen soon.  And now I am an Associate professor on the tenure track.

This morning, I'm feeling a bit fretful about the electrical work happening at our S'burg house--we bought all sorts of fixtures thinking that the installation was included in the expensive cost to rewire the house, only to be told we'd get an update on Monday.  Does this mean a proposal/invoice, as it sounded on the phone with the scheduler?  Or just an update on timelines?  It's tiring.

Tiring, but fixable--let me remember the saying that I first heard in one of Anne Lamotte early books, when one of her friends said that a problem solved by an infusion of cash is not really an interesting problem. It's especially not a problem when one has the money.

The sun is up to begin the day's roasting--let me go for my walk.

Fixer-Upper Report

My brain has been ping-ponging all over the place.  I wish I could say that I have seized summer, that I have put together a new book length volume of poetry--or even that I've written lots of new poems.  I wish I could say that I've written some short memoir-ish/short story pieces.  I have not done any of these things.  

In the next month, I will need to write a paper for my Paul class, and finish a huge writing project for the next phase of candidacy in the process to becoming ordained.  My hope has shifted to having time for Creative Writing in the fall.

In the meantime . . . 

We are trying to get ready for guests next week for Music Week at Lutheridge, while at the same time, doing some stuff that the fixer-upper house in Spartanburg requires.  My spouse is on his way there so that the inspection of the electrical rough-in can happen (I have to stay here because I have a dermatologist appointment in my every 3 months after a melanoma schedule).  We went down there yesterday and came back with a shopping list.

We stopped at our local Lowe's in Arden, which is always fairly deserted, compared to similar stores in South Florida.  We chose ceiling fans, a light for the kitchen with a track with 4 lights, lights for over 2 bathroom vanities, and a small light for the fall.  We also chose a hood for over the range, which costs far more than I wanted it to cost.

When we bought the house, I was not thinking we would replace the ceiling fans.  On the contrary, I was happy that the house had so many ceiling fans.  But they're very old, working to varying degrees.  The electricians will install them if we bought new ones, so we went ahead and replaced most of them.

When we looked at the house, back before we bought it, I thought that we could paint the walls, refinish the hardwood floors, and move in.  And we could have done that.  But even though the house has solar panels, the wiring inside the house hasn't been updated:  most of the wall plugs are 2 prong.  We could have used adjuster plugs in every spot, but it would mean that the house wasn't grounded--not the safest for humans or for fire risk.

When it's time to sell the house, these improvements may pay off.  We're not living in a part of the country where old houses are bulldozed for new building to happen, so future buyers are likely to be happy about the house having been rewired with a new HVAC system put in.

And in the meantime, these improvements will make the house better for us to live in too, during the 4-5 days a week that we're there during the school year.

Kristin in Indianapolis, Paul in Spain

In another hour or so, I'll put the last of my stuff in the car and head back to the mountains of North Carolina.  I've been in Indianapolis, taking a class on Paul, another task done on the path to ordination in the Lutheran church (ELCA, the more progressive expression of Lutheranism in North America).  

It has been a great class, full of deep dives into Greek words and church history and Paul's theology, which can be summarized as Proclaim Christ Crucified.  We even had a fun digression into what we would proclaim--I find it problematic to proclaim Christ Crucified.  Christ incarnate, yes.  Christ risen from the dead, yes.  But crucified?  That's the most important thing?

The cross means something very different for Paul than it does for me.  The cross as a symbol/shortcut does something very different for Paul.  I get that. 

We talked about not knowing how Paul died, not for sure.  Church custom/tradition posits that it's likely that he died in Rome, executed by Emperor Nero.  But it's also possible that he left Rome and continued onward to Spain.

A random thought floated through my brain on Thursday:  that would make a good poem, Paul in Spain, late in life.  By yesterday morning, I decided to jot down some lines, and voila!  A poem emerged, mostly formed.

Here's how it begins:

Paul slices citrus for sangria, 

oranges and lemons plucked

from trees in the lingering light

of a late October evening.

Who would have dreamed or demanded

such a soft landing?

This morning I thought, oh dead, when does citrus ripen in Spain?  I chose "late October evening" because Paul is in the late autumn of his life.  Happily, a quick search this morning shows the detail can work--and even had I discovered that it didn't, I'd have probably kept it.

The poem ends this way:

Safe for now, he pours the sangria

and waits for the sun to set.

I do worry that the poem is cliched, and I also worry that it won't be interesting to non-Christian readers.  But we all age, and this poem looks at aging.  By using Paul as the vehicle, maybe it does say something new.

I'll put it away and look at it again later this week.  But I am happy to have created a poem the way I once did:  an idea comes and within 24 hours, I'm attempting a poem and seeing it to completion.  Hurrah!

A Short TEEM Report

This morning has less blogging time, but I have finished my movie review, the first assignment for my TEEM class on Pauline letters.  I have done the practice quizzes one more time--I've been doing them over and over in the hopes that I'll do well on the quiz that will begin today's class.  

We have another quiz tomorrow, and I haven't done any practice for that one.  So tomorrow may be a light blogging day too, as I practice and practice.  I have not taken a quiz for course credit since undergraduate school.  Of course, I've taken quiz after quiz as part of HR training--those quizzes that you can take over and over again so that you can continue to be employed.

Each quiz counts for 10% of the course grade.  My inner good girl wants to make an A.  My pragmatic older self knows that whatever grade I make will be fine.  I'm not even sure if TEEM classes show up on a transcript.

And then, part of me wonders why I care about my official record.  Am I going to do more graduate work?  Maybe--and that's why I care.

Yesterday's TEEM training was a workshop on stewardship.  When I first heard about the workshop, I felt a bit of despair.  I've already had so much stewardship training.  But it was a great workshop.  We talked about a much broader vision of stewardship:  what do we value?  How do we protect what we value?  It's far more than money, budgets, and a finance team. 

I've been part of small churches, with attendance below 50 members, so these are not concepts that are new to me.  In a very small church, one can't assume that others will pick up the slack, unlike in a church that has over 100 members in the pews on Sunday.

Our workshop leader, Tim Brown, was both compelling and entertaining.  We had worship in the middle of the day, followed by Indian food.  It was good to have that long break.

Let me bring this writing to a close so that I can get some breakfast before the day begins.  Onward!

The Rethinking of Mary Magdalene Gets Wider Acceptance

I have been listening to a fascinating interview between Diana Butler Bass and Elizabeth Schrader-Polczer.  Several years ago, Bass preached a sermon using Schrader-Polczer's work, which Bass points out is one of 3 of the most watched sermons of all time; the other two were Bishop Budde's sermon at the interfaith worship service after the second inauguration of Donald Trump and the sermon preached at the wedding of Prince Harry and Mary Markle.

In that sermon, Bass presented the work of Elizabeth Schrader-Polczer, who was then a PhD student at Duke.  She did research on the Lazarus text and noticed that the word Mary had been changed to Martha.  Why would someone do this?  And how can we be sure?  

Bass published her sermon here.  It's worth the read, and it's got a link to hear the sermon.  Bass makes the case that it was likely a 4th century change, a change to disempower Mary Magdalene.

In the interview I'm listening to today, Bass and Schrader-Polzer review those ideas.  It's an interesting window into how research on ancient texts is done, and how this work was done.  It's got great information about issues of gender, along with church history.

Here are some highlights:

--At minute 28, they talk about the canon--which books made it into the Bible, which did not, and why.  Schrader-Polzer posits that the approach to Mary Magdalene, the changes made in the Gospel of John, might have happened in the 2nd century so that the book would be seen as more acceptable, so that it would survive. 

--In the oldest artwork, whenever there's a Lazarus, there's only one sister.

--Throughout the interview, there's lots of great information about translations of the Bible and how we come to have the Bible that we do.

--It is fascinating to me that there are changes to Bible commentaries and forthcoming changes to translations, including the master text, the "Novum Testamentum Graece (Nestle-Aland). The 'Nestle-Aland,' or 'NA,' is the source from which almost all versions of the New Testament are translated into every language around the world" (quoted material from Bass' newsletter).  These changes happened because of Schrader-Polzer's work and Bass' promotion of this work.  I'm inspired that academic work can have this effect.

--Bass points out that this kind of revision to Bible scholarship, a major revision like Schrader-Polzer's, doesn't happen often and usually about once a generation.

--In the first century, the town of Magdala didn't exist (roughly minute 1:08).  So using Mary of Magdala would be a wrong translation.

--"Reframing ancient questions" vs. "opening new questions"--Bass uses this language about the way that the Catholic church might approach these developments.  She posits that this research is the reframing of ancient questions kind of development.

--Just after 1:18, Bass and Schrader-Polzer talk about the Gospel as a piece of story telling, a cohesive narrative, that is not the way that most people think about a Gospel:  approaching it the way a creative writer/teacher would see it.

Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

It's been a good week-end, with our attention shifting from home repairs to church work.  I usually have a rough draft of my sermon written by Friday, but not last week.  So my main writing task on Saturday was sermon writing.  Happily, by the time I sat down to write, I had already plotted it out in my head.

You can read my sermon in yesterday's blog post at my theology blog.

It's always interesting to see how the sermon changes from rough draft to preaching manuscript to actual delivery.  For example, I will occasionally reference the youth sermon, but since I don't write it in advance, it won't be in the written versions.

We're a small church, and occasionally in the summer, when families are on vacation, we have no youth, so there's no youth sermon.  When I announced that there would be no youth sermon, I asked the congregation to think about what had brought them joy in their own youth.  I referenced a popsicle in the park event that one of the members had made the subject of a Facebook post.  The recording of the sermon referenced that popsicle event; the manuscript does not.

You can view yesterday's sermon here, on my YouTube channel.

I've been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don't like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don't become a wandering tangent where I can't easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I'm going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it's time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, "A Song Both Familiar and Strange."  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it's done, but before I started last week's revisions, I thought it was done.  

Last week's earlier draft ended with this stanza, which I worried ended the poem on too melancholy a note:

By your bedside, as you sip
tea through a straw, I think
of Julian of Norwich
who insisted that all manner
of things shall be well.
I wish that I could share
the convictions of Julian,
but in the presence
of your shrinking
body and mangled speech,
my doubts blossom
into an orchard of hazelnut trees.

Now that stanza is in the middle of the poem.  Here's the last stanza:

Like a medieval priest
chanting words in a strange
language, I read scraps
of Julian’s work, her odd
metaphors for the Divine
filling the space between us.
You listen and sing
a song both familiar and strange.

Last week I even made some poetry submissions.  In some ways, it's easier in the summer when many journals aren't taking submissions.  In September, when most journals are "open," and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.

Rain and Writing

It's the kind of rainy morning that's saying, "Wait and walk later."  Of course, the risk in waiting is that I might not go at all:  it could continue to rain or I could submit to laziness.  It's the kind of rainy morning where I have writing that I need to do, so waiting to walk makes sense.  

I was feeling bad that I had no sermon rough draft written, but by last night I was glad.  We went to the last fish fry of the season at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN, where we discovered that a church member had made aprons for everyone, reversible at that.  As I looked at us all wearing our aprons, I thought about Pentecost and the metaphors for the Holy Spirit, and I got an idea that hadn't been there before.  I don't want to write about it further, for fear of losing the energy of the idea.  Once I've posted the sermon, I'll come back and put the links in this post. 

I am happy for the rain, even if it means my walk never happens.  We've been in such a deep drought across the southeast.

Of course, last night I was not happy for the rain as we drove back from the fish fry.  At first, as we left at 7:30, it was beautiful, with clouds across the mountain.  The rain settled in as we got to the top of the mountain; once we got to the road construction outside of Asheville, the rain got heavier and the road conditions worse with construction debris and barriers and various lines on the road.  I have rarely been more relieved when we pulled into our driveway as I was last night.

Let me keep this blog post short so that I can take advantage of this rainy morning and get my Pentecost sermon written.

Summer Writing Intentions

I have not meant to let so much time go by since my last blog post; indeed, I'm astonished to see that I haven't written since Friday.  On Saturday, I wrote a rough draft of my sermon, and Sunday, I had to be on the road by 7 a.m. to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol.  Yesterday I was putting together the syllabus and other unique-to-me course elements for the online Professional Writing class that I'm teaching for Spartanburg Methodist College this summer.  The class starts on Tuesday, a week from today, but students have access on Thursday.

I often tell people that the only time I really feel that I have off is the week between Christmas and January 1:  no classes to teach, no sermon to write, no prep work to do.  Still, this week feels different, even though I still have appointments and online teaching duties.

It feels like the first week of summer, although it's hard for me to pin down when summer starts precisely.  The last day of in-person class feels like a demarcation line, as does turning in grades, as does graduation.  I want to spend some time this week planning for ways to get back to creative writing, the non-seminary, non-sermon writing.  I want more poetry.  I also want to remember that this summer is the time I planned to put a new poetry collection together.

Here's what I wrote in a December blog post:  " I'm going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly. I'm going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground. The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems."  That blog post reminded me that I had looked at past manuscripts--do I want to use one of them as a skeleton/scaffolding or start by looking at files of individual poems?

I also want to return to my New Year's resolution, which was also my 2025 resolution:   "I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I'm also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead."

Here's hoping for some white hot writing streaks this summer!

Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

It's been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

--In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn't remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn't remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

--I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

--As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had revised a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven't circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

--On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80's, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It's not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I have been up early, both fretful and hopeful, thinking about taxes, thinking about home renovation shows and real life fixer-uppers, working on some poetry submissions.  Usually I'd be revising a sermon on Sunday morning, but I got that done last night, after an up and down day.

I was thinking of mid-life crises, how some of us buy convertibles and others buy run down houses to fix up.  I had planned to work on a poem about Jesus having a mid-life crisis and buying a run down house to renovate--the idea came to me on Friday.  But I worried that readers would reasonably point out that Jesus didn't exactly live until mid-life to be able to have a midlife crisis. 

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn't do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it's so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn't come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go--it's so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that's closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Grading in the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning

I have been up for hours, literally hours, grading.  Two of my four online classes are finished, so I decided to get the grading done, since I couldn't fall back asleep after I woke up at 1:30.  So, I graded the final research essays, did some checking to make sure that I hadn't overlooked anything in the gradebook, and submitted final grades.  Submitting final grades isn't automatic.  I have to toggle between 2 tabs and enter in each grade.  But I now have submitted final grades for 2 of 4 online classes.

Am I caught up with grading?  Goodness gracious no.  It's the time of year when I won't really be done for another week and a half.  Papers are coming in, day and night.  But it does feel good to make progress.

Let me also remember that I continue to try to capture poem ideas.  Some have been in my head for months:  every time I see a tattoo, I think of a colleague who had a tattoo of a tomato plant on his arm, and I've been trying to capture that tattoo and give it a deeper meaning.  One idea came to me in a rush when I saw someone's online outrage post about a recent vote about allowing drilling/mining above the Northern Boundary Waters, which reminded me of a friend who died recently, and I tried to write a poem about both northern and southern waters and boundaries.  Neither poem is finished yet--in fact, I have yet to have crafted enough of them to know that I have a poem or just an idea.

Next year when my year-to-year contract converts to a tenure track faculty position, I'll teach one less class each term, and I'm looking forward to seeing if I get more writing done--by which I mean not just writing but actually getting to rough drafts and revised drafts. 

Fan Letter for Forgotten Poem, "The Moon Remembers"

Like many others, I get the occasional e-mail that tells me that the sender can help me find new readers for my brilliant books, millions and millions of readers.  Yesterday I got a different e-mail, an old-fashioned fan letter of sorts.  

The e-mail writer told me that she had selected my poem for a specific reason:  "This is to let you know that as a member of a Lectio Poetry group that met this morning, I chose your poem 'The Moon Remembers' for our session. Because of the recent NASA mission to send humans farther into space than ever before, and to study the dark side of the moon, I felt fortunate to find your poem to share."

The e-mail concluded this way, "In this world of chaos, 'The Moon Remembers' gave us an hour of peace, of joy, of hope."

Wow--what writer could hope for more than that?  I mean that sincerely.  It is one of the reasons I write, in the hopes of bringing something positive to people.

I don't get many fan letters anymore, and the ones that I get are usually about "Heaven on Earth," perhaps my most famous poem, read on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.  Yesterday's e-mail referenced "The Moon Remembers."  It's a poem I barely remember writing, and at first, I wondered if she was writing to the wrong poet.

Happily, my blog answers many a question for me.  I posted it in this blog post, and I'm guessing that's how the group leader found my poem.  Even though it's not one of the poems I remember, I'm still happy with it.

Let me post it here again, as I also say a prayer for the Artemis Mission which returns home Friday:

The Moon Remembers

                “I sing and the moon shudders"
                            Li Po, “Drinking Alone by Moonlight”



The moon does not approve of elementary choir
masters who stop the rehearsal, make each quivering
child sing a solo to find the one
who is off key. The helpless moon, marooned
so far away, wishes she could offer sanctuary.

The moon knows what the choir master forgets.

The moon doesn’t understand scales or the division
of voices into the caste systems of chorus:
superior sopranos, dowdy altos, basses as the bubble
of depth holding us up, the star tenor.

The moon remembers what the choir master forgets.

The moon sees our best selves as we sing:
the lonely driver late at night, singing to stay awake,
the melancholy mother, humming Christmas carols
to cheer the babies, the desperate lover
serenading the empty window.

The moon remembers what we all forget.

The moon knows that if we believed in our songs,
strengthened our fragile voices, and sang
as if we meant it, then galaxies would blow
to bits as the universe expands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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