The First Entry

I spent way too much time finagling with fonts and font colors and backgrounds and photos. I found html code for the moon. I stretched photos. I shrunk them, too. I did all of this knowing that I would sometime soon need to actually post writing on this blog. I love writing, and can certainly get caught up in the dream of words, but there’s something intoxicating about fonts, colors, sidebars, and always and anywhere the moon at any stage.

I’m finally posting. I’m embarrassed to reveal how long it took me to pick out the background color for this blog. Perhaps just writing the previous sentence is confession enough?

Another confession: I have trouble writing about myself. I can say (or add to what’s written in the right sidebar) that I’m entering my second year as a PhD student here in Lincoln. I just spent the greater part of summer back “home” in the Northwoods. I’m used to many little lakes and one Great Lake, and I’ll admit coming here in August of 2008 was a big adjustment. It took some time getting acquainted with three Lincoln characters: the heat, the humidity, and that seemingly always-cloudless sky. We’re all old friends now. I’m still so new here, but already I’ve found favorite nooks and crannies. I love the shade of the trees and the long twisted paths that border Salt Creek. I’m a (trail) runner, so finding a trail in the woods was a total score for me last fall. And then I became injured. And then I hopped on my bike and rode the great bike path system here. I spend a lot of time outdoors, especially in cooler weather. I love winter. I love snow. I do hope (and please don’t get too upset at what I’m about to write after I close this parenthetical) we get more snow this winter.

*

I teach as a teaching assistant here in UNL’s English Department. My students come from all over Nebraska, with some South Dakotans, Kansans(?), and Texans thrown into the mix. This semester I’m teaching Writing and Rhetoric, and so far it’s a blast. It’s also the first week, so no major challenges have leapt out at me in just two class meetings.

Before I arrived at UNL, I was a TA in my graduate program at Northern Michigan University and taught composition courses along with narrative and descriptive writing. The students mostly came from rural areas, and many came from the surrounding Upper Peninsula—a land very isolated from any major (or even minor) metropolitan area: on one side are the forests of the Northwoods and on the other side is Lake Superior. Although, some of my students came from lower Michigan (“below the bridge”) and haled from Detroit and the Detroit suburbs—an increasingly unique place these days.

This summer and the two previous summers, I taught a writing course to students in 6^th through 10^th grade. The course is part of a summer school/nature-environmental camp held near the Wisconsin-Upper Michigan border and is called Camp Lowenwood at Conserve School. (Most definitely I would like to incorporate what I learn about place-conscious education into my summer teachings at Conserve School.) This short teaching experience is, for lack of a better word (forgive me, it’s late), magical. Although my students came from areas very different from our summer home in the Northwoods, we all grew so close to our surroundings and did so in such a short time (I might have been at an advantage since I grew up, coincidentally, in the very same region). We formed a community of writers during those weeks, and the writing the students created (and even some of the poems I penned) reflected this tight community, this place we embraced in that northern land (and outdoor classroom).

*

What I find as a wonderful challenge teaching first-year college courses is getting the students—almost all of them literally in a new location—to feel a connection to their new place and to use their place, their actual physical setting (whether we sit and write in a college classroom or venture outdoors and write by a metal tree—or real trees, for that matter; I’m referring to the metal tree sculpture on UNL’s campus) as motivation to write something new and fresh or perhaps something more in-tune with their already growing writerly voices. And, maybe, somehow this change in place might serve to stretch these growing writerly muscles.

*