The 86 Days of Summer

Grand Beach, Manitoba

Some people create New Year's resolutions.

I create a list of...

68 things to do in 86 days of summer!

Here's the approximate breakdown:

10 items are food related
5 are related to exercise and wellness
17 of them are sports/leisure/hobby type activities
7 are literacy related
at least 12 of them involve travel
11 will help me build some mad skills
and 9 of the list items are purely indulgent

I'm sooooo looking forward to summer!

NDRA Conference Presentation Fun

On Friday I presented a session on using picture books in the secondary classroom. It turns out I had more material than time but I managed to squeeze it all in. I hope folks took something away with them. I am cuckoo for picture books and I am sure that showed!

My pal Andrea and I had the pleasure of presenting a session together yesterday at NDRA on Creating a School-Wide Reading Initiative. It was loads of fun to talk about getting kids motivated to read and all the great YA books available to keep them engaged.

Friday, our luncheon speaker was Jacqueline Woodson and she read from a variety of books. I haven't had the pleasure of reading any of her work, but I want to now!

Jeff Wilhelm's presentation on Teaching with Inquiry blew me away and got me fired up for fall. The whole perspective shift and re-framing lessons just makes so much sense when it comes to teaching. This was my conference highlight!

UND Writers Conference 2010

Deena Larsen 4:00 pm Reading
at UND Writers Conference

Each year I get pretty excited about the UND Writers Conference. This year's theme wasn't my favorite --Mind the Gap-- Print, New Media, Art. I read a LOT online but I still like my books in print and perhaps I've not evolved enough to really embrace hypertext poetry in all its glory.

Our RRVWP featured author was Deena Larsen and she and her partner were kind enough to join us for dinner at Eagle's Crest after her 4:00 reading. She talked about links and hypertext poetry and secrets. She used grad students holding images and phrases to demonstrate the power and versatility of links. I get it, I think. I'm just more of a straight forward boring girl.Cecelia Condit and husband

Deena Larsen and Nick Montfort

In addition to Deena we also got to chat with Nick Montfort and Cecelia Condit.
There were just enough of us that there seemed to be three-five conversations going at once and I was caught up mostly in the Nick Montfort Q & A. I fear we scared him with our rapid fire questions, the poor guy. Still it was fascinating learning about Implementation, his sticker novel (a novel in approx. 240 sticker installments spread all over the world), and discovering he'd also read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and without missing a beat could refer to bits of the bizarro technology in that world. Despite the fact that I'd not read as much of their works prior to our dinner, it was still a fascinating discussion.

Following dinner, I drove back to campus for Art Spiegelman's presidential address. It was a wild ride of images, ideas, and history of comics. Jack Weinstein interviewed Spiegelman.

I still need to decipher my notes, but here were a few of the things Spiegelman said:
Regarding Maus, he wanted to write a comic book that readers would need a bookmark for. He didn't set out to write a "graphic novel." It seems graphic novels have more respectability. He's managed to create "art." Spiegelman says, "It's a bit like thinking you are a "hooker" and finding out that you're a "lady of the night." After hearing he's considered the father of the graphic novel Spiegelman says, "I'm demanding a blood test."

RRVWP Poetry Workshop with Brent Goodman

Brent Goodman, poet and teacher

Painting with Your Senses: Teaching "Show Don't Tell"
Friday, March 12, 6:00-9:00 PM

Throughout the course we wrote a number of poems in 15-20 minutes, but in this session I wrote four. Here's an example of one of our prompts:

Write a poem --any length we want --
specific things must be included:

* a tongue will touch or taste something
* a smell will remind a speaker of something else
* you will invent the name of a color
* something in the poem arrives or departs
* invent a verb
* name what the radio is playing
* name a body of water

Here's a draft of my attempt (you'll notice I didn't get all the requirements in, oops.)

My blood spools,
spinning like the dizzy maker
on my childhood playground and
if I think too hard
or stare too long
I get the same motionless feeling
and now I start to slump a little to the left
afraid
to embrace that weightless feeling when
as a child I'd hold on like Superman
with my legs spindling out behind me
And my mouth is a copper penny
as my platelets return.
Welcome home, my own red sea.
I pray I won't feel the shiver
of my vein collapsing
as the cuff's chokehold tightens on my arm.
I require
a bit of gauze--a game I play with myself
to pretend there is no 16 gauge needle.
Something to squeeze,
my brain immersed in book,
and a blanket thick to work its warmth
when the saline slams through the tube,
reverse motion washing the coagulant-rich crimson back to shore,
a glacial melt spilling in my veins.

Our Poem: Creative Collaboration in the Classroom
Saturday, March 13, 8:30- 11:30 AM

We adopted a poem from the choices Goodman provided in a mini-anthology the night before. We used our "adopted poems" to examine the following things.

Any poem can be considered in terms of its...
Line – isolating the lines and looking at them
Music – looking at the sound devices
Shape – is it short lines, long lines, etc. stanzas, appearance.
Mind is this more about concept or ... (I missed the rest of that one)
Velocity is this meant to be read word by word… or is it more like Alan Ginsburg
Foot – meter?

Then we each picked just ONE line from the poem that we liked and talked about why. Looking at line breaks and at the "poems within the poems"

We tried an Exquisite Corpse poem and then did some partner poems some blind, some responsively. None of these quite worked as well for me, but I could see potential for cool things, especially with students.

Building Your Own Room: Inventing Poetic Forms
Saturday, March 13, 1:30-4:30 PM

In this session we started by revising one another's poems from earlier. It was interesting to hear others' efforts at revision and tightening of language.

Then we attempted to understand line breaks in a poem where they'd been removed. It was an interesting lesson in enjambment.

How do you form a line:
Breath
Idea
Architecture

We ended things by trying to write in a very tight form--a set number of lines and syllables. And then we'd revise that to fewer syllables, fewer lines. It was a great exercise. Difficult for some (ahem. me!)

Brent Goodman - Public reading/Q&A session
Saturday, March 13, 7:00-9:00, North Dakota Museum of Art, UND

The night ended off with Brent doing a public reading from his book The Brother Swimming Beneath Me. A few of us gathered recently to read some of his poems and to do some poetry explication before we met him. I loved what I read and it was thrilling to hear him read from that book at his reading. I'm all revved up for poetry month now... yippee!