We had some nice successes last week. First, Trevor got a new job! Flatfile Galleries closes at the end of this week, and he's already got another gig lined up as the Associate Director of Catherine Edelman Gallery, a very well established (over 20 years) all-photography gallery in River North. He'll most likely have a few weeks off, and we've got some super fun things planned: a visit to the dentist, a bathroom fix up (finally after the water leakage from upstairs over the holidays, we're getting a contractor in to fix the walls, the tile, and give us a new paint job!), and dog-sitting for the Borks. We're going to try to fit in a trip up to Door County, too, and I think we can just about squeeze it in.
MCC organized and hosted a writing competition for our eight-college conference, and it came to a close at a festival on campus last Thursday. Apparently the college (which shall go unnamed) originally slated to host this year's festivities is under such disastrous organization that they had to forfeit their turn, so Talia--the events coordinator at MCC--and I got "asked" to do it late in the Fall semester. So...we did! The two of us put our butts to the grindstone and cranked out quite a fun little party. Three of the twelve winners and runners-up came from MCC and two of those three are my creative writing students (and the work they won for they'd written for my class!), so of course I was the proudest of the proud. Here are some of the photos from the event.
And now that it's all over (thank God), I only have to deal with the end of the semester. This is the last week of the semester, then finals week where all I'll do is grade, grade, grade, and then I'm done! I'll have a few weeks off with Trevor (dentist, bathroom, etc.) and then I'm teaching a section of Creative Writing again over the summer. I'm excited to be doing it right after this class; I've been able to tweak the syllabus and fix some of the kinks. I was also just appointed as Co-Chair of Faculty Development, so I'll be busy all summer organizing our big Fall faculty workshop and rest of the year's curriculum for our sixteen new faculty. Yahoo! But getting the new gig means that I'll be able to drop one class, so I'll have a lot lighter teaching load, which makes a huge difference.
The students from this semester's Creative Writing class are so sad to see the class come to an end (that's not ironic) that they talked to me after Thursday's festival about starting a writing workshop student club on campus. I'd actually been playing with the idea for a few weeks before they brought it up, so naturally I accused them of reading my mind. Those sneaks. I'm really excited about it and know that they'll do a better job of organizing this club than my Science-Fiction club guys (by the by, Sci-Fi club is no more. They decided to disband. Ah. Fickle pickles.). But this club is much more up my alley anyway, so I'm really looking forward to it.
I might not write again until May 8th (when grades are due), or I'll write every day lamenting the stacks upon stacks of papers I have to get through in four days. We'll see.
