Wow.  Little Fury lay fallow for over a month, the longest such dry spell since I started blogging in 2002.  Thanks to each of you who sent puzzled notes asking when it would be regularly updated again… you can now resume wasting valuable work time here, instead of surfing for Internet pr0n.

I just finished up my first radio appearance in a long, long time as a guest on WUNC’s The State of Things.   Producer Susan Davis, host Frank Stasio, and the rest of the production team do a really terrific job; from start to finish I was amazed at how effortless they make it seem.  I was on with Michael McFee to talk about The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, and literary life in Durham.  Sitting in their new studios in the American Tobacco Complex, it’s hard not to be struck by how thoroughly Durham is in the throes of being revitalized, of growing into a truly exceptional place to live and work.

Assuming that I’m able to complete this last stretch, I graduate on July 12, which has been part of the reason for my silence.  I am now assembling a class and preparing for two thesis interviews.  I’m not sure why I have chosen to focus more of my energy and grey matter on these two tasks than I did on most of the rest of the semester, but friends, I tell you, they have eaten up just about all of my spare bandwidth.  I often feel like I’m not myself for days on end.  But I suppose that these two tasks are the first where I’ve been really beholden to my classmates, and I feel the weight of that responsibility quite keenly.  If I am to leave Warren Wilson with a sense of peace, I’ll have to feel like I knocked these two tasks out of the park.  (As an aside, I am also working with Lili Flanders on the fundraising for the graduating class gift to Friends of Writers.   Though wehave publicly stated that we really want 100% of the grads to participate, we’ve been a little more subdued about our other goal.  But I’ll put it out there, commit it to print: We don’t just want to contribute more than any class before us, we want to shatter the record, setting the bar so high for future classes that they will hire professional fundraisers.  We want the Holden Minority Scholarship endowed now.  If you are a loved one and you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider a donation– the donation form is on the FOW website– in honor of the Summer ‘08 grads.)

So I expect the blogging will be slow a while longer, though since Ladybug is currently in Turkey, I have a little more bachelor time.  I don’t think any man wants to receive e-mail updates from his wife, half a world away, about coed naked massage, but that’s the state of my inbox right now…