I spent the weekend in Swannanoa and stayed through Tuesday so I could see my peoples graduate. A terrific graduating class, one that I’m pleased to have around the alumni association because they’re so damn awesome. Ruba’s reading was stellar, as were most of the readings. I wondered if I was seeing things through rose-colored glasses, because everything seemed better than normal, fiction writers and poets. Nick Fox and Gabriel Blackwell gave astounding, animated readings. Angela Torres knocked my socks clean off. I mean, top to bottom, good readings.

The campus was all a-twitter because of the famous new student, which was hilarious, cute, totally worth mocking, and a little bit contagious. That’s embarassing to admit, but true. But all the new students that I talked to were pretty great and there are plenty of reasons to be all a-twitter if you’re at Warren Wilson right now.

Mc asked if I would battle with him since DJ Reed Turchi had to come back to Carolina, so I put in a couple hours at the dance, which was a sick amount of fun.

Notes on photos: I love the look on Matthew’s face here. Also, Tua is the most photogenic person alive.

Bad news today, in the form of a job that a loved one did not get, after investing a great deal of time and energy in trying to get it.  That always stings, especially when said loved one needs to not be in said loved one’s current job.

Lunch today at 5 Guys will Bill, where talk ventured toward the literary.  We spent a little while bashing literary fiction and then finally accepted its uses, then saw Wally Hannum wandering around the mall and invited him to join us.  Wally’s in phased retirement and has just bought a house in the mountain.  He said that for the first night there, they got a mattress and two rocking chairs, and that was just about all they needed.  (“A toothbrush, too, maybe,” he added.)

Emily came in with a story excerpt from a lesson plan, the best line of which was, “Dave was 6 feet, 250 pounds of pure defense.”  Oh.  My.  God.  Please let them put that on my tombstone.

I have been spurred to blogging again by a stern prodding from Jennings, and this reflection, which I sent to my alumni listserv yesterday in response to the question “How do you continue to write during a dark time in which you don’t really want to get out of bed?”

I’d like to tack on to what Ed said about keeping a journal during this rough time.  During the darkest phase of my life, I began blogging.  I tried to just keep up with what was happening daily– nothing special.  Though I was deep in the throes of despair, I tried not to talk about that so much… I just tried to objectively recall what was happening.  If I was pissed at someone, I said so.  If I found a rare moment of overwhelming joy, I made a note of it.  I kept my blog on a private site that was part of a small online community, because I didn’t want my name on it for the world to see, I just wanted to have some voice.  What happened next truly astounded me: the blog became one of the most-read on the site, and people came out of the woodwork to identify with my daily goings-on.  Some, I think, sensed that I was down and truly in need of some human connection.  Some were just interested in an honest accounting of what was going on in a thoroughly average life.  A few were friends, most were strangers (at that time, though many are now friends in my day-to-day life).

I did not, at that time, anticipate that there would be any salvageable writing in that blog.  In fact, I was certain that the opposite was true.  But I now recognize that those blog entries are infinitely valuable as a source of material for my writing, as a way to know my own mind, and as a wonderfully true record of a time that I sometimes flirt with revisiting.  An unexpected bonus was that I have a detailed impression of my first date with my wife, which happened at the tail end of my dark time.  I kept the record going for more than a year afterwards (and still blog occasionally, though in a more public space and a less honest way).  When I got married, my best man, in lieu of writing a toast, compiled and read entries about our courtship, which was one of the most touching things anyone had ever done for me.

I think the key, for me, was being certain that writing in that blog was a useless, self-indulgent act.  We all started writing solely for ourselves, and at some point, opened up to an audience.  Reclaim the writing for you for a little while, and see what happens.

Speaking of my alumni listserv, we released the results of our survey and there’s been a ton of conversation, and I am buoyed by the diverse responses.  There’s some anger, some indignation, some total agreement (even though the results weren’t uniform)… all in all, there’s a lot of willingness to discuss what we mean to each other and what we want to mean to each other.  I don’t yet feel fully a part of the community (though by no means to I feel fully apart, either).  But I can see how that will happen in time.

Robin and I opened up the discussion boards for tech testing and the first-day response was well beyond anything I could have hoped for.  I mean, I really think this thing could catch on.

Sometimes when it rains, it pours.  I had to pass today on the opportunity to lead a seminar that I would have loved to do because it falls on the last two days of classes at UNC next semester.  And as much as I would have loved to do a cool seminar, there’s no way I would miss the last two classes for my freshman honors.  Those classes are FUN.

I’m already doing a lot of thinking about how to improve upon my performance from two years ago.  My syllabus is good, not terrific, but I now have access to the incredible alumni community from Warren Wilson, many of whom frequently answer calls for ideas about how to teach x or y.  So, where before I had some decent poems to illustrate concepts, now I can get excellent ones.  I’ll also have time to evaluate my own textbook, rather than just using the one selected by a professor who had to take sudden leave.  I was pretty happy with that book, in the end (I used it the following semester, too), but I like the idea that I have some options.

I have experienced such good fortune in the past few days that I am seriously waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Starting to kind of dread it.  I keep thinking that karma will balance out and I’ll get some great cosmic bitch-slap.  I have watched too much “My Name is Earl.”

I kind of wish my name was Buddy. Then, whenever anyone addressed me, they’d be saying something really friendly like “Hey, Buddy.”

Started reading comics again this weekend, beginning Mike Carey’s Lucifer. I’m not yet through the first trade paperback (I have the first ten on my shelf), and I’m underwhelmed. It’s a little too intentionally oblique and arcane for me… Lucifer seems to just be able to do whatever he wants when he wants to. Which is cool, y’know, since he’s supernatural, but not too exciting for the reader. The joy of Superman or Batman is that the readers know their limits and can then enjoy how they persevere or get creative in tough situations. Lucifer doesn’t seem to have limits at the outset… so, it’s kind of blah thus far.

All my peeps are up at residency. How lucky for them. Still, being graduated has its benefits; for example, when I came home from work, I played Xbox for an hour and a half. This was not possible during grad school. I like to think that each head that I shoot is a poem I could have written. Take that!

So, December was the first month since I started blogging that I went a whole month and didn’t post. I was doing the story-a-day grind and got caught up in that, and wasn’t terribly interested in blogging (or really, social stuff).

Work really took off this fall, in good ways mostly, but by the time the Christmas break rolled around, I felt like I was drowning, and the night before I’m supposed to go back, I find that being away for almost two full weeks didn’t help that feeling a whole lot. So something will have to give there. I’m just not sure what.

Good news, though: it looks like I’ll be back with the English department in Fall 2009, teaching a section of Intro to Poetry.