Flailing About

I'm full of odds and ends on this Thursday morning.

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Haircut tonight. After years of not really caring about my hair, Bryon has discovered he likes the colored dye thing. He's put in requests for white and blue on some occasion. So tonight, Margot and I will have the Ramona Flowers discussion, and we'll see what she thinks of sinking heavily into Cindy Laupnerville.

Yesterday, I hit 55.7K and finished through chapter 18 of the Troll story. I'm just about 60 pages from the end. After the 4th rewrite, it'll be good to go. I'll go through and do some editing, sharpening, and cutting. But I'm jazzed, because not only only is there light at the end of the tunnel, but there is also a hole big enough that I can crawl through.

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My friend Catrina Horsfield and I are taking a summer trip in June to Finland and Norway for research for each of our novels (my sequel to troll, her wizards). I love planning itineraries, so expect much Norway blabbing in the future.

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Viable Paradise friend Brent Bowen posts this inspiring piece for writers. It's a well-written thing worth the read.

Another post coming up. I have discovered I don't want to bury these things in that post.

Cath

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.

What I Don’t Know Can Hurt Me

The times, they are a-changing.

There's an issue we're teasing apart into different filaments at the college. Diversity at Kirkwood is at an all time HIGH. Coolness and awesomeness! We have lots of students from different countries. We have lots of students who speak different languages.

We have lots of students who are coming from rural subculture. We have lots of students who are coming from urban subculture. We have lots of racial diversity. Finally!

This is the first time many of our white students are interacting with diverse populations. Come to think of it, this is the first time many of our teachers are as well. This five-year period has seen an incredible spikes. We're recruiting abroad and in the Chicago areas, and Iowa is bringing in immigrants.

BUT what we haven't seen to get us ready for all this? A scaffolding support system that helps us all get along. In reacting to a fight in the atrium, we hired a stone-faced security guard. It had become a gathering place for black students. Now, it's not. Instructors complain of how loud our Islamic students are, our black students are, and our Hispanic students are. Cultural norms are rubbing each other along raw edges.

If there's one thing the Internet has taught me in recent years, it's that you can't decide your own culture, ethnicity, socio-economic class, any aspect about you is "base-line normal," and everything else takes you into exotic country.

As a professor, I feel it's important for me to get educated. Most efforts at Kirkwood start modestly, and our modest beginning appears to be a reading circle.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.