I'm back! I am actually sitting here at DMACC's Ankeny campus with my creative writing students...today we are declaring our "writing goal" for the semester. I too have a writing goal I would like to meet. Step One: starting up this blog again.
Teaching 4-5 classes per semester since I joined the DMACC faculty in West Des Moines, Iowa has kept me way to busy to keep up this blog. However, this semester I am fortunate enough to be travelling abroad to London for DMACC's Study Abroad program! I will be going overseas with 19 students as well as DMACC Criminal Justice instructor Danielle Galien. Danielle will be teaching Criminal Justice courses along with assisting our British Professor Nicole Moody in teaching a course called British Life and Culture, which I will be sitting in on as well. I'm particularly excited about the opportunity to teach not only Composition and Creative Writing but also Detective Fiction, Women Writers and Encounters in Humanities. (More on my courses later...) We depart on February 11, and the semester concludes on April 9, so we will be there for eight exciting weeks. I am staying in London until April 15th, as my husband Dan will be coming out to spend some time in the city with me. (More on leaving Dan behind for two months later...)
I'm asking the students to make a writing goal, which they may or may not meet, because I have found the writing life is often about making plans for your work and setting yourself up to fulfill those plans. This isn't always possible, because the Other Life often gets in the way of the Writing Life. It's important to know what you want to do, however, which is why something like a writer's club or creative writing course is often a way to force a goal upon yourself. Writer's clubs almost always involve some setting up of goals, and this also has the effect of teaching you what you can really handle as a writer and what you have time for.
Already I can see the students are struggling to find even a concrete goal...what do writers do, anyway? "I want to write something that allows me to explore my feelings..." There is a lot of "something" in what I see students writing. Just for the record, "something" is not a goal. It's difficult to come up with a concrete goal for writing, though. What feelings are you having? Could you write a poem about anger, for example? Or anxiety? Do you want to feel something that you think you should be feeling but can't? Could you write a scene in which a character feels what you are supposed to feel? Are you hiding from a feeling? What is that feeling, and if you were to construct that feeling as a monster, what would it look/sound/smell like? What is causing you to have your feelings? Could you write an essay about that cause?
It's hard enough to meet a writing goal when you know exactly what it is. Spoiler: if you 1) have a job, 2) have a family and/or 3) have any home responsibilities, then you will not have time to write. Or I should say, if you do make time to write, then one of the above things will be neglected. That's just a fact. I've gotten the "no excuse" lecture at many a conference, many a time. These are usually given by someone who 1) works "freelance" aka no job, 2) does not have children, or is not expected to care for them, 3) does not have to cook or clean their own house. I don't have children, and yet, working on my writing projects has consistently still meant my house doesn't get cleaned (except by Dan) and several balls get dropped at work (sorry students!) So let's all stop beating ourselves up for not being productive as writers, okay?
Having said that, goals. My writing goal this semester abroad is to complete another chapter of my A Song of Ice and Fire fan fiction, and to write two more poems for my currently too-small collection. The fan fic is something I will talk about in more detail, so feel free to judge the relative literary productivity behind that until then. For the poems, I will deconstruct the language of at least two laws, recently passed, of which I severely disapprove...more on those later as well.
In addition, I am returning to this blog. I think it will be a great way to share my London experience with my loved ones at home. So if you are reading this...stay tuned! I promise I will not just post stock photos I found online and use to promote London Study Abroad at DMACC.
