This semester has been an unusually easy and pleasant one, as in addition to a full and reasonably engaged class of students for North American Art to 1900, I've been teaching a smaller Honors course on Surrealism, which has been simply delightful. This lighter than usual load has enabled me to get a lot of writing done, which is a very fine thing.
As noted awhile back, over the summer I succeeded in finishing one of the novels that I'd been working on off and on over the years. Once it had been read and commented on by one of my fiction-writer friends, I made some fixes and have now submitted it to a small number of contests and presses.
Meanwhile, a novel completed earlier--In Search of the Magic Theater--which I've been submitting with some vigor to small presses after giving up on agent submissions (these people apparently can't figure out how to use Submittable to send polite rejections, but simply let one wonder, month after month), was named a finalist for the Eludia Award. This award is given to a woman over forty who has not yet published a book-length work of fiction. The list of finalists was fairly long, but still, it was neat to find myself on such a list. The winner of the 2019 competition is Elise Atchison, for Crazy Mountain, which will be published by the Hidden River Arts Sowilo Press.
I had expected to spend August slaving over course prep and scholarly projects, but felt compelled to get going on what I thought would be a novella, set in the Trump Era. (Era? Well, it has seemed long enough to call an era.) It turned out to be a short novel rather than a novella, and was done in mid-October. As it begins with the 2016 election, it's not something I exactly enjoyed writing, but I hope that readers find it at least reasonably interesting. Parts of it are, at least--to my mind--funny. On the other hand, it doesn't leave out climate crisis, the Mueller Report, or ailments often suffered by persons nearing retirement age.
And then there have been the scholarly projects! During the first week of school, I escaped for a brief period to attend the second annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, where I presented a paper on Toyen during a panel on Central European female surrealists. I meant to blog about this conference, which was fabulous, but was (apparently) too busy writing fiction to do so.
I then had to get cracking on my paper for the ASEEES conference, where I will be presenting on the Czech surrealists Nezval and Štyrský as Prague flâneurs, for a panel Chad Bryant and I put together on walking in Prague. I have now sent it to the discussant and merely need to do the Powerpoint; and also read the papers on Toyen that I will be discussant for.
Finally, or perhaps not so finally, I have a book chapter on Toyen due in December for an edited volume. I have got this just about wrapped up, but not quite.
As next semester I can expect to be teaching over 100 students and reading over 200 papers, 200 essay exams, and about 100 (since not everyone turns them in) exhibition journals, it is safe to predict that I will not be getting nearly as much writing done. C'est la vie.
No comments:
Post a Comment