As promised, les enfants des AWP. . .
Author, Professor, Blogger, and Huffington Post writer
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
(Best conference bag ever: nice, roomy-yet-flat outside pocket for keeping the handy conference planner at your fingertips)
Amazing and overwhelming, all at once. The latter even more than usual, I’m not sure why. Maybe because I got added to a third panel at the last minute, and with 3 panels, a focus group with Bedford St. Martins (that was amazing!), a friend’s book launch, a meeting with my dear friend Mimi Thebo, lunches and dinners with old friends and former students, as well as my birthday, my head was just spinning. In a good way. I suppose.
So the third panel, about reinventing the workshop–I got invited to replace another panelist at the last minute and Charles Baxter was the headliner. Since that’s the only chance I’ll ever have to sit on the same stage as one of my idols (obviously gushing doesn’t embarrass me) I wasn’t going to turn that one down.
Oh, and his talk about the workshop, his paper, was so good, so smart, so lovely, so him. No one else could have written or spoken it. Every time I listen to him read or speak, I wonder, does an unconsidered thought ever come out of his mouth? Ever?
The other panelists were quite good as well, especially those who had been his students. No surprise there, of course.
The panel ran during the very last session on the very last day of the conference (Saturday) and he still filled a decent-sized ballroom. That tells you all you need to know.
Some notes I made. . .
The landscape our students are entering is quite different, there is an urgency to teaching them to make sense of digital media. (From Crossing the Digital Divide)
Sandra Cisneros: “I believe in workshops I just I don’t believe in the academic workshops I believe in the alternative workshop, the community workshop-that’s what we can do for each other—writing is like cutting your own hair there’s only such much you can do before you have to cut the back -the workshop helps you with the back.” (From the We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop panel)
If you’re going to piss people off, you should do it on purpose. (Also from We Wanted to Be Writers)
In the pissing people off category, we learned that AWP is cancelling the Pedagogy Forums for future years, in favor of including more pedagogy in the general panels. Not sure how I feel about this. The Pedagogy Forums open the conference to a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise be funded to go, and they provide a valuable exchange of ideas. Cancelling them completely seems a little extreme. Compromise, anyone?
There were beaucoup babies this year, many more than in the past, which was kind of inspiring, the idea that this might really be becoming a family friendly event. Given my penchant for the pint sized set, I started taking pictures (with their parent’s permission, of course). So the next post will be AWP 2011: Conference Babies.
Stay tuned, y’all,
SV
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
Today was my first day at AWP 2011 and it’s been a great one, but I’m a little overwhelmed by the universe of creative writing as it’s unfolding (and it’s just the first day-whew) so I’m going to take a day or two to curate my thoughts about the conference.
In the meantime, I have a great new site to share with you, one I’ve been saving for the appropriate time.
Follow this link at Biblioz and you can look up the books that were bestsellers the week and the year you were born. Why is this an appropriate time? It just so happens to be my “birthday week.” Here’s what came up. Like most bestseller lists, there’s a little bit of everything:
Bestsellers Week Ending February 5, 1967
Fiction1 THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA Robert Crichton
Fiction2 CAPABLE OF HONOR Allen Drury author
Fiction3 VALLEY OF THE DOLLS Jacqueline Susann
Fiction4 THE BIRDS FALL DOWN Rebecca West
Fiction5 THE MASK OF APOLLO Mary Renault
Fiction6 ALL IN THE FAMILY Edwin O’Connor
Fiction7 THE CAPTAINJ an de Hartog
Fiction8 TAI-PAN James Clavell
Fiction9THE FIXER Bernard Malamud
Fiction10 WAITING FOR WINTER John O’Hara
Non-Fiction1 EVERYTHING BUT MONEY Sam Levenson
Non-Fiction2 PAPER LION George Plimpton
Non-Fiction3 GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Eric Berne
Non-Fiction4 RUSH TO JUDGMENT Mark Lane
Non-Fiction5 THE JURY RETURNS Louis Nizer
Non-Fiction6 WINSTON S. CHURCHILL Randolph S. Churchill
Non-Fiction7 THE BOSTON STRANGLER Gerald Frank
Non-Fiction8 HOW TO AVOID PROBATE Norman F. Dacey
Non-Fiction9 MADAME SARAH Cornelia Otis Skinner
So what’s on your list?
Bye y’all,
SV
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
So Wordamour and husband are headed to DC this week for the Associated Writing Programs Conference with lots to look forward to. So much, in fact, that we are going to have to pace ourselves. And we’re at a hotel that’s a whole metro ride away from the conference so there will be very little going back to the room between events to de-stress by lying on a hotel bed staring at mindless tv (my de-stressing MO, if you haven’t guessed).
I’m on two panels which I’m very much looking forward to. Fiction Writer’s Review gave me a shout out as a contributor when they listed contributor’s panels here. I love Fiction Writer’s Review–if you’re at the Book Fair, check them out. Better yet, subscribe to their blog.
Besides the panels: Focus group on creative writing books for Bedford St. Martin’s with a free lunch and a stipend, dinner at Meskerem (a fondly remembered Ethiopian restaurant from my salad days in DC) with Anna Leahy and Cathy Day and friends, dinner with grad school pals Kelly Stern and Deb Moore, dinner with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law in from Maryland one night as well.
A publication party for Erika Dreifus’ Quiet Americans, which my husband reviewed here.
A whole group of students is going from UCA this year (and I know they will behave themselves so others can follow in future years. Right? Right.). Colleagues Mark Spitzer and Garry Powell. Former student, current Roosevelt MFA Heather Cox.
The Toad Suck Review will make its debut!
Glimpses of my British friends, Graeme Harper and Paul Munden among them (and the annual payment of my NAWE dues).
And the bookfair. And more panels. And somewhere in there, my birthday!
Good Lord!
I’ll be blogging about it all!
Bye y’all!
SV
PS A shout out to my mother, who is making all this possible by staying with my kiddos! Thanks, Mom!
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
for the Second Annual Heart of Winter Iron Chef Challenge is. . .
Cinnamon.
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
Today’s post, discussing author Cathy Day’s provocative essay on this subject is over at The MFA Blog.
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
Besides spending a lot of time in her pajamas being lazy (btw. if you get the whole family on board with this; it really cuts down on laundry), Wordamour completely overhauled her atelier a.k.a. workspace over the holidays. It was much more work than she expected, about five days worth, so of course, it required a post.
Wordamour’s old atelier (see October 2009) was kind of crowded and dark. This was mostly because she had a guest bed in there, a bed which seemed like a good idea at the time but didn’t live up to expectations. As Wordamour’s younger son pointed out, “no one ever sleeps there” so over the years it just started to attract various teetering piles of stuff.
So, out went the bed (in the event of the rare guest, the boy’s lair has a guest bed anyway) and the teetering piles. In came air and light and space. Ahh. Voila!
A tour:
The aerial view. Lucky, the blurry cat in the corner of the photo will reappear later. The television, purchased for $15 at Goodwill, only plays DVD’s and came in handy during the hours of work it took to transform the space.
Look at that writing desk, so clean and spare. But where did the countless cups of pens, markers and pencils that Wordamour collects go?
Never fear, they’re right here:
Along with the other office supplies that Wordamour covets and that her wonderful friends give her:
On the right, the books and notes required for current writing projects.
My new favorite place. It got worse before it got better and like I said, it took much longer than I thought it would but it was worth it. So worth it.
Finally, Wordamour read recently that it’s a good idea to make one’s workspace hospitable to one’s pets.
I think mine have expressed their approval, although Lucky is going to have to move over:
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
Appropos of nothing, Wordamour has decided to post some holiday photos. Maybe with the semester starting this week and some big responsibilities looming (like shepherding the Great Bear Writing Project as it sponsors the national Rural Sites Network Conference in March!) she’s feeling nostalgic for the end of 2010. But if you want to read about writing or reading, you might want to skip this post.
So. We made our traditional Gingerbread cookies and decorated them, along with my favorite sprite L. who would have won the prize for loading up a cookie with the most frosting and sprinkles, if we had one. I guess feasting on a sugary treat like that is prize enough in itself when you’re five.
(That’s my grandmother’s rolling pin in the first picture. I just inherited it and I’m pretty psyched. That rolling pin rolled out a LOT of apple pies over the years.)
This is a tradition in my husband’s family begun by my mother-in-law and practiced by most of the cousins (Wordamour’s husband has seven siblings). We love it. I don’t use her recipe any more though, which was delicious and healthy but I found the dough tear-inducingly hard to work with (and mothers have enough tear inducing stress around in the run up to Christmas without bringing on more). So I switched to Tasha Tudor’s recipe from the book Take Joy, which my mother would get out every Christmas. I am a big Tasha fan. Anyway, the recipe is much easier to work with and still very tasty.
Our decorations were relatively low key this year as we have a nearly year old puppy set on chewing to bits everything in his path. We adore this puppy but I didn’t need the further tear inducment of finding an heirloom ornament one of my kids made in pieces on the floor every morning. So we only put out about 1/3 of our ornaments and decorations and only decorated the tree starting about four feet up this year. Let’s hope next year the chewing obsession calms down, though I have to admit it was kind of a relief to simplify a bit.
Below, the Angel and the X-Wing Fighter. That about characterizes the schizophrenic Christmas decor around here. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Someone asked me once why I didn’t collect those china Christmas Villages, that I seemed like the type. I’m not sure what that means, but while I think they’re perfectly nice, I don’t collect them for a few reasons.
1. No one in either of our families collected them and I kind of tend to lean on family traditions when it comes to the holidays.
2. I really like vintage stuff and if I collect anything for Christmas, its old Golden books (which I collect year round anyway) and shabby vintage paper houses.
3. Those china Christmas villages are really expensive. Old shabby paper houses are cheap.
4. I really don’t have a lot of surface area for a big village display.
However, I do have one china decoration that means a lot. It’s a replica of the Silent Night chapel in Oberndorf, Austria, outside Salzburg, where Silent Night was composed for guitar on Christmas Eve 1818 (when the organ went out). My great great great great grandfather was Franz Gruber, the humble music teacher who composed the music of that song. I’m kind of proud of that and it’s my dream one day to be in that chapel with my family during the Christmas Eve service.
May your dreams come true in 2011.
Bye y’all,
SV
by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized
Don’t miss this wonderful post/rant about Southern Literary Good Ol boys here. Thanks for Sandy Longhorn for bringing it to my attention.
WordPress’ annual review of this blog (below) demonstrates that. . .blogging about food is a great way to get hits.
Happy New Year, Y’all,
SV
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 4,000 times in 2010. That’s about 10 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 194 posts. There were 12 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 10mb. That’s about a picture per month.
The busiest day of the year was November 28th with 186 views. The most popular post that day was The One with the French Bread Recipe.
The top referring sites in 2010 were ask.metafilter.com, facebook.com, en.wordpress.com, twitter.com, and practicing-writing.blogspot.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for german rituals, curves writing, dance card, christmas present survey, and wordamour.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
The One with the French Bread Recipe April 2009
4 comments
German Rituals: Schultuete August 2008
2 comments
Big learning curves: with writing and blogging (and a tidbit about Natalie Wood) November 2007
2 comments
Bud the Teacher vs. Arne Duncan’s Press Sec. March 2010
1 comment
About Wordamour. . . October 2007
Author, Professor, Blogger, and Huffington Post writer. Stephanie Vanderslice aims to write what she likes to read: fiction and nonfiction that spins a web to lure the reader in. Read More…