Category Archives: Lilly grant

geometric shapes with watercolor

ETCW 2020: Stay Home Edition

This blog was born as part of my Lilly Teacher Creativity Fellowship, where I got to blow $10k on writing workshops and a sweet new laptop (thanks, Lilly Endowment!), and one of my annual traditions is to update it during Teacher Camp, aka the Extending Teacher Creativity Workshop which is usually held at Indiana State University but this year–for obvious reasons–was held virtually.

Susan Powers, the woman who organizes the event each year is always an incredible powerhouse but this year, considering I got THREE shipments of workshop supplies and swag, and so did everybody else, she deserves a medal.

Sessions were held over Zoom, and while I certainly missed the delightful catering that characterizes most years’ workshops, and the random encounters with such a wide swath of my profession, it was great to still be able to see my “camp friends” and try out some new things. Each year after the first year teachers can choose a big workshop and a “mini” workshop; this year, I chose Made to Create (aka a watercolor workshop) for my major course and a bracelet-making workshop for my mini. That meant I got a box of watercolor supplies, a lightboard (!!), modeling clay and twine, a very sharp Exact-o knife, and a whole bunch of other treats (black masking tape! Very sharp scissors! A variety-pack of Sharpies! Yes, I am easy to please).

toddler watercoloring
The decoy paint station was a hit!

Our instructor for the watercolor workshop worked her tail off, too, making us TEN videos highlighting different skills, techniques, and projects. After setting up my work station, and then setting up a decoy station to distract my kids, I got to work, and…. managed to watch and paint along with three of the ten videos.

Don’t get me wrong – I still had an excellent time. And since the videos are still up for the time being, it’s possible that I might “catch up” later (not likely, mind you… but possible!). It was hard to carve out the time while I was still physically at home — when I go to Terre Haute, I’m gone, so it’s a lot easier to focus — but I still really enjoyed what I got to do.

It also let me be a student on a Zoom call and really experience the distractions, frustrations, and challenges of e-learning from the student side. There were some plusses (doing the videos when I wanted to, at my own pace) and some minuses (having to do videos instead of being in the room with others, to learn collaboratively or get immediate feedback). I already have a tendency to “go rogue” on things like this, and being in a room full of other people can help me stay focused and keep me from losing track of time (two opposite problems, both of which I have when it comes to art).

me and my toddler, who is brandishing a paintbrush
Two novice painters!

As usual, I finished ETCW grateful for the Lilly Foundation and its support of Indiana teachers, with some good ideas to steal and some reminders about what doesn’t work (definitely remind everybody who isn’t talking to stay on mute… yikes).

Now I’m going to go bust out my sewing machine and see if I can make my ETCW2020 t-shirt into an ETCW2020 face mask. Wish me luck!

Staying Home

Well, I was just thinking what a shame it was that I hadn’t updated my blog in so long that I had to go look up my login/password info, and I looked back to see that my last update was… right before ‘normal life’ crashed and burned thanks to Covid-19! So I suppose that explains why.

the front yard of a brightly-painted house with a verdant garden, sloppy grass, and a Black Lives Matter sign, on a sunny day
lots of home improvement projects, not so much with the blog updates

I got to try online-only teaching for the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, which was quite an experience – it felt like being a first-year teacher again, and not in a good way – and now I’m hovering in uncertainty with the rest of the world – planning for the worst, hoping for the best: I’m set to start school again (staff orientation) next Tuesday in person, but the board has pushed our start date back and put us on a hybrid model (50% of students in the building at a time, blended with e-Learning) so no matter what happens (hybrid? Virtual?) I’m sure 2020-2021 will be a heck of a learning experience.

I mean, if we didn’t understand before, we certainly know now why “May you live in interesting times” is a vicious curse.

Being used to “Dwell[ing] in possibility” like my good friend Emily Dickinson, that means I basically haven’t done any planning for the school year (yet), despite the fact that (once again) I have five preps and 2 of them are new (English 9 Honors, an all-new class, and English Lab, a remedial class that has to be planned anew each year to meet student needs (at least the way I do it)). Interesting times indeed!

So I’m going to try to figure it out as I go, as usual, and I’m going to do my annual “oh hey look a blog” posts any day now – ETCW was virtual this year, which was both better and worse, and I have another short story from the NYC Midnight competition to post – and maybe, just maybe, add some more teaching-related content… as soon as I wrap my head around online and/or hybrid teaching!

#etcw branded swag (bag, sticky notes, travel mug, t-shirt, notebook, writing utensils)

#ECTW2019 (Day 2)

Today I learned that I’m still capable of waking up, rolling out of bed, and getting out of the dorms in about 10 minutes. (I feel a little groggier than I remember feeling in college, but that’s probably because it’s fifteen years and two kids later.)

After spending some of yesterday’s writing time writing that last post, and the rest of it fighting updating WordPress and then fighting with that and Twitter about a Twitter widget, and then giving up on the Twitter widget and nuking it in favor of a link to my Twitter page (FANCY), about all I had energy for was to stuff myself full of dinner and go do some arts and crafts in the dorm lobby. So, uh. Not a lot of writing got done.

But look at these pretty alcohol-ink washers I made!

This morning I woke up to the calendar reminder that my pages are due today for IndyScribes (ten pages due, and I have written… none, whoops).

Luckily I’m in a writing workshop for most of the day! So I’ll get started on that… any minute now… I’m sure…

#ETCW2019 (Day 1)

So, it’s July, and I have the great pleasure of being (for the third time) at the Extending Teacher Creativity Workshop at Indiana State University in Terre Haute for the next three days!

One of the many benefits of winning a Lily Teacher Creativity Fellowship (besides the humungous grant – $10k when I won in 2015, and $14k now) is an annual invitation to what I think of as Teacher Camp – previous recipients gather in the ISU student union to do one Workshop and one Mini-Workshop, and they feed us generously and gift us lavishly and try to freeze us to death (whoops, no, that’s just the a/c).

Continue reading #ETCW2019 (Day 1)

New Year, New Me? (Nah)

archer-wiki_characters_archer-vice_skinny-pam_01Well, after my flurry of November activity/NaNoWriMo, I sure did taper off on blogging, didn’t I?

And since today’s New Year’s Day, it’s a perfect time to resolve to blog more in 2017!

Among other resolutions, of course. But don’t worry, no “new me” stuff — as Pam says, I really like me. Continue reading New Year, New Me? (Nah)

Everything Old is New Again

This morning I went through the closet in my old room at my parents’ house and pulled out some old toys for my son: some Buffy the Vampire Slayer action figures, a Harley Quinn doll (with two hyenas!), and a very perplexing Jonny Quest figurine (Hadji in… a mech suit? With a machine-gun arm?). The kid is pretty dang into them. And that’s not the only connection between past and future that’s going on today.

I haven’t really written much (any) sci-fi before, but one of my current WIPs is “cli-fi,” aka “climate change fiction.” It’s about as sci-fi-y as The Hunger Games, in that I’m aiming for a world that seems basically like ours only after some kind of disaster, with some technology that’s basically magic and just there for plot reasons (sort of like in Star Wars, only there’s no Force. Yet?).

buffy1b
Countdown to when these looks are back on sale at Forever 21

Obviously even when you’re writing something set in a contemporary world, you have to do worldbuilding: small town? Big city? What details of technology give the setting? Buffy is contemporary to when it aired (and boy do the outfits look hilarious nowadays, except for the ones that are somehow back on-trend) but still has tons of worldbuilding around the magical/supernatural elements.

 

BURN NOTICE -- "Breaking and Entering" Episode 201 -- Pictured: Bruce Campbell as Sam Axe -- USA Network Photo: Dan Littlejohn
Oh, he’s real. HE HAS TO BE.

Something like Burn Notice has a world built up of some real places and organizations (Miami, the CIA, the IRA) and lots of fake people (all of the characters except Sam Axe, because I refuse to live in a world where Sam Axe isn’t real).

 

Worldbuilding for a world that’s not our own is trickier… but pretty fun.

Continue reading Everything Old is New Again

GO TEAM!

go-team
Go, team! (Not to be confused with The GO! Team, but they’re also excellent)

I’m really loving the posts that Jenny Crusie’s doing about “Story Teams” over on her blog. She’s analyzing why they work (or don’t). She analyzed the teams from Leverage (LOVE it), Person of Interest (tried to like it because she loves it and writes such interesting analysis of it, but…), and Legends of Tomorrow (uhhhhhhh) in preparation for troubleshooting the team she’s building in her WIP.

Reading her posts made me think about some of my favorite TV teams (Burn NoticeChuck, and Buffy being standouts, and White Collar too, although that’s a duo with support more than a team most of the time, and, of course, the Quest Team/Venture Brothers–Oh, and I guess Archer?).

So I want to analyze these teams the way she’s doing it, mostly for fun but also for comparison to the team I’m trying to build in my Lilly grant novel (YA cli-fi starring Anika, as-yet-untitled).  I listed too many, so I might just pick a few from the list.

Of course, that requires me to a)do that analysis and b)figure out what the heck is going on with my team.

And tonight’s not the night for that; I’m going to go to bed and sleep on it, and see what thoughts manage to crawl across my mind in the tryptophan-haze that is post-Thanksgiving relaxation time.

But teams make a pretty satisfying story unit. I’m excited to dig into this more!

strugglebus

Some days you're the flaming bus... and some days you're the motorcycles.Spent two hours making “garbage soup” (made of whatever leftovers are around) and writing a paltry 531 words.

Ugh.

Well, tomorrow’s another day…

I did have fun listening to my “inspirational” Pandora station, although it doesn’t seem to be very inspiring atm.

The worst part is that this brings me to five pages over two months for the project I’ve been working on with my crit group, IndyScribes.

Sigh.

…Tomorrow??

mixing it up

At the writing date I had last Wednesday with two friends and fellow writers, my internet-friend-from-way-back-who-recently-moved-to-Indy Chel brought her CD wallet in. This mystified Chelsea, who is enough younger than us that a giant CD wallet full of burned mix CDs struck her as a charmingly old-fashioned item.

20161113_225256
kickin’ it old-school: CD binder edition

Chelsea and I have talked before about making soundtracks as a writing tool; it’s something I’ve been doing since I was in high school (the earliest ones were cassette tapes, but my dad was an early adopter of new technology, meaning we got a CD burner when they were still rarities). Chel and I have been exchanging fanfic and mix CDs with our friend Meach since the 90s, and I used to put a truly amazing amount of time into creating WinAmp playlists (uh, and skins) and mix CDs (often with “cover art” that I drew myself, first-person notes from characters, and on-disc art).

Since having a kid, though, the time I used to put into this seems to have mysteriously evaporated, so I’m extremely rusty; plus, I’ve had a computer upgrade but the new computer doesn’t have an optical drive. But I’ve been using Shazam to identify songs I like and then I’ve been using Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube to follow up. Continue reading mixing it up

Blast from the Past

Well, while The Baby is napping, and C’s off feeding a friend’s cats and picking up his brother’s dog, I thought I’d try to pop up a quick entry. I’m working on finishing up my grant report for the Teacher Creativity Grant that led to the creation of this blog (fellow educators, GO APPLY!) and will post that shortly. I’ve also been doing some literary archaeology and re-reading the big, sprawling, terrifying novel draft that I was working on with a friend for several years (but no updates since… yikes, January 2015!).  Continue reading Blast from the Past