I’ve been looking at Calls for Papers, for conferences and journals, and hope to write a couple of abstracts up this week. I’m also on a campaign to get others to join me in this endeavour, so we can all submit work and get into the swing of graduate student life. I’m glad I gave a paper at the Antithesis “Piracy” Symposium earlier this year: it feels, now, like it was a good hurdle to get out of the way, and now that it’s done, I can approach the next batch in a less nervous manner.

Somehow lately I have the creative energy I’ve been lacking for a while—sat down to write a poem a few days ago, and the words arrived. It’s not the right moment to sit down and write more yet, but that will come. It’s such a relief!

The last few weeks have been a bit emotional for me—I’ve been pretty homesick, which has been something of an ordeal. But too, I feel like I’ve started to make real friends too. Moments have arrived where I’ve been able to tell people that I’m not at 100%, and people have responded with real warmth. And so there’s a flipside to it all. In a way I feel that this grieving for Australia is what will help me make a real home here, for the time that I stay in America.

I gave my first (real) class paper this week, on Tom Jones. I did a kind of practice run two weeks before that when I gave a (voluntary) paper on some features of Gothic literature of the Gothic period. I found it inspiring that, without notes from the course I took way back in 2000, I could still remember so many of Peter Otto’s lectures with such clarity. That paper went well, but because it was voluntary, it wasn’t really a pressure situation. This week we’re finishing off Mr Jones, and talking about current trends in literary studies. I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve got my thanksgiving plans sorted out—my “muse” Lisa is taking me to Tennessee, where she has an aunt and uncle. My first road trip! We’ll give it a nerdy spin, as I’m trying to put together some kind of reading list for us to get through. Judith Butler and perhaps Elaine Scarry. In other news, filling in a medical form this week I had to list someone local for an emergency contact, and Lisa became my “person”. We’ve spent a lot of time in the last week sitting silently together in cafes, on benches, on the Healy Lawn, reading books and taking notes. It’s certainly nice to have a person here!