At the moment it’s all writing, all the time—I don’t particularly mind. I feel that this semester has been one long class. I’ve learned so much—especially about the ways I think, and about ways to approach my formal writing. These things don’t so much overturn what I already had figured out as supplement.

Now it’s crunch time—my three big assignments are all due this week, one on Tuesday and two on Thursday. The essays I’m writing have been moving—sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly. (My Dickens paper was all I worked on yesterday. It was good to get so much work done, and I feel that it’s going to be a good paper—it’s good to have a full draft of it now, that I can tinker with early next week.) Right now, though, I’m working on getting a full draft of the other two completed. I’ve moved out of the “DQ” (the area of the library right near the Dickens Quarterlies) into the conference and seminar rooms of the English department, which have been renamed “The Situation Room” and “The Bunker” respectively. Apparently we’re a much more present group of grad students than has been here in other years. I like the collegiality that has been set up.

Thursday is also when I hope on a plane to come back to Australia for a few weeks. As I don’t have a real television in the US, I anticipate I’ll spend some time being incredibly lazy, lying on the floor with Scout, watching movies. I’m still in shock that I haven’t seen more movies since I’ve been here. Oh well!


Because I’ve been lazy (read: insanely busy) I somehow never got around to posting my few pictures from Tennessee nor recounting the thanksgiving experience. Suffice to say: food, yum. I counted 29 Baptist churches on the highway—actually not that many for such a long drive (10 hours) but the Baptists don’t seem a very highway-centric denomination. More into the small towns the highways all bypass. I may get around to posting the list of churches, or else they may turn into a found poem.

I met Jorie Graham a few weeks ago too—I don’t always love reading her poems (some of her recent books have one or two absolute stunners, and then more that are fascinating, but also seem loose in some way I can’t define) but I’m always interested in them. And I am a fan—can’t help it. I was talking to David Gewanter about this last week, and I think it is simply that the “tyranny of distance” negates the possibility that I can play it cool with overseas poets. I love Australian poets and poetry, but I suppose I sometimes feel cut off from the rest of the world so much sometimes, that now I feel like fainting every time I get to meet a new poet. And it’s lovely that I actually get to meet some of them! I’m hoping that next year I’ll finally get into gear and do some interviews