Being Dead is the Most Boring Experience in Life–Oscar Wilde (supposedly)

May 21, 2009

No, i’m not dead–but you wouldn’t know it based on my lack of posting lately.

It’s been a hectic and challenging last few weeks. Some highlights:

A couple of weeks ago, as you may know, I took Tom Spanbauer‘s Dangerous Writing workshop– three intense days of talking, writing, analyzing about what we are afraid of in our writing, about how to get to some of those places we worry about going in our writing, and even how to be better writers on the sentence level. Exhausting and insightful. I’m actually going to rewrite parts of my novel based on what I gleaned from the class.

I’m wrapping up my teaching semester, a semester that found me receiving an Excellence in Teaching Award–given to me by the college that I primarily teach at. It was a complete surprise, and a wonderful gesture on the part of my Chair. Now can I parlay it into a full time job…? I’m hoping at some point.

I was also awarded a substantial fellowship from Vermont Studio Center for Jan 2010 (it sounds so far away, but really only 8 months). I’ve accepted (of course), so I guess in the coming months I better get out my snow boots and winter clothes.

And, well, umm, I turned 40. Yes 40. On April 29th. I almost can’t believe it. Even as recent as this week, the thought came over me that, wow, i’m 40. In ten years I’ll be 50–half a century old.

I’m trying not to get bogged down in the ole “what have I done in my life now that i’m 40″ whining… and instead trying to focus on what i’m doing next, and the fact that I have a good life, I have my health, a wonderful husband who is doing some incredible stuff with his PhD, my cat Hermia is still alive at 18 years (for better or worse), the best is yet to come, right?

Besides, Wallace Stevens didn’t publish his poems until he was in his 40s!

Speaking of ageless writers, here’s a bizarre, zany book I got for 25 cents at the college library where I teach. It’s called Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde, by Hester Dowden. The book is called a modernist hauntology, and is made up of Ouija board/seance messages from Oscar Wilde written down in the early 1920s. It’s fascinating stuff. Not sure what I want to do with it– do I use it as ephemera or do I preserve the book as it is?

Here are a few pictures: