Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
Every October, our school stops classes for a week. We devote the time to special projects--some students are organizing a march against human trafficking in our nearby city of Førde; some are helping out on a local farm; others are job-shadowing in Bergen; a few groups are on three-day hikes in the mountains. My husband... Continue Reading →
School is busy. I'm behind on grading. A lot of my work time I'm needing to devote to lesson planning, and then there have a been a lot of additional meetings with students recently. And on top of it all, this last week, everything was put on hold because of the annual UWC Day celebration,... Continue Reading →
The new school year is back into full swing. With introductions over, we are well into academic work. With my first year groups, I'm teaching Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and the memoir of the Cambodian genocide I taught two years ago, First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung. Then in the second year,... Continue Reading →
I think it was in 2020 that someone showed us where the blackberries are. In a field along one of the local narrow roads, the road I walk to reach the trail up into the mountains, a field I had passed by frequently in 2017, 2018, 2019 and never considered that the berries might be... Continue Reading →
In the last stage of our journey home, we traveled north from Italy through Tyrol and the Alps, into southern Germany where the land flattened and forests gave way to plains and fields of crops. We had a marathon day traveling from Verona to Munich, Munich to Hamburg, Hamburg on to Kiel on the Baltic... Continue Reading →
July has hurried by. We left Pitigliano on the 21st for Florence, where we joined the throngs of tourists to explore medieval and Renaissance history and art. Our guide was this funny and in-depth podcast by an art history professor, Rocky Ruggiero, which helped us contextualize what we were seeing. Florence, from the Bardini Gardens... Continue Reading →
In the southern part of Tuscany, the region of Maremma stretches along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. About an hour inland in Maremma, the land changes. Old volcanic tuff rock rises in plateaus out of the forest. Tuff, as stones go, is quite soft, and for millennia, the people here have been digging and... Continue Reading →
Just a quick post for today. I’m writing en route south to Italy by bus, boat, and train. Saturday our friends drove us to the bus stop. I’m writing this post now on the boat from the north bank of the Sognefjord headed towards Bergen. A few minutes ago, I was up on deck, and... Continue Reading →
These last two weeks, I have been taking part in a workshop on nature writing with Granta. With about ten other writers located around the world, I am learning about the genre, reading essays by Kathleen Jamie, Jason Allen-Paisant, and others, and experimenting with how I engage with nature in my own writing. In a... Continue Reading →
After graduation, campus changes. Half the students depart, and we are left in a quieter place as the rest of spring unfolds, as the days stretch longer and longer (it's still light at 10:30pm now; I haven't stayed up late enough to check, but I think we have now entered that period of light when... Continue Reading →
Words like trees 