Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
Earlier this week, earth crossed the equinox. Days in the northern hemisphere are longer than the nights now. Here in Norway, the sea change between winter and summer is always so dramatic, and around the equinox daylight change is the fastest. We're headed into sun and light. We've had a smattering of beautiful clear days... Continue Reading →
The school where I teach in Norway is part of the United World College movement. There are eighteen UWC schools around the world, united by a common mission, to make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. In these last seven years, I've been lucky to get... Continue Reading →
For the first six years I was teaching here in Norway, one of my primary roles was Learning Support, which is a role we don't quite have in the US--in a US context, learning support is special education work with students who have specific, documented learning differences, coupled with what we would call in the... Continue Reading →
Hello 2024! Time goes so quickly--it feels like less than a year has gone by since I posted a reflection about my 2022 writing goals. Looking back now, it appears I never actually made a post about my 2023 writing goals, but they were essentially a repeat of those from 2022. It feels like a... Continue Reading →
Since my last post two weeks ago, we finished term, we packed, we journeyed down to Bergen and over the ocean, eight time zones across to Billings, Montana, visiting my husband's parents. Travel went smoothly, but after a few days here, I began running a fever. I tested positive for Covid-19. For the last few... Continue Reading →
A tension has been on my mind for a while, between the stories we tell in fiction and the question of meaning. It was on my mind in September 2020, then again two years later, December 2022. It seems that perhaps every year in autumn I find myself thinking about this theme. Here I am... Continue Reading →
Two weeks ago, I missed making a post. I was hurrying that weekend to revise the essay I had written in the nature writing workshop I took part in last summer. I was reworking scenes and consulting academic articles on the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. I was reading aloud in a whisper to... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Words like trees 