Beauty is Not Only Scan-Deep

So I'm a month into the Writing Sems program at Hopkins, and at this point I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. Alice McDermott is the best writing teacher I've ever had. I was workshopped for the first time last week and I got ripped, just like everyone else has been. It's a good thing; I feel honored that my work is taken so seriously, and I don't take constructive criticism that personally. It's just part of getting to the next level.
Alice told us that we'll all be writing short novels with her next semester, and our workshop will be with Stephen Dixon, so I'm already looking forward to that. Next week I'll be giving my first ever reading as part of the Graduate Reading Series here. We had about fifty people for this week's reading. And get this-- we have our own librarian. We can go to her for any research questions, so if I need to know more about the Cambodian woman's perspective on prostitution in SE Asia, or need the answers to any of my more obscure questions about Mesopotamia, she'll do the research.

This week I'm teaching scansion and honestly, some of my students probably know more about it than I do. I'm not a poet, and I won't pretend to be. Which syllable is stressed, which one isn't? All I know is that I'm stressed. I could bang my head on a Mending Wall right now, which is what I'll be teaching tomorrow.

I've had conferences with my students the last few weeks, and I also graded my first major assignment-- memoirs. My favorite was about a Thai girl making spring rolls with her grandma in Bangkok. Teaching has been my biggest challenge so far, and I've really been enjoying it. I like my students, my students like me. And I kinda like how the Writing Sems people are considered pretty hip TAs.