Buckle Up

When opening the Blogger interface, I am struck by how much things have changed. Hello, hello out there. Is this thing on? I think, as well, about my footprint of "SBeasley" and "SandraBeasley" across the web. If the internet is around in a hundred years (assuming civilization as we recognize it is around in a hundred years), generations that come after us may consider it wildly shortsighted that we were allowed to claim whole internet domains and social media spaces simply by way of being the first person, with a particular name, to think of seeking ThatName.com. 

Or maybe the point is that there will always be newer platforms that create space for the next generation to stake their unique claim. 

I try to be reasonably tidy in terms of my internet presence in terms of website, Facebook, and Twitter. The two outliers are Instagram--newest platform for me, and I'm not sure how I want to use it--and this blog, oldest platform for me, and I'm not sure how I want to use it. (In this respect, Janet Fitch is a kindred spirit.) Today, I'm just bulletin-boarding my 2022. 

In order to explain 2022, I have to rewind and explain the years prior, specifically the academic years. The simple version of the story is that I got to serve as American University's Visiting Writer in Residence for AY 2020-2021, and 2021-2022. What I loved about my time was leading the graduate workshops in creative nonfiction, advising MFA students on their thesis work, teaching a LIT 215 undergraduate course called "Writers in Print and Person" (a class I've had an adjunct relationship with going back to 2014), and learning to teach LIT 107, the "Intro to Creative Writing" class that spans all genres. 

I have never had the security of a multi-year contract in teaching, much less a tenure-track job, which makes it harder to measure pedagogical growth. But I used this sustained appointment to adopt a contract grading policy for undergraduate teaching, with an emphasis on equity; to re-invent my workshop technique with graduate students, abolishing any "cone of silence" tradition; and to conceptualize a 300-level literature class, "The Ethics of Writing Creatively," which was ultimately approved to fulfill AU CORE's Ethical Reasoning requirement. 

Wait; I came here for a chick who digs poetry, not a chick who digs teaching. 

Teaching fuels the poetry, I promise. But it's also true that publishing a book of poetry during a pandemic is really hard! I haven't gotten to do many readings for Made to Explode since it was published in February 2021. The paperback edition of Made to Explode will be out in December of this year, and I hope that gives the collection a second chance to make it into reader's hands, and maybe even people's classrooms. In the meantime, my spirits were considerably lifted by learning that the Library of Virginia has named the book one of three finalists for the 25th Annual Literary Awards, in the poetry category. Alongside books by Tina Parker and Rita Dove (mentor & hero, no pressure). 

The pandemic has made it difficult to think expansively over these past few years. Our emphasis has been on hunkering down and surviving. But I came into the summer with something like Big Hope, in part because a next nonfiction book (a collection of essays in unconventional forms) has been coming into focus. After the brief spring "tests" of driving first to AWP in Philadelphia back in March, then a literary festival at Clemson University, I lined up substantive summer travel in the form of two residencies--first ten days at A.I.R. Studio in Paducah, Kentucky, and then all of June at the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska. Both offered responsible options for quarantining (if needed) and staying safe, while also furnishing the community I've craved.

Those residencies were amazing. Full stop. Storyknife, in particular--we were on the Ring of Fire, with volcanos on the horizon! in the solstice season, meaning, 20 hours of light a day! six women writers, gathering around a dinner table!--took my breath away. 

8 PM Sky in Homer, Alaska (July)

Evangeline Cabin Studio Desk

Residents' Deck of the Main Cabin

Communal Meal Table in the Main Cabin

8 PM Sky in Homer, Alaska (July)

I used my time at these two residencies to read, write, and refresh. So there's no easy way to segue to what came next: on my last full day in Alaska, I got the call that my husband was in the hospital back in our home of Washington, D.C. He spent most of July in the ICU. Now we're wrapping our heads around what comes next. I had to resign my Visiting Writer-in-Residence position at American University for Fall 2022. I had to defer a plan to join the faculty of the University of Nebraska's low-res MFA. I have no choice but to slow down, to be present in the moment, and to be grateful for the company I'm keeping. (And, in a brief nod to the fickle cruelties of the American medical system: to remember, money isn't real.) 

That's the thing about life--it keeps changing, right out from under us.