The residency for my MFA is this July, and this time it’s remote. Which is kind of weird, but what isn’t weird right now? So, no nervously flying over mountains for me this summer.

This residency is for my fourth and final semester. I do have to go to one more residency to attend to officially graduate, but this is the last semester I have to do work. And I’m lucky because all I have to do this semester is finalize my thesis critical piece and creative piece, both of which are already in late-stage drafts. This will be nice because I’m considering applying for a PhD, so I will have time to work on preparing that application this coming semester and easily be ready for the spring deadline. (It’s quite involved to apply.)

This residency I am teaching a workshop where I’m covering all of kidlit. I had to create a video lecture (75 slides, 38 minutes of video, many hours of actual work), pick several readings, create discussion questions, and come up with an idea for a live discussion. It turned into way more work than a normal residency workshop would be. But I did everything and it should go well. Fingers crossed. I’m hoping nobody is overly bored by it. I know some people aren’t big fans of writing for kids. The readings I gave them were all super-short except I added the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book (as a middle grade example) and the first chapter of The Hunger Games (as the YA example). The discussion we’re going to have will cover a bit on all the readings (I’m going to see what people say in the discussion) and be mostly focused on what people remember reading as kids and/or what they remember of reading to their own kids.

Other than preparing for residency, I’ve been kind of taking it easy lately. I even started learning watercolor painting. I’ll probably post something about that next time, unless something suddenly changes and I have book news.