Back in Regina

It's hard to believe I've finished the first year of my MFA and am already back in Canada. 

January-March were spent barely leaving the apartment except for nightly visits to the gym (long since abandoned). The polar vortex kept most of us inside, which was great for our writing, but not so great for our mental health. 

Once the snow melted, we started to wake up and the past six weeks in Iowa were filled with conversations and meals shared with friends, and amazing readings in crowded living rooms, backyards, bookstores, and the Dey House. I celebrated my 25th birthday with new friends, and we celebrated Workshop Prom in early May. Mid-semester, Robert Hass came to give a 2-week course which dealt in part with translation and partly with depicting the horrific and the beautiful. I really enjoyed my workshop this semester and am grateful for the detailed and attentive comments my work received. I taught a poetry writing course to six hardworking students, and am gearing up to teach Creative Writing--which covers poetry, fiction and non-fiction-- in the fall. 

The big news is I'm heading to Iceland from mid-July to mid-August. I received a grant from the University of Iowa which will cover my airfare and some of my lodging expenses. I proposed to write about the tension/gaps/juxtaposition between the past as experienced in the landscape, artifacts, and art, and my personal encounters in the present age... What that means is after a few days in Reykjavik to explore the city's various museums, I'll be taking a bus around the "Ring road" which traverses the island. Nathan is coming too, and we're planning to camp for the duration of the trip and REALLY commune with nature/some volcanoes. 

I've been reading some amazing books. Finally got my hands on the new Amanda Jernigan collection, which is incredible. I'm also reading Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree which explores various parents' experiences with having children who are deaf, have autism, dwarfism, down's syndrome, and other unique circumstances not all of us face in our lives. It is really a book about what it means to be human, and on the ride home I had to read every second page to Nathan. Highly recommended. I'm also excited for Leslie Jamison's Empathy Exams, Lydia Davis' translation of Proust which I learned about in syntax class, and poetry collections by James Merrill, Lucy Brock-Broido, Jorie Graham, and George Herbert. If nothing else comes of my MFA, I will be infinitely grateful for the books of poems I might not have otherwise encountered.

On the poetry end of things, I'm excited that The Malahat Review accepted one of my poems for publication later in 2014. As is often the case (or seems to be), this is a poem that did not see the workshop setting. I'm excited it found a readership and I'll be sure to post when it comes out. 

I've only been home a few days and was already able to take in Bruce Rice and Jan Zwicky reading at the Creative City Centre yesterday afternoon. It looks like with the Hagios launch on Thursday and Cathedral Village Arts Festival, there will be lots of readings to keep me busy in the next few weeks. 

After unpacking and seeing our families, I'm sitting down at my desk for the first time all week... I missed this...