FLY

Once a year, the professor who convened the first literature module I ever taught organises and executes the week-long Festival of Literature for Young People, or FLY for short. There are speakers and workshops and games for kids of school age, and it seems to be both madly popular and madly successful - my housemate remarked when he got in yesterday evening that half his school seems to have been signed out for it. 

UEA being what it is, a fair number of the volunteers are from its hallowed halls, including the workshop teachers. And since, when the email went around six months ago asking for teachers signing up seemed like a good idea, I got to field a batch of sixth formers this afternoon.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn't have born reporting, but I haven't taught in months now, and I haven't been in Norwich in weeks. Which means that I didn't get around to planning until yesterday, and even though the session wasn't until the afternoon I had to get to campus immediately post-breakfast so that I could wait in the medical centre for an hour to eventually be told that all seemed well and see you again in six months. So it should surprise no one but me that, immediately after being told I was healthy and skittering off to the postgrad cafe to drink coffee and wait for my teaching slot, I realised that not only had I forgotten to bring the bag full of random items necessary for my three favourite writing exercises, but that I'd completely forgotten that such a bag needed to be put together. 

I live a thirty minute walk away from the university. Today is one of those strange days you seem to get in England, where it's hot enough that one sweats, but too cool for shorts and sleevelessness; it's sunny enough to burn, but too cloudy to tan; every time I take my jacket off it starts raining, and every time I put it on it stops, and there's so much ambient moisture that all of that sweat just sits on your skin, like an oil slick. Also, I haven't been in Norwich for a while, so only my teaching clothes seem to be here. Teaching clothes bought intentionally for Norfolk winters, when I usually find myself teaching. Which explains why I wound up running from school to home and back again while dressed head to toe in black, and might begin to explain exactly how all-fire uncomfortable that was. 

An aside for foreign readers: aircon isn't a thing here the way it is in the U.S. 

The actual teaching went better than I hoped, at least. The students were a bit reticent, but they wrote, and they seemed to like the exercises I gave them. The best part for me, as always, was getting to hear some of the things they came up with; there wasn't a dud in the bunch.

Book Festivals

Now that the programmes have been finalised I can say that I'm going to be at both the West Cork Literary Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival this summer!

On Saturday the 23rd of July I and Horatio Clare will be on Whiddy Island as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, reading from our work and most likely talking about our shared preoccupation with the ocean. As far as I can figure it should be the last event that I'll be doing about The Shore, because The Lauras comes out on August 11th, and it seems that most people are interested in the latest thing. I'll be glad to get a chance to read something different, though I'll miss being able to say 'thang' in public and still seemingly be taken seriously.

On Thursday the 25th of August I'll be in Edinburgh with Jenni Fagan, where we'll both be talking about our second books, The Sunlight Pilgrims and The Lauras. I recently met Jenni Fagan and was struck dumb by her awesomeness, and may have missed a deadline because I couldn't stop reading her first book, The Panopticon. So while I never feel comfortable insisting that I'm worth listening to, I feel more than qualified to say that she is.

Missing in Action

At the moment I'm sitting in a surprisingly large hotel room in Morristown, New Jersey, trying to find the will to sort my suitcase out, because it's going to have to be dropped tomorrow morning into the trunk of a car that's not mine and transported to the airport. I'm naturally going with it, but since nobody is going to be weighing me on arrival I require much less sorting.

Yesterday afternoon I presented the paper that I dropped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago to write as part of a panel dealing with censorship in public education. The room was surprisingly full, the questions were interesting and answerable, and I've finally met another human being who spends a horrifying amount of their time looking at textbooks. And since I presented on the first day, I got to spend today actually enjoying other peoples' papers instead of trembling in the corner with nerves. Even with the trembling, it was wonderful to finally feel as though I'm a part of an academic community; my research doesn't have much in common with that of the rest of my cohort, so a lot of the time I feel like the madwoman in the corner, pegging away at something that no one cares about. Meeting even one person who already gets it, let alone over a dozen, was worth the distance travelled.

This is probably the most productive trip I've ever been on: about two weeks ago I flew into DC and bribed my younger sister to drive me so that I could do a final round of location research for Belief, then spent nearly a week harassing relatives about their memories of their misspent youths, also for Belief, then dragged myself several states north for the conference. And now I get to skedaddle back to England to do something with it all before too much time passes and I can't understand my own notes.

And, of course, get back to helping organise a conference at UEA for this December. I'm sure the other plotters are just thrilled with my recent inability to answer email.