What a delight to step out of the classroom with you & into your portfolios, each a unique surprise, each crafted with time, thoughtfulness, attention to detail. The product of your portfolios is significant because it is a tribute to your hard work, your growth, the gratification of this month as you’ve cultivated your writing in various ways; it is a gift as much to yourselves as to me. However, beyond the portfolio as an object-endpoint, the real tribute is the process undergone during this month, and the ways in which the portfolio speaks to that process: the dailinesses, the fumblings, the betweens, the modes by which you pushed through to new discoveries. Your portfolio, as I see it, is really just a beginning, an opening.
Thank you for the commitment each of you made to showing up – not just to class, but to the page, to expectations of yourselves, of mine, to the dialogue we shared – you & I, you & you, you & language. This was a fun month for me (and I presume for you) because of the space-time offered just to write, and because of the community we formed as readers, writers, thinkers, bloggers – drawing from each other’s work, responding to each other’s work with critical honesty, opening your work to each other. Our muses are many, and sometimes we are lucky to find ourselves within a setting in which we have partners-in-crime, in-magic, in-discipline, even if we fall differently along the spectrum. Your writing, I should add, has stirred my own, (as have your appetites). After all, this was about food, too, whether we shared a love for, or escape from food, a hunger, or a lack, along the way we negotiated the collisions of words, food objects, recipes, images, & tastes.
I wish (as always) that we could have done so much more than a brief month allows: visited a local farm, as we’d planned, seen more food-related films, talked at more length about form poems, cooked more feasts together, produced a stein-inspired dance and performed it in Hepburn Zoo. (that’s a joke). But what time there was, we filled well. It’s a rare treat to have a class full of such devoted, dynamic, engaged lovers of language (& food…well, except for Seth, who only loves hot drinks), and I feel lucky that this month was my encounter with you. I hope that we’ll continue to reconnect, if only on the blog, and that you’ll check in every so often – it’s yours for the extension of our dialogue, as you wish. I also hope that you will post your portfolios (like right now!) at my request & the request of your peers. Thanks again for a great month. Keep writing, & eat well.
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