Soft skills

 https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/5239641001

travel trips

 

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-ways-to-drive-across-country-11612298638

 

FOR STIR-crazed Americans wrestling with the virus and its variants while awaiting the vaccine, the dream of roaming pedal-to-the-metal across the continent is a transfixing one. “In quarantine you’re not just stuck in a place physically, you’re stuck mentally, and travel opens up your thoughts,” said Chicago photographer Jasmin Shah who made several cross-country trips last year. Whatever the inspiration, be it Sacagawea, Kerouac or “Thelma & Louise,” it’s still possible to conduct an epic cross-country road trip during the pandemic. But do plenty of research before heading out the door. Think about “snacks, water, cleaning supplies and stops,” said Paula Twidale, senior vice-president of travel at the American Automobile Association (AAA), who ticked off a list of precautions to consider. “You need to plan ahead to have freedom and flexibility.” Covid-19 restrictions, quarantines, openings and closings change frequently so check them often. AAA, for example, posts such information on the organization’s travel planning site triptik.aaa.com. Ms. Twidale’s team of travel planners outline three memorable trips:

New York to Seattle

Shore to Shore

Crossing the continent via Interstates 80 and 90 would take 42 hours straight through, but Ms. Twidale cautions travelers not to rush the 2,852-mile-long route. Bisecting 11 states, the journey offers plenty to see and do. The route includes urban layovers in Cleveland, with a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Chicago for its deep-dish pizza (locals like delivery from Lou Malnati’s) with a stop by Lake Michigan. In South Dakota, visit the town of Mitchell and its Corn Palace. From Montana, a short southern detour to Wyoming will deliver you to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, before finally ending by Puget Sound in Seattle and a visit to the Space Needle. (Amazon’s twin Spheres, however, are closed.)

Chicago to Los Angeles

Time Travel to the Old West

Any list of cross-country trips should include Route 66, the country’s “Mother Road” between the Midwest and California before the Interstate Highway System. “It’s going back in time,” Ms. Twidale said about making the 2,448-mile-long drive. AAA’s recommended stops include iconic monuments like the St. Louis Gateway Arch and quirky roadside attractions like Illinois’s 1924 Ariston Café, or the Cadillac Ranch art installation in Amarillo, Tex. In Arizona slight detours will take you to Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest national parks and if you need a respite, sleep over in Holbrook’s Wigwam Motel. In California you’ll pass near the desert wilds of Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks before concluding the trip in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Pier on the Pacific Ocean. Order a celebratory takeout meal at nearby local favorite Chez Jay.

Washington, D.C. to Denver

Civil Rights History Lesson

This 2,032-mile-long road trip features stops along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, a collection of destinations in 16 mostly southern states and Washington, D.C., that highlight Black Americans’ fight for justice, and concludes in Denver. Begin at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington near the Lincoln Memorial, location of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Stop in Greensboro, N.C., the city famous for its Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins. In Memphis, Tenn., see the Lorraine Motel, part of the National Civil Rights Museum, and site of Dr. King’s assassination. In Topeka, Kan., explore the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site commemorating the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that began the country’s desegregation efforts. In Colorado, visit the Black American West Museum (temporarily closed) and take a walking tour of Five Points, Denver’s historic Black neighborhood. Once the “Harlem of the West,” it’s now filled with galleries, restaurants and microbreweries.

 

Teaching Schedule

 Fall 2021

EN300VA Advanced Writing Nursing

2 EN101 First Year Writing MWF 9, 10am

EN210 Mythologies in Literature MWF 11am

Spring 2022

EN300VA/VB Advanced Writing Nursing
EN190/390 Cinemagic

EN206 Beginning Poetry Writing

[below schedule is still not in stone]

Fall 2022

EN300VA Advanced Writing Nursing

EN101 First Year Writing

EN210 Mythologies in Literature

Spring 2023

EN300VA/VB Advanced Writing Nursing
EN192/399 Lit and Film Mythologies

Fall 2023

EN300VA Advanced Writing Nursing

EN101 First Year Writing /  Vets and Military

EN210 Mythologies in Literature
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Spring 2024

EN300VA/VB Advanced Writing Nursing
EN199/399 Film Appreciation: Black Cinema

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Nightboat looks for

We're looking for innovative prose writing, including inter-genre/hybrid writing, book-length essays, and manuscripts of formally experimental fiction and/or nonfiction. Prose translations, international anglophone writing, and multilingual texts welcome. No strict forms. No limits. Your manuscript might include poetry and poetic sections, but we're not considering full length poetry collections at this time. The kinds of work we are are excited to encounter might include, but isn’t limited to: Writing that illustrates and proliferates complexity in our world Writing that gestures towards or reports back from other worlds Writing that documents past / present / future periods of political uprising & experiment Writing that builds up / writing that tears down Writing that investigates & complicates existing narratives around identity Writing that torques conventional prose forms or genre Writing at the intersection of the material & the metaphysical Writing that borrows from or investigates other mediums e.g. visual art or performance Writing that cannot be easily categorized by any algorithm Honestly the weirder the better—surprise us!

Punk-Topeka Form

Diane Seuss: My aesthetic—not in the least prescriptive for anyone but me—seems to be one of opposing energies. I’m interested in the rural, but I approach it via degrees of formal experimentation. I think of my work as punk-rural, in that my it emerges from rural spaces, but looks for the toughness, the strangeness, the absurdity, the taut stringiness, the rage and pain of it all as opposed to the homespun. The rural is no less punk than the urban. Roadkill. That’s my aesthetic. Naked dancing on the water tower. Cheez Doodles and a Coke. Cigar-smoking ghosts on the riverbank. I love what I call “freaking form”—learning traditional forms so that they can be usurped, upended, repurposed, like a bathtub that can be made into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. I’m sort of an anti-intellectual intellectual, a geek about the literature and visual art of the past but I like to bring it down, downtown, here where I live, with the earthworms and gravediggers.

 https://therumpus.net/2019/12/the-rumpus-interview-with-diane-seuss/

If I am to build on my own aesthetic through Topeka, if Topeka is one of the most poetic cities, I need to retrace my traced histories compared to poets who moved away, so-called "made it", while alos noting Anne Boyer and CA Conrad moved away at a young age.

Menninger's My other mother was punk, the outcast, night coordinator, graveyard shift as those other intellectuals were at home getting ready for bed. The Potwiners made a path for their kids, while mine was just huddled through, trying to make it, guideless.

Draw on that guidelessness for my poems?

Punk Topeka.

I wished I could have skipped just one day, rule follower, as others could just go to the library, cruise around, as they were smart.

Worked at McD's.

The War in

 Doing some of the war poems using long Binh jail and those Gallant men, erasures for text