Conferences plan

 Waiting to hear back from ncte

and from International Conference on Religion & Film

in March? 

for May>>already asked for

Register for conference money in August

Either for ncte?

Upcoming course schedule change and plans

 Fall 2024

Submit for Fall 2025 Sabbatical

EN 210 Online (cross-listed with EN 399 and RG 300)

EN 101 MWF 9:00-9:50

EN 101 MWF 10-10:50

EN 300 Online nursing emphasis

 

Spring 2025

MWF 8:00-8:50 EN 300

MWF 9:00-9:50 EN 206

MWF 11:00-11:50 EN 300

Mon. 5:30-8:00 EN 190/390

 

 

Fall 2025

sabbatical

 

 

 

Spring 2026

Beginning Poetry (206): Etzel

Superhero Films 

Fall 2026

EN210

Spring 2027

Beginning Poetry (206): Etzel

Beginning Nonfiction (207): Etzel

 

 

Fall 2027

EN210

Spring 2028

Beginning Poetry (206): Etzel

Fall 2028

 EN210

At the Movies

 Themes

Genre

Mythology and religion and philosophy and psychology

Vietnam

Two lesbian mothers

Neuroqueerness

Superheroes

Everything everywhere all at once

Mental rom-coms

Places that movie theaters are

The positive Trickster

Self-care Cinema therapy

I'm from Topeka Kansas and so are you

Art Plus capitalism equals emptiness

What does it mean to write a memoir, film as memoir

Generative Poetic Practices like the HBO guide and analyzing it back and forth and everywhere

Phenomenon philosophy, indie VS corporate, loss of the Dickinson theater, while Atchison rallied

In a dead end job

At the movies in December, the best movies come out, reflection, snow storms and the beauty of Silence

Approach

 I know I should really think about writing pieces that are funny, smart, in other words have wit.

In other words, write pieces that I would love to read out loud and to an audience.

Think of pacing, think of ways that a story engages with a listener.

Comedic memoir

 Leaving Louise's reading and how she affirmed that a lot of life is about pain but the comedy helps relieve that or at least make it approachable. And how difficult it is to write comedy as I'm talking to Eric and he remembers the piece that I wrote called against masculinity in the comedy I had written about after writing about the angry men I had survived when my mom came out after her divorce and said I don't think I like men and I responded me either! And then how I then run into Roger who took a fiction class with me 8 years ago and he remembered what I said about there's a story and everything and he even mentioned the story recently wrote called sticky notes. He now has a couple of Memoirs written. And a couple of novels. And here's the thing it's toward the end of the semester and I was feeling down and sometimes that little depression comes back but then here are these notes as I'm thinking about writing memoir and that I have to remember is to bring back that comedy. I love how my mom said I always used to tell jokes and I was always being humorous but I also know that was partly the disguise of the sadness I was feeling. Eric told me about another time when we were both students at Robinson Middle School and somehow someone told him about when I was in Randolph Elementary School that I asked someone in the back do you want to see me jump out the window? And I had then showed a piece of paper with the word Jump On It. I waited for the teacher to turn back around and threw that piece of paper out the window!

I'm wondering that comedy will be a part of my memoir?

Dreaded EN300

 I'm telling you, I'm ready to go to the next level and talking about students about their writing. I'm going to be on the next level about talking about safety and belonging. I'm going to talk about engagement and how students need to find a way to engage with the course and not just left it off. And most importantly the idea of ethics. We all need a moral compass and ethics means not using chat gpt. It means truly finding a way to engage.

And when I tell them I'm using trauma informed basis for their field of study, I'm definitely going to talk about what that means. It doesn't mean calling people snowflakes. It means the reality that there are people who would benefit from having empathy and the use of ethics that they could be trusted and everyone could win.

Let me tell you about my friend Tony who's into real estate. He was having a hard time closing on a house as the sellers all of the sudden decided to raise the cost a slight bit just as the buyers knew they really wanted that house. The sellers wanted more money. On the day at the closing. 

So Tony got with the seller realtor and said let's take a cut out of our paycheck. Let's just write off what we would normally make because we want to make these people happy. 

Really the time and money the Realtors put in, the time the buyers put in, everyone would win win even though the Realtors weren't going to make as much.

But really Tony did it because he wanted these people to get the house. These are people he spent time with and got to know on that personal level that people can choose to have or not to have.

So I know there are car sales people who are taught that it's all about the sale and the scam, to see how much money you can get. And I know there are sales people out there who just want to get someone in a car they can afford.

Your moral compass and ethics which will sell them have to do with how much money you can make off of someone. If you're already trying to scam someone or get the most out of someone, you are probably compromising your ethics.

Great TEXTS 200

Jericho and I are so excited to offer TX200: Movies, Myth, and the Mind this Fall! In a nutshell, our course is exploring how films—esp. in a movie theater--are contemporary mythology, can be sites for self-care, and can be like a religious experience. It is a mashup of cognitive and social psychology with therapy, religious studies, mythology, and poetry, examining why we can feel like kids again, feel deep empathy or relate to characters that we don't feel as so alone or an outcast, or leave transformed by a movie in conjunction with a theater experience.

One word summaries of pedagogies

 So after reading through the different pedagogical approaches, as well as finding ways to implement them, I want to try to Summarize each pedagogy in the way I found repeating themes or ideas.

Of course, these words would lead to discussions, and they're definitely needs to explain why for those naysayers, but here it is:

First generation best practices: Belonging

Anti-racist pedagogy: Equity

Ungrading: Freedom 

Trauma informed pedagogy: Safety

Of course there is overlap, but these are my Impressions right now after spending this semester intensely looking overall and again at these pedagogies.

academic years

 August 2024

Academic Sabbatical Applications are due on November 1 >> Fall of 2025 

Spring 2025

Beginning Poetry (206): Etzel

Topeka Correctional Facility Poetry

2 EN101 writing courses

 

Fall 2025

I am not scheduled to teach any of the writing courses

>> hope sabbatical

 

 

 

2024 AWP

 

Things happening and my possible schedule

Wednesday, February 7, 2024 View Full Schedule
5:30 pm to 8:00 pm
21c Museum Hotel, 219 W 9th St, Kansas City, MO 64105	Wild Patience: A Poet-Mom Reading Cost: Free Url: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qTCSLCmHZkvcs6xN_NG-vLeODyHMzm8_bOVHRd7h8jE/edit?usp=sharing Come join us at 21c Museum Hotel, a short walk from the Kansas City Convention Center, for a dynamic reading of poetry that crosses fields of nurturance, crisis, connection, catastrophe, hope. Eighteen poet moms, drawing from a variety of poetic practices and traditions, will share work that occupies the overlapping spaces of our lives—war zone and garden, city and body, climate and house, populace and child. Readers include Tess Taylor, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Keetje Kuipers, Nicole Callihan, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, among others. Cash bar opens at 5:30 p.m. in Gallery One, reading starts at 6:00 p.m. in Main Gallery. Delete from my schedule
Thursday, February 8, 2024 View Full Schedule
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Room 2102A, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level	T113. Queering Kansas: LGBTQ+ Writers in the Heartland . (Laura Lee Washburn,  Jericho Hockett,  Fable Briggs,  Dennis Etzel Jr,  Allison Blevins) Five Kansas LGBTQ writers of memoir and poetry discuss how Kansas influences their writing in both representation and resistance. How do LGBTQ+ poets and writers draw on the landscape of Kansas, from the Tallgrass Prairie to the Flint Hills? How is memoir and poetry shaped by writing as survival? How has prose and poetry played a role in coming out? How does community play a role in subject matter and support in LGBTQ+ writing? This panel will be a lively conversation about Kansas queer writing. Delete from my schedule
10:35 am to 11:50 am
Room 2503AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2	T154. Fragmented Inheritances: Lyric Essay and Intergenerational Trauma . (Joanna Penn Cooper,  Kiki Petrosino,  James Allen Hall,  Rajiv Mohabir) Lauded essayists discuss experiments with form, including fragmentary approaches to narrative, and how they leave space for both readers and writers to approach subject matter about difficult legacies. How does the use of fragments allow ways into incomplete or contested family and cultural narratives around war trauma; religious persecution; racial, sexual, and gender identity; and violence? How might fragmented narrative further the possibilities for sharing and transmuting difficult legacies? Delete from my schedule
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Room 2504AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2	T182. Neurodiverse Sounds like Universe: Crafting Worlds Embracing Neurodiversity . (Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach,  Oliver de la Paz,  Eugenia Leigh,  Diannely Antigua,  Allison Blevins) Combating stigmas and shame culture surrounding mental health, writers share poetry, nonfiction, and cross-genre work that embraces autism spectrum disorder, Anxiety, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar, and depression. These writers refuse to hide from or mask within an ableist society and through content and form, call attention to the creative powers of neurodiversity. They will share their work and discuss how their craft choices transform neurotypical language into a neurodiverse universe. Delete from my schedule
1:00 pm Table T3115 Bookfair Jericho signing Allison Blevins Sinister Wisdom Thursday 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM T1303 Petra Kuppers Black Earth Institute, The Thursday 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM 3330 Melissa Fite Johnson Riot in Your Throat Thursda y 3 3:30  PM - 4:30 PM T1615     320 writing without retrauma 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
YMCA, 222 W 11th St, Kansas City, MO 64105	Open Mic with Johnson County Library Cost: Free Url: https://jocolibrary.bibliocommons.com/events/6570a4f9b3e768370031c005 Johnson County Library is excited to be hosting an open mic event in Kansas City. Open to all, we want to hear your work and share a little bit of ours. Bring poems, short stories, essays, and excerpts to share on the stage, or come just to listen. Sign up at the event; three-minute limit. We’ll gather to snack and network at 6:00 p.m. Open mic will be from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Food provided by Olive + Co.

8:00 pm to 9:30 pm

Grand Ballroom A, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2

T256. #AWP24 Keynote Address by Jericho Brown, Sponsored by AWP . (Jericho Brown) Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Poetry and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captio

Friday, February 9

7:30am 

Messenger Coffee chat with Ryan

10am Blue Bird Bistro 

https://maps.app.goo.gl/KKE6vZg5tt4MqpnT7

12pm Room 2101, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level

Screenwriting with the Hero's Journey and Beyond

(Dennis Etzel Jr, Erin Hamer-Beck, Kevin Rabas, Matt Nyquist, John Ingle)

In Story (1997), Robert McKee proposed the Hero's Journey serves as a universal outline for many stories and encouraged its use for screenplays. In this panel, we will explore if this is still true. What are the steps in the HJ? How have screenwriters borrowed from its structure? What films deviate from the HJ norm and how? What other "journeys" can screenwriters use when crafting their stories? The panelists will include films which focus on diverse represenation to discuss these questions.

 

 

3:00 to 3:30 pm: Jasmine Sawers will be signing copies of The Anchored World at Table 1815 in the bookfair.

4:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Brewery Emperial, 1829 Oak St., Kansas City, MO 64108

BlazeVOX Books Reading Cost: Free Url: https://fb.me/e/13pUDNq9V BlazeVOX Book invites you to a reading of its recent authors during happy hour at the singular Brewery Emperial in downtown Kansas City, just minutes walk from the conference. Featured readers include: Timothy Bradford, Grant Matthew Jenkins, Allison Blevins, Vi Khi Nao, Jessica Alexander, Cheryl Pallant, K. D. Harryman, Dana Curtis, Elizabeth Friedman, Emily Toder, Dennis Etzel Jr., Joseph Harrington, E. J. McAdams.

 

 

Saturday, February 10, 2024View Full Schedule
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Room 2103B, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level	S116. Grief: What is it Good For? . (Maddie Norris,  Ross Gay,  Kathryn Savage,  Thomas Mira Y Lopez,  Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint) Absolutely everything. While many view grief only as tragedy, these four writers dive in to find connection, community, love, and joy. An exploration of their writing shows the value of investigating grief and specific ways of doing so on the page. In this moderated Q&A, panelists showcase how they approach grief, the importance of doing so, the ethics of including those gone, and the various craft techniques used to find value in mourning.

5pm Dinner with a Mentor

My students and I get together to talk about the great time we had!

would be a drive

7pm

Blip Roasters, 1301 Woodswether Rd, Kansas City, MO

Riot in Your Throat & Small Harbor Publishing: An Off-site Poetry Reading

Cost: $5.00
Event URL: website

An off-site poetry reading featuring poets from Riot in Your Throat and Small Harbor Publishing. Reading will be Saturday, February 10 at 7:00 p.m. at Blip Roasters (1301 Woodswether Rd, Kansas City). $5.00 cover. Lineup includes: Anna Leahy, Laura Passin, Sarah Freligh, Allison Blevins, Meghan Sterling, Sonia Greenfield, Courtney LeBlanc, Darren C. Demaree, Melissa Fite Johnson, and Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer.

Contact: Courtney LeBlanc
Contact Email: riotinyourthroat@gmail.com

 

Back up plans

Screenland

Union Station, jack stack bbq 

Hotel room

Roasterie and Boulevard Brewing

Andres