End of January

So, what's going on. I've been teaching a fiction writing class through the Writing Salon in Berkeley and it's really interesting and exciting for me to be able to begin working with adults who want to write and read and share fiction. I'll be teaching a flash fiction seminar up in Sebastapol in March. This is a series funded by Poets and Writers. Lately, all I've been reading are short story collections. Then I went with a friend to hear Khaled Hosseini(Sp) to hear him talk about Afghanistan and his books. I picked up his new one A Thousand Splendid Suns, started it and got caught up in the prose. I'm teaching The Great Gatsby in my high school class again and trying to make the students slow down and appreciate the gifted prose. Then in the other class, we're reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. I'm hoping to sustain the interest level, but those high school kids are a picky crowd. Some of them are pretty literal and when Zora Neale Hurston waxes poetic about the bees and the pollen, some of the guys' eyes wax over (and some of the girls' too) and I've lost them. Oh well. They do like the word play when Amos Hicks is trying to hit on Janie. Been thinking about all the things going on in the world and how far removed I am from everything--the war, the economy, movie stars accidentally od-ing---sad, sad, sad. Wonder how we're ever going to get out of Iraq if a Republican wins the election. My teenage daughter has a good friend over there--kid fresh out of high school, a boy who went to church every Sunday by himself because he'd had some kind of vision, but couldn't find a job when he got out, so he enlisted. And the people over there, sustaining the hit. There's a new cable channel called Current (107) that shows podcasts and videos from viewers, has interesting insight and less censorship--take a look at it. It's a strange world.