reading next saturday

Just discovered that the combined reading/talk on flash nonfiction that I've been invited to do next Saturday via Zoom is an altogether larger affair than I'd imagined. Desert Flash is sponsored by excellent writers, Sudha Balagopal and Rudri Patel (editor of Sunlight Press, where my essay "Dear Maddy" won an Essay Contest). They've scheduled a formidable roster of well-known flash writers. Michelle Ross is also doing a talk as well as reading. Other readers: Dan Crawley, Spencer Litman, and Jayne Martin. They expect about twenty people. (For some reason I thought they might be a group of five or so, like my writing group, and that I'd be the only visitor.)

On Friday I'll be attending another Zoom event, the end of the year party for the English department, important because the Occam's Razor writers will be part of it and I supervised two writing contests, and because it's my last year. Feeling nervous about what I should say, if anything. I'll be reading the judges' comments on the winning flash and creative nonfiction and I always enjoy that.

I feel like I'm behind, when in fact I'm doing okay. CRAFT reading finished for the week (more coming tomorrow). Workshop portfolios organized and ready to grade. Grades aren't due for a week; the work is not the grading, it's the final comments I'm planning to send each student.

I was most worried about revising my essay "An Incident on Clement Street" in time to to send it to a couple of journals about to close down for the summer. Spent all day working on it today and I'm pretty pleased with the result. I think it's finished. I'll wait a day or two just in case I want to do any last-minute changes. There's something so satisfying about the hard work of revision.