Sheesh, what a week. I left home for Milwaukee last Wednesday at 10:00 AM and returned last night at 10:00 PM. In those six days I slept in five different beds, woke up before 6:00 AM three times, and went to bed after midnight every night. So yes, I’m a bit foggy headed. At my advanced age, can this cause permanent brain damage?
The reason for all of this was the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago. Overall, I have to say I was underwhelmed, or at least out of my element. It seems like most people use the conference as an opportunity to reconnect with friends who have moved to other programs or professions. There are tons of exhibitor booths for all kinds of writing programs, literary journals, and book publishers. There’s a full schedule of programming (panels and whatnot) and readings, but few caught my attention. Usually there are some people from the speculative fiction world in attendance, but this year there weren’t, or I didn’t see them. I had only sent a handful of stories out to these literary markets and haven’t gotten any sales, so I didn’t see the point of going up to introduce myself.
The good news is now I know what to expect from AWP and I didn’t have to travel across the country and spend a butt-load of money finding this out. It makes a lot of sense to attend these conventions to meet the people who have published your work, so if I get on the ball and manage to sell some things to these types of mags in the next couple years, I would probably go back. Short of that, however, I don’t think I could justify the expense and I’m not the rabid networker who thrives in such situations.
I ended up cutting out early and spending time with friends as Amy and Athena also came down for the weekend. Amy’s folks were down checking out art galleries on Friday, and they treated us to lunch at the always fantastic Cafe Iberico. I worked really hard the week before the conference in order to free up time, and in hindsight it was well worth it to get in some quality friend and family time in Chicago instead.
I also found out I was given a creative writing class next fall. I’ll still be teaching 101 (Intro to College Writing) or the follow-up 102 (The Researched Paper) in addition, but it’ll be nice to mix things up a bit.
Also, I’ve been really pleased with my current students’ reactions to Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women, a film that shows how an alarming number of advertisements portray women in submissive, passive, silenced, sexualized, or victimized positions. I figured this would be a good starting point since Kilbourne uses a number of clever rhetorical strategies to get her point across, its useful in terms of talking about purpose and audience, and it’s an easy segue to encourage students to expand their notions of what it means to “read” and what counts as a “text” that can be analyzed outside the classroom.
I’m holding individual student conferences this week and having the students read aloud their final papers in this assignment series, and so far just about all of them have said that they’ll never look at ads the same way again. Better yet, a number of them have extended Kilbourne’s argument to pay more close attention to race and class in addition to gender roles. Good, good stuff.
Current Mood: Are You Kidding Me? |
3 Comments
Thanks for the Kilbourne link. I’ll check that out. I’ve been annoyed and downright angry at the trend over the past few years of beheaded women on the covers of books. That is, you see most of a woman’s body (usually her rear or her breasts are centered beneath the title) but her head is cut off by the edge of the cover. This was a big hit for publishers of fantasy, but was also prominent on YA and historical fiction covers, too. What the hell? Fortunately, this seems to have gone out of fashion. For now.
You can watch it on YouTube here. Low resolution but that’s to be expected. It’s only 30 minutes long.
There was some knee-jerk reaction on the part of some of the guys in the class who seemed to think Kilbourne was blowing things out of proportion or taking them out of context, but the next assignment was for students to find three ads of their own to analyze and I think it struck home that these ads are everywhere once you start looking for them. I also found it interesting that the only ones who objected were young white men, and the people who seemed to identify with Kilbourne tended to be women and not-white students.
This turned out to be a much better exercise than I anticipated, especially considering the initial resistance I encountered after the first viewing. Their brains really started to grind when we started talking about what the responsibility of advertisers should be, what would more responsible advertising look like, and what we as individuals can do about it. Like I said, good stuff.
You should totally come to AWP next year because, well, it’s in Denver, and, well… I’m in Denver. And that’d be cool.