"I am a Minnesotan by birth and a traveler in wild places by vocation and compulsion." -Paul Gruchow

Sunday, September 4, 2011

While Writing a Lecture on Setting for 252

I realize that I'm treating this blog as more of a blog-blog than just a record of things for this class. So, to make things easier, I've tagged the assignments as "992" and clicking on the Tags list on the right will take you right to those responses.

It's the first time in a long time that I've been able to open my one functional window in my apartment and get some fresh air in here, and how fresh it is! The cats are particularly excited to sit in a window, though Maeve is feeling evil and keeps chasing Galway out of it. Such is life in the Babine household. I just finished grading reading responses for my fiction class and I'm moving onto the next thing on my list: finalizing the power point lecture for Tuesday. I'm still nervous enough about that class that I'm over preparing, so as not to be left with an hour to go and nothing to do. I'm a little excited about that class, because we'll be talking specifically about scene and setting...and Place! (My excitement right now might be completely related to the level of caffeine in my blood.)

So, in my preparing for this class, two things happened across my internet in the last couple of days. The first is a blog entry by my friend James Engelhardt, who just moved with his family from Lincoln to Alaska. This blog entry has everything to do with place--and the complications of trying to figure out new places. You can find "Writer as Listening Body" here.

The other unexpected awesomeness was coming across a geography course description from Dartmouth: "Landscapes of Murder: The Geography of Mystery Fiction." I just about hit the roof when I saw that. I want to teach that class. Badly. Look at the reading list--not just literary fiction, but popular fiction too. If I were to have designed this class, I would have also chosen Evanovich, for the brilliant way she uses Trenton as a character (and Stephanie Plum is just awesome anyway). And I just adore Nevada Barr. Firestorm is a good one, though I might have chosen a different one. Since I'm teaching William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake this semester, this idea just is wonderfully exciting.

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