What time of year do you ask? Taxes of course. But, before I really get into that, February also still feels like the start of the year to me right now. Maybe because I spent January resolving things at my father and step-mother’s house. With that chapter closing (slowly, the pages too thick to fall quickly) I find myself assessing and rethinking like I normally would do at the first of the year. I’m in transition.

I’ve enjoyed the last month of making ends meet by doing freelance work, but it won’t last. I know I’ll have to do a bit more to keep things a float. I’m starting to look around at jobs again although I’m not completely sure what to apply for. I’ve decided I’m not applying for teaching jobs (especially if they saw that sentence ending with a preposition, right, the horror!). If I saw an amazing creative writing teaching job that was local (that’s a LONG shot) I’d put in for that since we aren’t mobile, but as far as teaching composition courses I think that part of my life is done which is funny given what I’m presenting on at AWP. As I prepare that paper it will be full circle on a career.

I recently finished another issue of AWP’s magazine The Writer’s Chronicle which I get with my membership. My favorite article was one on beginnings. I was particularly drawn to it because it references a lot of the type of research I did when I wrote about poetic closure for my graduate school seminar so neat to see that information applied and re-worked to thinking about how we begin our poems.

So, what is my next beginning?  I still have some freelance services up, but I need to find a “regular” job again. I’m taking suggestions. You can see my resume and skills if you have thoughts about fields and positions i should be looking at. I do still have my application in to be an academic advisor at one of the local schools. I’d still like to work in and around education. One of my mantras with teaching/education has always been joining into conversations so I’d like to continue in that  conversation if I could. Speaking of conversations we have one about forms going on over at Referential. 

I’ll also continue to blog. It helps when you have those regular readers (you know who you are!) and then you hear good words from people like Robert Brewer about your blog.

As I continue to plot out the next course I also reflect back on a movie I watched recently called Dreams of a Life. I hesitate to call it a documentary because there are substantial moments of dramatic recreation of the life of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died in December of 2003 but whose body wasn’t found for 3 years. That’s so sad. Not so much the dying alone even as just that no one would have noticed she was gone for so long. I don’t have to make a big impact in my life, but I’d like to have done enough with the time I have left to know that someone would at least think to check on me once and a while. I’d like to know that there are people out there whom I’d also keep an eye on.

Let’s be good to one another