News from Underground…Image above of my son’s sidewalk chalk-work during “Art in the Park” last Saturday at Manchester’s Victory Park, sponsored by the New Hampshire Institute of Art where he is a freshman. Photo by his father. It was a great day & a spectacular event complete with a Celtic-sounding quartet that I could have listened to all day.

It’s my G-4 semester and I am feeling all the pressures that Goddard G-4s before me warned of, even as prepared as I was to leap into my final semester. Which is why I am mostly underground these days, both literally—as I work from my basement office—and figuratively.

I do pop up on occasion: to cheer on my daughter’s high school volleyball team, to teach classes at UNH, and to walk weekends with the dog and hubby.

Otherwise, I’m writing.

Today I finished my final Goddard annotation. Number 45. On the Use of Movement to Help Ease the Reader’s Journey Through the Novel "Night" by Elie Wiesel (as translated by Marion Wiesel). It was a potent, poignant tale that The New York Times calls, “A slim volume of terrifying power” (quoted on the cover).

I don’t usually have the courage or discipline to read stories about the holocaust, but this was so magically written that I couldn’t put it down. Twice. And I look forward to re-reading it yet again, at a time when I can do so leisurely. Once my G-4 semester is behind me, most likely. I highly recommend the slender volume. You will be changed after having read it. For the better.

So, Packet # 2 went off without a hitch. Exactly as I outlined in an earlier post: three annotations; my complete (yet still evolving) bibliography that includes everything I’ve read and studied in the past two years; an annotated bibliography of the top eighteen texts that most directly informed my creative thesis; course equivalents and course descriptions, which detail what I have studied during each semester, and one of my ten minute plays. A process letter accompanied it all, as always.

I am pleased to report that besides one minor tweak, all my graduate work was accepted by my advisor.

Leaving Packet # 3, the contents of which I have mostly completed today. I have revised my now 19-page Process Paper three times and am pleased with its contents. I have written my final two annotations (# 44 examines the use of the red herring in the novel "About a Boy" by Nick Hornby). I will pen my process letter next week, which is when I actually have to mail my packet in. And I hope to include some pages from my newly revised Creative Thesis screenplay, which is what has driven me underground of late.

So, without further adieu, I shall return to my script NIKI SWEET TALK MOVES in an attempt to move this next draft forward. I’ll surface again at the end of the month. Hopefully before the snow flies in our region of the country.

Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
Dana

A boatload of thoughts...
It's Moving Day.

So much has gone into this day: a year of home schooling in preparation for the GED, increased art classes, blood, sweat, tears, and a bunch of prayers. And here we are. Moving our sixteen-year-old son into his dorm at art school.

By all practical rules don’t I get him for two more years?

I’m paraphrasing Elaine from Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS when she becomes both sentimental and vulnerable as she speaks with her fifteen-year-old son William who’s in Topeka with the band he’s covering for Rolling Stone. It’s such a touching moment that I can’t stop myself from misquoting it to my son.

That and Elaine’s oft said, “Don’t take drugs!” Which, while I’m sure she meant that literally, I also took to mean, “Don’t be ordinary.” If I could have one wish for my son, and for my daughter, it would be that they may live a life that is anything but ordinary. Hopefully that will lead to happiness, as well.

Okay. I have a few more hours with him. Think I’ll go savor them now. Thanks for stopping by.

(Photo above by my husband, taken as our ferry docked in Portland, Maine.)