It’s a busy week. Just updated my CV (resume). Job application in the works. Got to get my two pages of fiction in. Send off two poetry submissions. Scout out a couple more venues for new poems. Eat a big salad for lunch. Run to the store for bread and jelly (jelly is for William). Walk. Get home and get ready to go to The Color Purple at TPAC tonight, courtesy of a good friend.

Tomorrow I get all my ducks in a row so we can leave early Friday morning for Spindale, NC. I’ll be giving a reading as part of the Spratt Lecture Series at Isothermal Community College at 7:00 PM. Then Saturday morning, I’ll be teaching a workshop as part of the Isothermal Writers Conference.  For more info, visit:  www.isothermal.edu.  If you live near Spindale, come on out!

Then is on to the Raleigh for William to promote his sculpture. See his work at www.rustedbirdstudio.com.

Home one Wednesday, just in time for a new Hump Day Report. The writing live is a busy life!

Meanwhile, here’s an announcement for you to consider, a chance to spend some quality time with a fine author right here in Tennessee, two places in Tennessee in fact.

Register to attend now! A Morning with Junot Díaz is free of charge in Memphis and Clarkesville. As part of its community outreach and reading initiatives, Humanities Tennessee is hosting A Morning with Junot Díaz. The award-winning author will be discussing and reading from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, followed by a question and answer segment to dialog with participants. Memphis (April 8 at 10:30 a.m. at the Germantown Performing Arts Center) and Clarksville (April 9 at 10:00 at the Morgan University Center Ballroom on the APSU campus).

 Space for this event is limited and will be granted on a first come basis. If you are interested in having students participate, for more information, or to register, please contact Lacey Cook via e-mail: Lacey@HumanitiesTennessee.org or by phone: 615.770.0006 x19.

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown, a collection of short stories and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2009. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and is currently Nancy Allen professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’s hump day and I’m recovering. Recovering from a crazy week last week including two trips with William to the hospital (all is well) and a trip with William to the Fearrington Folk Art Festival this weekend.  (See yesterday’s post for more info on the Masking Tape Guy. I love his work!) We got back yesterday evening in time to unload our stuff, pick up the dogs, and then sit down until bedtime. Continue Reading »

I’ve decided that giving you a long list of my 54 resolutions is narcissistic at best. But dropping them into the Hump-Day report and other blog entries is less obnoxious and maybe more inspiring and entertaining. I’ll add subtitles to these reports to hint at each report’s contents. The first of these subtitles is Miracles.

“There are two ways to live your life. One is as through nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”  –Albert Einstein Continue Reading »

On this hump day I’m humping it to catch up with all the things I’m behind on as a result of being gone all last week and preparing to be gone this weekend and most of next week. I feel a little bit like a gypsy. To compound my frenzy of activity, when not at home, I’ll have limited Internet time in the afternoon after 1:00 or anytime during the day.

Today I felt a serious need to be online and communicating with folks early in the morning, so I blew  my 1:00 PM reverse curfew. This hump day might also be called “hussle day,” because it has become about meeting commitments and following up on loose ends and contracts in progress.

In the midst of all this hussle, I’m still trying to keep my resolutions. Are any of you old enough to remember the guy on Ed Sullivan who had to keep all those plates spinning on those thin poles while he just kept adding plates to poles? I feel a little like that guy today.

That discription is an apt description of a novel writer as well. You have to keep all the plates spinning while you figure out what the heck is going on and where the heck is the novel going , and you have to do all that without breaking any plates.  Whew! What a job!

I will confess to a mint cookie eating frenzy yesterday, but I’m back in the saddle today: nuts, berries, protein, water, water, water.

Hope your plates are all spinning.

Gotta go! I see one wobbling!

I’m here at the folks school trying to keep my healthy eating regime, but they have desert at every meal except breakfast! Fruit! Fruit! Where’s the fruit? Oh, darn. There it is.

John C. Campbell Folk School website: www.folkschool.org

In keeping with my goals to become better at new and social media, here’s the list of tools mentioned at the Southern Social Networking Summit. If you want to be more proficient at social media and Web 2.0 activities, try out these handy dandy tools and resources. See what helps you in your social networking quest to be both engaged and efficient. Continue Reading »

It’s hump-day and I have a big hump to deal with: the Southern Appalachians!  I’ve got to get over them, or at least to the other side of the Cumberland Plateau and into the NC mountains before the snow and freezing rain starts on Thursday evening if I want to teach at JCCFS beginning Sunday. Yikes. Continue Reading »

All right everybody, How are you doing on your resolutions? Still BOLD? Still BRAVE? If not, you can rededicate yourselves. Us southerners are good for that.

As for me, I’m still recovering from food poisoning. I’m back to my old self, but now it’s about playing catch up. Continue Reading »