The Nature of Technology

Before I began teaching my annual nature writing class online in Chatham's low-residency MFA program, I taught on-campus incarnations of the same course. One of the course requirements, then and now, was that students keep a nature journal, which has a long tradition in the nature writing genre. Students are asked to choose a single place and to visit it roughly weekly all semester, staying for at least twenty minutes each time, and then writing about their observations and ideas gathered while there; students also craft entries in response to directed prompts to accompany their place-focused entries. This is my favorite assignment of each semester, as I eagerly look forward to reading students' notes and ideas as they develop a relationship - sometimes positive, sometimes negative - to their individually chosen places.

With the transition to strictly online teaching of this course, I have necessarily had to adjust this project. In on-campus classes, students were asked to - gasp! - handwrite their entries in a paper journal. And the results were often astonishing. Now students keep nature blogs, because it would be very difficult to try to weekly read and evaluate the handwritten journals of students who are located all over the country (and sometimes abroad, such as this semester).

A former student friend recently scanned and posted to Facebook some of her journal pages - scattered throughout this entry - from that summer course five years ago.

And seeing these images again reminds me that, as much as I still enjoy this assignment even in blog form, as much as I feel the nature blogs are often just as inspired and as creative as the handwritten nature journals were, I miss that medium. A lot. J. gave me permission to share those images and some of her thoughts on keeping her nature journal that summer:

"Most of [these pages are] just musings on time spent in a community garden down the street from my house when I lived in Pittsburgh. I was taking a nature writing course, and one of the assignments was to choose one place, visit it often, and write while there. It was an amazing assignment. The act of sitting in a place for longer than I normally would and writing about it was a wonderful way to open my eyes to the many layers of beauty the garden had. Drawing became an extension of that, a way to still my mind and focus my attention on what I was surrounded by. The longer I was there, the more I wrote and drew, the more I could see. I couldn't believe how beautiful eggplants were in their various stages! One evening, just after sunset, I sat in front of a plant that had white bell-shaped flowers and started to draw it. The blossoms were closed when I began the sketch, but each time I looked up to capture another detail the blossoms were open wider. Whoa! So I stopped drawing and literally sat there watching these flowers open up before my eyes. No time lapse photography needed!"

Amazing stuff, really amazing!

A Return, Very Grudgingly

I've been missing for a long while, but not entirely of my own too-busy doing. Sometime between my last post here in July and this past December when I logged in again to post in preparation for the new semester's nature writing grad students, the Blogger automated software mistakenly detected this innocuous nature blog as *spam.* And, with no notification to me, via email or otherwise, that program went ahead and deleted the whole thing (I'm still wracking my mind to try to figure out what content in here would have suggested something nefarious or inappropriate). Apparently Blogger is so big now that it is impossible to speak to an actual human and the only way of dealing with issues is to post to their help forums and hope that someone who replies is actually someone in authority who can fix the situation. It took me over a month, during which I admittedly had to get pushy and cranky on their "help" forums, but that persistence paid off and the blog was finally restored.

I am now, though, very conflicted about its continuance, and about posting new content. I also have used this platform with the nature writing students, required dozens of them to have used it over the last several years. This was an awful experience, and I also am admittedly still irate (downgraded from enraged) about it. And I hate the idea of continuing with this platform after such an experience, either for myself or with my students. I decided that I wanted it restored for the sole intention of backing up all the content and exporting it all straight over to Wordpress, and then I would delete this one myself for good. I realize now that it will be many months before I have the time to do that, create an entirely new blog and essentially start over. I can't imagine that I won't want to post during that interim period, so I have now decided that I will just try to set aside my annoyance, post until then, and proceed with the I'm So Over Blogger Plan. 

So, know that this home here is simply for now. Because I have perfected the art of holding grudges. 

In the meantime, in local news, am very excited that the annual Radford Roosting Festival (the renamed  Vulture Festival) is upcoming and takes place during the Kindergartener's (the renamed Preschooler) birthday weekend festivities!