Shameless Self-promotion

It's been a great few months, if I do say so myself. I've settled in to my office at home and I'm working on settling into a routine. I have to admit, I think I may have suffered a brief bout of post-masters depression and found myself in a little crisis of identity for a bit. Who am I now that I'm not an enrolled student? What am I supposed to do with all this time? The result was a frenzy of volunteer sign-up and a handful of small jobs and projects. Yet, I'm now doing a lot of really great things that I wouldn't otherwise have taken on.

I participated in a Habitat for Humanity house build in the nearby town of Three Hills. The town is about to celebrate its centennial and, in partnership with the Elks, sponsored a 100 hour build to commemorate the occasion. I spent two days at the site, first helping with the refreshments and meals, and then painting and clean-up. There were so many people helping over the 100 hours that by the time I arrived there wasn't much to do. My only real complaint, however, was I had to wear borrowed Habitat steel-toed boots. My feet have been itchy ever since!

I've also been volunteering as an English tutor and helping out with a summer reading camp at the Three Hills Library. I enjoy giving over some time to causes that make me feel useful. It's nice to put all that book learnin' to good use, by which I mean for the good of others. I'm up to about seven hours a week volunteering now, so I promised myself I had to stop taking things on.

Among all the volunteering I've started to become work busy! I'm happy to report I've found some freelance work writing for an academic press (not sure if I can name it right now) doing introductions and annotations for upcoming anthologies. I've also been helping out at the local paper, the Three Hills Capital.

On top of that, my first official publication is now released! Back in March, I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book titled Alternative Futures for Publishing sponsored by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. It is available for free download, although be patient because it's a big file. Other contributors include my friends and colleagues Mark Leslie and Todd Anderson. I'm delighted to have worked with these and the other authors, and am indebted to Jerome Martin of Spotted Cow Press for his support. Mine is chapter four, "Look Who's Talking, Really: The Dialectic Relationship Between Author, Reader, and Publisher."

photo taken from Mark Leslie's Blog

Finally, I am beyond excited to say that I have been accepted to The Banff Centre Writing With Style residency program! I will be spending a week at the gorgeous campus in Banff where I'll be revising my thesis and turning it into the novel I know it should be. I'm so excited to be part of this inspirational and invaluable workshop, and I can't wait to tell you all about it.

Well, I guess I'd better get back to work. Those introductions won't write themselves. Thanks for reading, and don't forget dreams really do come true, if I can do it you can do it, keep your fork, a bird in the hand, and never put your hat on the bed.

Do I still get to call myself a student?

I expected when I started this blog that I would talk about life as a graduate student. Yet here I am two years later and I think I hardly spoke about it even in passing. Now it's all over. I can breathe a sigh of relief; I somehow managed to fool everyone.

Eventually I plan to do a post about tips for surviving graduate school, but first I have to think about what those tips might be. At the moment I feel like the overlooked average kid. The one that doesn't stand out, doesn't need extra help, just goes where they know they're supposed to and makes it through to summer vacation hardly scathed. I also know this is sarcastic humility, and I am very sure there are some things I did exceedingly well, and some things I would go back and do differently. But that's not what I'm going to talk about here.

I'm going to talk about my newfound freedom in working! I guess I need to start by saying that I have too many lucky stars to count. I'm barely two weeks outside of my degree and I'm already working in publishing, a field I've always wanted to be a part of. I am rediculously lucky to join Todd Anderson at Henday Publishing as the managing editor. Together, we intend on creating community development, social economics, and education material with an interdisciplinary approach, a keen interest in technology, and an open mind for new material and methods. I am not so bold as to say we are the new face of academic publishing, but I am bold enough to say that we are pretty darned determined to carve out a space for ourselves in this strange uncertain and ever-changing market. Stay tuned and keep your eyes out for Henday Publishing.

In addition to my work as an editor, I am also thrilled to start a long-overdue artistic partnership with my dear friend Dusty Hagerud. Dusty is ony of my oldest friends, and he has been a designer/illustrator for as long as I have known him. I am a huge fan of his work and his sense of humor, and we have a number of plans in the works. Stay tuned for loads of hilarious, irreverant tales of myth, mischief, and marionettes.

Finally, after all the time I have spent working on courses, school deadlines, and that big old monster I called a thesis, I can't wait to get going on my portfolio. The first thing I'm going to do is put that thesis in a drawer for a few months and not think about it. Next I'm going to free-write to my heart's content and enjoy every indulgent moment of it. Then I'm going to do what any recently graduated, aspiring writer would do—pimp myself to anyone who will listen and brag like crazy when someone puts my work into print.

So, this is unfortunately one of those self-satisfying diary-esque blogs that doesn't serve much other than to promise awesome things to come. Hopefully I've done enough already that you are intrigued enough to believe me. Exciting things are certainly to come.

I'll write the title later

My alarm goes off at 7am every weekday. I get out of bed around 8:30. There's a Second Cup that opened a block away from my house and it has become my new "office space" for writing my thesis. I plan on heading there around 10:00 every morning and putting in a solid 6 hours. I get there around 2 and work until about 6. Intended 6 hours always translates to realistic 4 hours, doesn't it? Right? Or is it just me? I have been distracting myself lately by reading more blogs and it's prompted me to revisit mine. I haven't touched this dusty whatever-this-is in over a year. I admit it; I have a procrastination problem.

So in true Jessica form, I figured I'd click on that scary "new post" button and fire off an inspirational rambling that will put the Nike slogan to shame! Then I realized that the simple act of interacting with this blog has essentially brought my procrastination to a pause. Maybe not a screeching halt, but at least a slight hesitation.

I don't know why I'm terrified of writing. I seem to work very hard at finding other things to do that don't involve the one thing I claim to want to do more than anything else in the world. Why don't I write more? Who knows. Perfectionism? Fear of failure? Finger cramps? I'm confident that at least one of my problems is fear of bad sentences--and I write a lot of them! But writing an encyclopedia of bad sentences in September leaves room for chiseling out the bad in February.

Let me take a moment to redeem myself slightly. I did accomplish a lot last year. I attended a conference in Spain in April, I spent the summer in Quebec City étudier le français. I joined some committees, did some fundraising, met lots of people in academia, and got all my coursework done. All things considered, I can network and cross off to-do lists with the best of them. I just can't bring myself to write.

So here's a bit of advice for me. Stop being so hard on myself, write bad sentences, write them often, and have a long talk with that alarm clock.

Remember This Moment

Hi all,

So it's been...what...WHAT? Five months?!? Oops.
I can't deny that I haven't thought about this blog. There have been moments where I've put down the books and thought, "that would be a good idea for a blog entry. Too bad I have seventeen hours of homework to get through before class starts." So I've put it off, promising myself that when I did finally get reaquainted with this global, digitized community I'd have something amazing to say.

I don't know if this is amazing or not, but I think it's worth saying. The last couple of weeks I have been watching the olympics. I consider myself to be both sentimental and patriotic, so the olympics in Vancouver have rendered me a pile of red and white gushing dribble. I've literally been glued to my television, or when I haven't been at home I've had the live feed running on my laptop.

So I've seen all of it, from tradgedy to triumph. The horrible accident involving the Georgian luger before the olympics were officially opened; the beautiful opening ceremonies, complete with cauldron malfunction; the first gold medal on Canadian soil; the spills and disappointments; the incredible gold medal winning ice dance by that cute young Canadian pair, Virtue and Moir; the disappointing loss in the Canadian vs. US men's hockey game; and the heartbreaking death of Joannie Rochette's mother days before she took to the ice for her big olympic chance.

I just finished watching Joannie skate her short program. She was flawless. I'm thinking now about the determination of these participants. I include more than just the athletes. Right from the beginning of the opening ceremonies. Representatives from all the First Nations peoples across Canada took part in a pow wow that lasted the entire duration of all the athletes' introductions. It had to have lasted more than an hour. Then there was the Georgian team, who entered somberly, but purposely to stake their place in this global event, and to honour their teammate. There was Kristi Richards who, on the medal race in freestyle moguls, fell. She got up, collected herself, faced down the mountain and went all out in her final jump. Even though she was out of the running after her fall, she wanted to do her best just because she could.

After Joannie skated her perfect short program she, understandably, burst into tears. I cried right along with her. I admire her emotional strength. You could tell she was skating for not only her mom, but for her own healing. I think that her commitment brought her mom onto the ice tonight.

And on top of the athletes there have been the coaches, the volunteers, the coordinators, the announcers, the viewers, the people in charge of collecting lost skis, fixing gouges in the ice, timing races, giving directions, serving food, and who knows what else is going on in Vancouver. They're all a part of something bigger, and they are all working tirelessly at it. If there is one thing that I can take as inspiration from the olympics, I want it to be that. Sure, the athletes make me wish that I could run marathons and have washboard abs, but more importantly, I want that never-say-quit attitude. I want to look at my endless to-do list and stop letting it overwhelm me. Afterall, I do all this school and extra stuff because I want to. No one is forcing me. So hopefully after the olympics is all over I will remember that the lack of sleep, the headaches from too much reading, the temporary breakdowns in confidence, they are my falls on moguls, my bad luck with weather, my missed goal, and my step closer to that moment when, medal or not, I did my best.

Afterall, in the end that's what we work hard for, isn't it?