Home from Sewanee...

Yesterday, Shawn, Riley, and I returned from our summer home on the Domain after six beautiful, fun, tiring, and enlightening weeks.

As far as classes go, I took a fiction workshop with Ellen Slezak and a course on the novella with Michael Griffith. Both classes were fantastic - we read great stuff, analyzed a lot, wrote a lot, and learned a lot. Even after just six weeks, I feel I have come a long way as a writer. Very exciting. I owe that all to my inspiring, intelligent teachers, and my terrific classmates.

In addition, to classes, we filled the past month and a half with weekly basketball matches, readings (Richard Wilbur and Richard Bausch in the past week), dinners, trips to the lake with Riley, visits from my parents (a weekend and a week!!), Claire (two whole weeks!), Alli and CE (a week!), and our friends from Colorado (Clay, Krista, Connor, and Amara). What fun we had! Thank you to everyone who joined us at Sewanee for making our summer so special.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention Monday night Bachelorette nights, a date night for Shawn and I to Chatanooga (thanks Mom and Dad!), weekly golf outings (for Shawn with some of my classmates), bi-weekly trips to the thrift store on campus, lunch buffet at Crust, and a few nights on the Shenanigans' porch!

Then, there was Stirlings, and the stops Claire and I made on our way to class for coffee, and the trips Mom and I made in the mornings before hitting the library, and the trips Dad and Riley made for Strawberry smoothies...we spent a bunch of time there for sure!

Wow! We really were quite busy! Amazingly, I had time to write two short stories, a twelve-page paper, a major revision, an artist statement, a writing exercises, a five-page close reading - and, read 22 short stories and write critiques, 12 novellas, and Burroway's book on craft (all 12 chapters!).

Sewanee really feels like my home away from home. Something about the stone buildings and breeze moving through the tops of trees....or maybe its something about the smell of the library and the heavy drone of cicadas at night...or maybe its something else entirely. Something else about reading and writing and being in a beautiful place to do it with my family....