Pea Arts About

I've just finished the last session on the Biography Writing class I've been taking with City Lit as part of my Developing Your Creative Practice project and it's all been fantastic experience. The writing exercises set by instructor Robert Fraser have led to me having an outline, trajectory and core themes in mind for my book, which I feel I can begin to draft now. As a special treat, Robert invited the author of our focus text, Xanthi Barker, to join us, and she managed 15 minutes from her lunch break. We got through quite a lot actually, and she was generous with her answers to our questions. It was particularly useful to hear about her writing process for the book in question: Will This House Last Forever? * about her relationship with her father, the late poet Sebastian Barker. As a school teacher she mainly wrote in the summer. She wrote in the mornings, then gave herself the rest of the day to swim or be in the sun when possible. It was too much to be in all day. ...

I recently embarked on a personal project I've been meaning to undertake for a while now, and that is to reboot my archived lectures from years of teaching fellowships here and fixed-term lectureships there and distribute them online. Back in 2017 I started this with screencasts of my conference papers uploaded to YouTube and intended to do the same with lectures.  A number of reasons led to avoidance. One is that only the older ones that (I feel from experience) are less robust have full notes while the stronger, more recent ones have scant notes, because that's where I had got with knowledge and retention at the time. I also got really into audio and wanted to have a go at making the podcast , which I've been doing for three years now. Another reason was simply that it dredges up memories, many of them painful, from my times at different universities in different cities. There were tough experiences everywhere I taught, but also incredible friendships, communities and ac...

I feel as if much of my life these days is overcome with learning and managing new systems - online and business systems in a work sense as well as new ways of being and functioning in a being alive/surviving sense. I want to spend less time on social media but I have a podcast (have I mentioned it?) and a small creative business to promote, so it took a few tries to find a decent, free post scheduler (I'm trying Later.com ) and figure out how to work it, then set aside time for blitzing through posts (which need images to pre-load) and sorting up to a month's worth at a time. This is one system along with Etsy where I've found it necessary to work between the app on my phone and the website from the computer to achieve everything I need to just make one listing or post. It's flipping exhausting, and that's before we get to the spreadsheets. Facebook has been on at me for months about tagging my page photos with shop listings. That was another nearly full day just...