overload

I haven’t been reading or writing lately, which isn’t good. This past week I taught eight workshops—starting on Monday morning with two up in the Bronx co-facilitated with my former BMCC colleague Yadira Perez Hazel—and then my residency wrapped up on Saturday with a fantastic reading by my BPCS middle grade students. Because I was running the event, I didn’t have time to take photos, nor did I have time to feast on the many sweets laid out for guests, which is a good thing since I’ve been eating ice cream every day. Nonetheless, yesterday I put on a new dress and walked out the house knowing that this chapter of my writer’s life is nearly over. I’ve submitted one version of our anthology to Create Space and will try to meet with the students one last time to get their feedback. Then I need to finish my picture book story and novel about Weeksville before turning in my final report. For the past two months I’ve tried to say “yes” to just about everything, and I am definitely ready to say “no” for a while. My adult class, Magic & Memory, wrapped up last Wednesday; we had a small group of eight students but we still had a great discussion about Afrofuturism and the legacy of slavery. My students wrote some touching messages in the card they tucked inside the folder containing their course evaluations; I won’t be ready to read the latter for a while yet, but the card really made me feel like we achieved something meaningful over the 5 weeks we spent together. And it was nice to know that I haven’t lost my touch in the classroom. Folks keep asking if I’ll be teaching anywhere else this summer, but right now I have nothing lined up—and that feels great! Saying “yes” to so many different gigs means I should have earned enough this spring to get me through the summer. And the fall? I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll have more author talks lined up through the BPL. They sent me to Explore Charter School in my own neighborhood on Wednesday morning. I’ve never seen 80 middle grade students enter an auditorium so quietly! And their teachers sat *with* the kids, snapping photos of my presentation (the one below was posted on Twitter).

On Thursday I did two back-to-back presentations at Weeksville Heritage Center for 70 members of Mrs. Field’s Literary Society; I met some very nice women, including the sister of my alma mater‘s current president! It’s a small world, and I hope the relationships I formed during my Weeksville residency will flourish in the future. There are so many writers with stories just waiting to be told! I did two presentations at Launch Expeditionary School on Friday and at the end, a sixth-grade student raised his hand and asked how kids can help me write my stories. I told him that talking to kids about my books often inspires me to develop new stories and/or to finish works-in-progress. But I know what he was really asking: will you come back and write something with US? I’m not sure how to make that happen; now that I’m operating without a professor’s salary, I can’t afford to do as many free school visits. But schools and libraries have limited budgets, so what’s an “artivist” to do? I suspect I’ll have to start looking into grants this summer…