Toward the end of summer, knowing the fall would be sort of insane due to our department being down about 50 percent of its staff, I lined up all the details and promo for our fall events. At the time, the end of November and the last event, our annual DIY SnowGlobe Workshop, (not counting the murder mystery this Friday.) seemed very far away. I realized last night, as I was meticulously scraping glitter off our plastic tables and into the garbage, that another semester has been put to bed. We pack a lot in, and in this case, the huge bulk of it was in October with our Beautiful Monstrosities focus month programming. I wasn't able to squeeze in any poetry related events, but we had three really valuable & well-attended panels, our usual zine nights, some fun how-to's, and some great progress made on this year's Book to Art shenanigans. All of which passed by in a whir and were finished before we knew it.
With more on my plate in terms of general duties (including coordinating ILL, which used to be an entirely different sub-department position devoted exclusively to that) there wasn't quite as much time to devote to some of the other minor things but I think we still held it down well (there might have been a tiny panic attacks on my p[art before some things, but hopefully no one noticed. ). I've been cross-posting content for the A of R blog with the Library's Blog, but haven't had as much time to do regular updates there as much as I was before, nor to dig in on some of the library-related writing projects as I wanted to. I'm hoping I might be able to work on the latter over the holiday break when I have time off.
Now we turn toward planning for the spring, and our potential mini-conference, which seems daunting at the moment, but I will be ironing out something of a plan in the next two weeks before the semester is over to get things moving before the holiday break. I'm working toward an the emphasis on bringing scholars and artists together angle, so there will be more traditional academic panel discussions, an exhibit, artist talks, workshops, and more in the span of a single day. (when you think about it--it's kind of like condensing focus month into a day (which is hilarious since we expanded it to a month to be easier on ourselves initially, so we'll see how it goes. I am truly excited by the idea and possibilities, so more on that as we go..
