Luckily, I have garden gloves, and long fleece sleeves, but it was still definitely a battle between me and the thorns as I hacked away at roots and hauled up on the thorny stems (changing shape of container from long and narrow to oval and wider required much rearrangement of plants). The thorns did manage to stab me more than once, but they were only flesh wounds. Really, I'm fine. I'll just lie down over here and bleed, don't mind me...
I need to shower and head into campus. Meeting with grants person who will tell me that she has no useful advice on how to get grants for the creative writing program, and especially for my new online literary magazine. Oh, which I've forgotten to tell you about. It's tentatively going to be called The Michigan Avenue Review, and will be edited by the creative writing students taking my online publishing class in the spring. We will be paying almost certainly nothing (unless this grants conversation is more fruitful than I expect), but I hope some of you will send me some stuff anyway. I have a dread of getting no submissions at all. Our first issue is going to have an urban theme, so anything city-related -- fiction, poetry, prose. Speculative is of course okay.
After that, meet with student for advising, then a couple of hours to do course prep, grab some dinner, teach. Long day, but should be a good one.
Oh, and my course schedule for next year is confirmed. The exciting one is that in the fall I'm teaching an undergrad-level S. Asian lit. class; if you're in Chicago and interested, I think you can just register for that on its own. I'm still planning on teaching sf/f writing this summer, which we *really* want people to register for, since that'll show the university that teaching creative writing courses over the summer is viable, which will give us a lot more flexibility.