Serendib Teaching

SF Novella Recs Wanted

I’m teaching an Intro to SF Lit. class this semester, and I’m planning a presentation assignment where they choose from a selection of novellas and present on them. So I’d like a nice thick set of novellas for them to choose from. Recs, please? A title and author, and maybe a line about why you […]

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Almost Entirely SF

Okay, so I’ve given up on any attempt to include fantasy in my intro to speculative literature course — there’s just no way to reasonably squeeze it into a semester. I’m teaching this course again in the spring, so I think I have the option of focusing on fantasy that semester (need to check if

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Keeping Ourselves Sane

Clarion on Zoom has involved a lot of sitting — by yesterday I was hitting my limits and had started teaching class while standing at the kitchen island. I may end up teaching on the treadmill today; my back just can’t take that much sitting! Benjamin Rosenbaum and I have also been trying to exercise

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A Quiet Garden, Time to Think, Time to Write

Benjamin Rosenbaum and I were talking to the Clarion students yesterday about the writing life and how to make it sustainable long-term — we told them our goal for ourselves, and hopefully for them, was “a sustainable praxis for yourself that makes your life good.” We talked about other things too, like goal-setting, and how

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Ritual Mornings

When I was working on Bodies in Motion, I was in grad school, and broken-hearted, so I was going to bed very early (8 p.m.) because I had nothing else I wanted to do in the evenings. While it was miserable emotionally, this turned out to be terrific for productive writing. I developed a ritual:

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Home Again, Home Again

I really enjoyed teaching at this workshop for UC Berkeley — the attendees were smart and engaged and excited about the material, and I think we had a great discussion of South Asian and SA diaspora speculative fiction. Beautifully organized by Shane Carter of ORIAS, who also fed us really well throughout (a surefire way

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