THE WORK IS NEVER DONE. Sorry to be delinquent in updating. For the past three days, whenever I've jumped into my car to rush off somewhere and then noticed the needle on "E," I've thought, "How crazy is it to drive around on fumes not because you can't afford gas but because you feel you're too busy running around to stop and fill up?" But I've done so now and also had my oil changed, and my dear and trusted mechanic, Norm, told me to go straight from his shop to a tire store because my front tire was "practically square shaped" and "bordering on unsafe." I'll do that tomorrow -- it was alreadyafter five p.m.</p>
The news beckons, so I've no time right now, really. That's why I'm going to paste in an excerpt from a letter to a friend as the rest of my February entry. It's about changes at work and what's going on with school -- the usual. Here goes ....
"Another change, a move to a new building in our complex, is imminent. And physically, it's not even a lateral move. I'm going from a shared office to a shared cubicle. C'est la vie. But I'll miss the traffic in the main building. I've got a lot of folks hailing me in the halls these days because I recently spoke at our Wednesday staff devotional and was a hit, so to speak. As it was Valentine's Day, I decided to read some scriptures about love and also share my true "I was an e-Harmony reject" story. Folk laughed really hard -- and lately, some of them start all over again whenever they see me around the building, and they go on to tell me how much they enjoyed my talk or how much they identified. So, yeah ... although my job satisfaction is so-so right now; I do like the people here. They're a fun bunch, sometimes.
What I really care about these days, though, is mostly non-job-related. I'm working hard on my last two online linguistics courses (in English as a Second Language pedagogy) at the University of Mississippi, the final 6 out of 12 units that I have to knock out to apply for an add-on ESL endorsement to my secondary educator's license. Meanwhile, I've enrolled in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University and am looking forward to moving forward on that. However, in that program no academic work is really due until my first residency in mid-March; so I've concentrated on applying for grants and loans, which is like a job in and of itself. In preparation for the Seattle residency, I'm supposed to read and annotate an Annie Dillard book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins by March 15. But the ESL workload (reading, writing, and responding online) has been so relentless that I've barely begun my MFA reading. I'll catch up in time, though. I've been taking Annie Dillard to bed with me lately -- gosh, better not let my co-workers at AFA hear me say that!
Meanwhile, I'm taking a local, non-credit Spanish class for beginners, freelancing a tiny bit, preparing a one-day abstinence education presentation for a local church youth group, and doing my usual amateur social networking thing among friends, including several writers, artists, teachers, ministers and activists of faith and conscience. The latter project involves just staying in touch with people and making inquiries about the work and/or dreams of those whose visions I want to support or connect with in some way. (See, this is how I deal with living in a small Mississippi town, cut off from what my friends and others are doing elsewhere. If I stop, theoretically, my head will explode.) I've also been making "cold calls" to officials on different university campuses to which I have a connection -- people who run think tanks and outreaches in the area of social justice or racial reconciliation -- to ask if I can be involved from a distance.
One such outreach is the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, which appears to be loosely connected to the MS Civil Rights Education Commission (on which I've been nominated to serve). Another is the John Perkins Center for Reconciliation at Seattle Pacific University (I used to work for Dr. Perkins' ministry in California and for his son's ministry in Jackson, MS); and then there is the Center for Reconciliation (which a former boss of mine co-founded) at Duke Divinity School. Another former boss, my editor in chief at The Banner in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is now president of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto; I've recently re-established contact with him and am thinking of bringing up the idea of starting a Centre for Racial Healing and Reconciliation on that campus -- he is a true reconciler at heart. Hey, I don't orchestrate these kinds of connections in life ... I simply expect, look for, discover, and try to make the most of them. We live in a world of broken links and other unnecessary barriers to connection and, as poet Edna St. Vincent Millay said, "I am not resigned."
Speaking of connections, I've had a great chance to reconnect with a lot of family members recently. My grandfather, a lifelong resident of West Point, Mississippi, passed away January 31, and this resulted in a kind of impromptu family reunion. If Granddaddy, aka Emmett Lenoir, Sr., had lived one more week, he'd have been 105 years old. The funeral was attended by four generations of his descendants, so it was quite a gathering -- and as funerals go, actually pretty pleasant. It was tough on my mom, though -- and seeing her miss him is tough on me.
In addition to working on immediate academic goals, I'm also daydreaming lately about continuing beyond the MFA to work toward a PhD in English. I like the doctoral program in English (literature, not the linguistics track) at Duke University. I definitely want to use the SPU MFA as a stepping stone to publishing and to university teaching jobs; but I keep thinking I'd like to finish out my days as an honest-to-goodness English professor, maybe even tenured. Who knows?"
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That's all for now, blog reader, except to say thanks to another "patroness." My admired, good friend and sometime yokefellow Alexis Spencer-Byers, has kindly assumed the premier position on my financial, "support list." Thank you so much for believing in me, dear author and poet, as I do in you, and for supporting my dreams of becoming a published and well credentialed Christian writer, scholar, and teacher of excellence.
ASB, you joke that you want to be able to say of me, "I knew her when." Well, I'm proud to say I knew you when and am privileged to say I know you now. And to think that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." !!!
ILYVM. Blessings,
-- Jenni
