A Southwest 737 taking off from Reagan National the other day...a plane likely full of remarkable, strong women
What a time, what a world!
Fresh back from the Women’s March on Washington, I’m feeling
inspired to write and energized to redesign my courses for the fall semester. I’ve been in a funk since the election in November, and I've also been hunkered down trying to channel whatever verve I could muster into my writing, since I had a book due this month. I
just turned it in a week ago: it's called Airportness:The Nature of Flight, and it comes out in September. It’s the most carefully
structured of my airport books, yet. (It's probably also the last one I'll write on this topic.) And I love how the cover came out:
Meanwhile, I signed a contract with Bloomsbury for a new book, called The Work of Literature In An Age of
Post-Truth. I’m tackling some of the things in our current political
moment, and thinking through a range of topics related to teaching, writing,
and thinking about contemporary literature and it’s roles in the present epoch.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with over the past few months is how to
return to teaching once I return from sabbatical. All my old reading lists and
course frameworks seem obsolete, what with the new political regime in place. I can’t imagine sitting around with my
students close reading The Great Gatsby
like it’s any other fall semester. (Not that’s how I really teach, but…you know
what I mean.)
On the other hand, with Trump as our once unimaginable
president, maybe The Great Gatsby is
the perfect book to read: the worship of power, shady background dealings, toxic nostalgia, destructive secrecy…it’s all in Fitzgerald’s pages. But I feel like I need to reassess exactly what
I’m teaching, and how I'm teaching it—especially my twentieth century American fiction course.
In one of the chapters of my new book I’m going to work through some of my
previous required readings for this course, and also explore some new stories and novels that I’ve
read this year—thinking about how these American fictions I haven't yet taught speak to and
speculate about the moment we’re now in, in the nonfiction world ("alternative facts" notwithstanding).
While driving back from DC I also sketched out a few new ideas in my head,
which hopefully I can wrangle into essays and pitch them to places over the
next couple months. So I've got a lot to do over the remaining months of my sabbatical. But I'm convinced that this is the time to do get to work, if we want things to change for the better. This is the time.
