There’s so much exciting stuff going on, I often can’t find the time to write about it. Also, I’ve been thinking about setting up a Twitter-account but so far haven’t found the guts to do so (but who knows).

One of the things I’ve been working on is outreach. UEA is quite active in this regard; basically the idea behind it is to show children from backgrounds where a university education is not taken for granted what university life is like. We often get groups of schoolchildren to visit us on campus and it’s always great fun to see them staring at the concrete mass surrounding them. There’s an opportunity for students to get involved and I’d love to. The gap between universities and society has always been a concern of mine, even though university life is not the ivory tower it used to be (but many people still think it is, so ther’s work to be done). So I might end up sharing my work with non-academics and learn from them. Very exciting.

I’m working on various other conference proposals at the moment. Luckily I got a grand for the F Word conference so I can afford to go to at least one more event this year (if one of my abstracts is accepted, that is). I’ve started working on my paper, which will be on Foxfire, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates about a girl gang. It will be interesting to hear other people’s responses; like many of the texts I work on it’s rather violent and disturbing.

On a lighter note, there’s another creative writing society open mic coming up next Monday. Watch this space.