Bora meets her new supervisor!

Drum roll, please...This semseter, I will be working with Adria Bernardi, novelist, short story writer and translator of Italian poetry. I'm pleased with the match--she's one of the four people I requested, partly because of her emphasis on language and also because she is bilingual and may have insight into my stories that are either set in Korea or are about Koreans living in the US. This is my third semester, in which I am required to produce a critical essay (50 pp) on a particular craft issue. Her main job will be to help me with that, but I hope to get it out of the way as quickly as possible and come back to ficiton writing. Ahhhhh...the pre-semester-who-will-I-work-with-this-time anxiety is now a distant memory. And we're off and running with semester 3.

The students who are entering this semester are diverse in age, background and (more than usual) ethnicity. On the fiction side, I've met a woman who has led rock and mountain climbing expeditions all over the world, a man who just defended his dissertation from the Harvard school of public health and a woman who made a living acting on the Guiding Light. People are here from all over the US, but also from Spain and Switzerland. I guess I shouldn't grumble too much about having to travel fom the west coast.

For you writing types: the most interesting lecture today was about authenticity in fiction. Not "truth" in the sense of "did this really happen?" OR doing sufficient research, but the elements that make the reader believe that the story is authentic, "truthful," makes them say, "Okay, I buy this." Whether it is about working in a fast food place or logging in the 18th century or Black people owning slaves (as in The Known World by Edward P. Jones) or farming on Mars, for that matter, what makes a story believable? If any of these topics are of great interest to you, we can order a CD of the lecture for $8. Or I can dig out my notes when I see you. Off to bed. Zzzzzzz.....