An End and a Beginning...

So now that the topic of my blog has transformed into my day job as a doctoral student, I find most of my reflections on the topic worm their way into my academic papers instead of online. So this blog has been dying a slow death over the last year. As a result, I've made a decision. It's time for an end, and a beginning. This blog is done, but a new one, on my experiences and reflections on the writing life, has begun. And so, for now, I will say goodbye to this blog and direct you instead to my new blog, "Still and Still Moving." For those of you with a feed reader, the address is http://deborahleiter.blogspot.com See you over at the new spot!

A couple of great quotes...

1. From my Facebook "Deep Thought" generator: “To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I can’t remember, all rolled into one big ‘thing.’ This is truth, to me.”
   —Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
   
   Deb's thoughts: This one just made me laugh. Especially since it's so similar to my thoughts on the matter after an MA in lit. and almost-one-year of a PhD in communication. Thankfully I've spent a lot of time reading and analyzing poetry, so I'm okay with paradox.


2. From the blog "95 Theses", by way of Cindy (thanks, Cindy!): "In a conversation between Waugh and Graham Greene, recorded by Christopher Sykes, Greene described the plot of his then impending novel The Quiet American, and observed that it would be “a relief not to write about God for a change.” To which Waugh rejoined, “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were you. Not at this stage anyway. It would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.”
   
   Deb's thoughts: Again, it's funny. Yet profound. I'm feeling poetic at the moment, though, rather than poetry-analytic (perhaps because I'm in the middle of analysis for a paper), so I won't overanalyze the implications of this one. Just enjoy...

Please Pretend It's My Mom's Refrigerator

Okay, so it's been a really long time since I posted here. So what have I been doing, you ask? My slightly stressed PhD student self would say, perhaps, that I've been really busy writing papers about creativity and communication in the digital age rather than blogging about the topics.

It's true, actually, but it's only most, not all, of what I've been doing. I've written a few other things too. They're mostly linkable things, so I thought I'd briefly pretend this space was a spot on my mom's refrigerator and post the links:

1. This isn't so recent, but the linkableness is relatively recent. In running a vanity search on Google, I discovered the PDF version of my University of Saskatchewan MA Thesis on connections between T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (successfully defended last August) is now Google-able. (Not only Google-able, but if you input the words "four quartets walden" it's the first result in Google Scholar. Ah, how interestingly the search engine is changing the way texts are indexed and privileged.)
   
   Now that you know it's out there, I'm sure you'll all be glued to the screen, compulsively reading until the momentous conclusion. If anyone does want to read it, here are links to versions someone posted online of Four Quartets and Walden for textual context (try saying THAT 10 times fast :).


2. I've been writing a lot for catapult magazine lately (well, relatively speaking--2 articles this year plus one in each of the next 2 issues). (If you haven't heard of catapult, it's a very thoughtful online magazine about intersections between culture and Christian viewpoints.)
   
   The most recent one I wrote was about international cooking and stereotypes and includes a recipe for Ethiopian chicken stew. The one before that is actually connected to the purpose of this blog--it connects some trends in mediated communication to our very human penchant for building imaginary versions of other people. The upcoming one will be posted this Friday and will be about Christian liturgy and the idea of enactment. The one after that, which will go up 2 weeks from this coming Friday, will be about my 10 years of visiting monasteries. I've actually written a few things for them in the past as well (a couple of essays and a couple of poems).