Donuts for Everyone
The final stop on my book store brought me to the Follett Bookstore on Nassau Community College's campus. It was a full house with standing room only and I couldn't be more grateful for all of the colleagues and students who came to listen to my talk.
The NCC Foundation, the NCC Alumni Association, and Dunkin' partnered together to provide these awesome Just Here For the Comments donuts for attendees. The donuts helped sweeten student participation, but they also were a reminder to folks that proceeds from the book sales benefit The Children's Greenhouse which offers high-quality, low-cost childcare on a sliding scale to the children of students, faculty, and staff. Student parents, many of whom are first generation college students, who utilize the Greenhouse are more likely to persist in school and graduate.
Although I was a professor when I wrote this book, without access to The Children's Greenhouse, I never would have been able to write it. I look forward to sharing the a portion of my royalties with the Greenhouse.
AoIR
This week kicks off the the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Sheffield, UK. Although I can't be there in person, I was delighted to be one of the keynote presenters for their doctoral colloquium and to share insights on academic publishing.
Good Reads
I am looking forward to reading Cindy Tekobbe's Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces because she utilizes unique research methods that center storytelling as epistemology. What I admire in her research is that it centers the indigenous worldview of good relations, to collaborate "with openness, good faith, sincerity, reciprocity, and a respect for others as relatives with each other, the land, and its ecologies." Given the complicated history of consent in human subjects research, and the sometimes less than collaborative and collegial approaches to contemporary academic research in general, I think there is much we can learn from Tekobbe's methodology.
Although it debuted in 2022, I just finished Jessamine Chan's haunting The School for Good Mothers. It's a contemporary dystopia motherhood about surveillance. The protagonist Frida Liu has a very bad day where she leaves her 18month old unattended for two hours and temporarily loses her parental rights. After a period of state mandated 24 hour video surveillance, she is sentenced to a year at the school for good mothers where she is given a lifelike doll powered by AI with a camera in its pupils. The doll can assess the "motherease" of her voice and the length and depth or her affection. Frida will not be reunited with her daughter until she can make this doll love her. These transactions are complicated by race and class and the characters are often punished for the ways their approaches to parenting do not meet white American standards. The intricate details of all the many ways we are judged and evaluated as mothers is chilling and far more frightening to read than the more speculative fictional elements of the book.
In many ways it made me think of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another book that is about technology, care giving, and monsters - written as part of a "scary story writing contest" while Shelley was a pregnant 21 year old. In a hundred years, it wouldn't surprise me if Chan's book receives the same scholarly attention we give to Frankenstein. (BTW, if you have any thoughts on passive aggressive behavior in MFA programs or creative writing workshops in general, you might enjoy this recent McSweeney's piece, I Wish I Went Before Mary Shelley in This Storytelling Contest)
Next Month?
It's been a surreal few months and I am excited to return to my various writing projects and to take a pause on events and promotions. I'll be back next month with some good reads, lurker insights, and thoughts on the writing process. Thanks for walking beside me.
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