This is just my 100-word or so blog, so I get to be lazy with rhetorical devices (and questionably grab book covers off Amazon.com, I guess).
The point is that I got notification that “The Patron Saint of Dreams,” an essay collection by Philip Gerard, will be required reading this semester. It’s serendipitous for two reasons: I had already bought it as part of my read-Goucher-faculty-work extravaganza (although it ended up in a box somewhere in the disaster of my office – thank God I found it). Second, it’s a book of…essays…and I’m working on a lengthy…essay…the one for Creative Nonfiction’s contest. I have two months to pull this thing together, and I’m hoping that Gerard’s book will learn me to write good.
We are also required to have the Chicago Manual of Style, which I ordered off Amazon, and in order to get free shipping I had to order more cheap books, so as usual a small purchase ended up being a $25 purchase, which now that I think of it is also fortunate because I ordered one book each by three of my mentor choices. (We’re supposed to hear next week who our fall mentors will be.) Of course I’m already fairly well-read in my fourth mentor pick, Thomas French. Right now I’m reading “Home Town” by Tracy Kidder, which I’m finding – sorry, sorry, sorry – boring. It’s what I worry my MFA thesis will be – a series of character descriptions, facts and history of a small town which would be interesting broken down into parts but just doesn’t hang together as a book. So I guess I’m learning from that, too.
Can you tell I’m getting really, really, really excited about school?
Ruth Nasrullah 