30 April 2007

End of the semester

It's now that time where I re-emerge from the academic leaf litter to pretend I'm a faithful blogger.

A few hours ago, I turned in the last of my final projects for the semester. It was an out-of-the-ordinary project too, which made it a difficult last one. It was for a class called Women, the Environment, Ecofeminism, & Environmental Justice (or Green Consciousness for short). The class dealt with ecofeminist theory. I've never been a skilled theory head, so I did my share of struggling with the dense abstractions and philosophizationizing.

Knowing as much early on in the semester, I asked the professor if I could write an ecofeminist story as a final project. My secret agenda was that it would allow me to craft one more story for my thesis. I was pretty psyched when she agreed. Her only additional request was that I also write a critical analysis of my own story, using ecofeminist theory to back up the choices I made in the story.

Well, the story came out a little less satisfactorily than I had hoped. The hard work will come in revising it. However, the substance of the story paralleled green theory very well. I'm glad I undertook this project, since it gave me a better sense of applying theory to my fictional worlds. It's certaintly not something I want to make a habit of though. That's hard work doing all that flipping back and forth through books, double-checking details to make sure you've dealt them into the story properly.

Anyway, now I get a break from school for two months. Summer B class starts early July, so I have three books to read before then. Maybe I can squeeze in a bit of pleasure reading beforehand. Oh yeah, and some blog posts.