This is my last blog and my last day in the office, and in fact on campus! It is a scary feeling. I have been rushing around today, trying to get everything done and I feel like I should instead be appreicating the campus I've lived on for the last three and a half years. What a time I've given this place.

Anyway, enough of my sadness. Speak Out! finished wonderfully. After Mandy and my's scrambling to get the publication done and submitted on time, we got back the final product that looks wonderful. We did forget to add the title (ok, I forgot to add the title) and now it looks like it's titled, "This is Your Wake Up Call." Although the real title is "Reflections of an Unlocked Soul," I kind of like the wake up call better. It is more assertive, less dreamy, and it is kind of what the publication is doing. It's waking up the public to who these women are. So, mistake turns into a positive thing.

The reading was on Tuesday and the women were so excited. We had 22 women come down from the pod to watch and five outsiders come in. It was great! Everything went really smoothly and they read fantastically. I think they were happy with the finished product and so were we. I've gotten a couple of compliments about the look of the publication from fellow interns and from a professor. She read the journal, loved it, and told our class to get their copies. It was great publicity. I hope everyone else recieves it as well. I think it can continue to improve, but we've made some great changes that we are hopefully able to keep up.

I got my thesis done and turned in completely today. It was great to work on it, but I'm happy that it is completed satisfactorally. Now, I hope to be able to use it to show my work for future employers for one capacity or another so that it serves a further purpose.

It's been a great internship and I'm really glad that I've done it. Thank you to everyone on the staff for a great experience and I hope you have a wonderful next semester!

Mandy and I worked for some long hours to get the publication done. We thought we had it done and it not too long of a time, but we  then realized that it was in the wrong format and had to size the page down, which then made it so that we had to change the font size throughout and still only two of three poems fit on each page. We realized this at 2p on Tuesday- it was due at 12 on Wednesday. It was tons of fun. We got it done and are going to pick up a hard copy today. Hopefully it looks great!

We only have one more week of Speak Out! left and we will just be celebrating. It should be a lot of fun and hopefully the pods turn out for it. I'm really excited to hear them read and for them to see the finish project. The women wanted a sort of punk rock look so I googled punk rock and kind of modeled the cover off of that. Hopefully they liked the finished project.

Everything is wrapping up and I only have a week of college left. This has been a great experience and I have a lot of learning to do both in community literacy and in publishing. I enjoyed putting the piece together, though that is not what I have ever envisioned myself doing. If I am with a small journal, though I would imagine that everyone works on everything, so it's great experience. I'm glad that I've worked so hands on and now I have both a beautiful (hopefully) publication and a substantial (hopefully) thesis to take to potential employers to wow them with. They will hire me on the spot and I'll love my career. Haha, wouldn't that be great? But really, I hope that I have a couple of impressive pieces to take to employers and some good experience to work with. I have so much learning left to do, but I have also learned a lot, including my weaknesses and limits. This has been a crazy semeseter, but now I can handle a harder load and maybe everything will seem a little easier after this.

There are only two more weeks in the semester for me. How crazy is that? Two more weeks in college and I am done with school for a while at least. I don't know when I'm going back and that is something I can't imagine. It is not real right now...

My thesis presentation is tomorrow and I feel good about it. I reflect more on how the whole process has affected me outside of just what it meant to do the thesis. How the thesis affects my larger life. I think in many important ways it has altered my point of view and I want to share that. It's a little less focused on the academia at first, but I  talk about how it affected me as a person (sort of). I think I'm prepared, so we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

There are only three more Speak Out! workshops including one over Thanksgiving and the celebration. I can't go to the one over Thanskgiving because I will be in Buffalo, but Tobi and Mandy are going to facilitate it still and hopefully that will be really positive for the women. It will give them something to do over the holiday. The week after that we aren't letting any new women come and that kind of worries me because we have been having very few returners! Are we going to have a workshop of two because the other returners are on lockdown? I don't know. I guess we'll see then.

This week there were 16 women and most were new. It was a different dynamic again this week, a little bit older. It was nice to have the slightly more mature voices leading this time. The women came in really late so we only had a little less than an hour once we started the prompts. We had to rush through the last two, but it seemed to go ok. I don't even remember right now how my prompt went, but Tobi's went well. It was about strong women. They seemed to react well to it, so that was positive.

Having the women cycle through so quickly has been a little frustrating, but it's also been a good learning experience. I feel like I've been exposed to more diversity of incarcerated women. I think it's a great experience in that way. Hopefully the publication and celebration go well and everyone enjoys it.

This week has been a blur of work. My penultimte draft was due this week and a couple more revisions and the final are due next week. It's been crazy but I feel like it's coming together well. Hopefully everyone else does too!

Janelle and I drafted a letter asking for sponsorship from AlphaGraphics this week. We're sending it through a couple of revisions and hopefully on Monday I'll be able to email it out to him. We can get this moving and maybe, if they decide quickly, we can have a sponsor this semester. If not, which I am assuming will happen, we will hopefully have a sponsor next semester. It would be great to have a more professional looking journal. I think the women deserve it and would  really enjoy it.

This weeks SpeakOut! was somewhere in between the good ones and the bad ones. The women are almost all new and they don't quite understand how to give productive feedback. I think we've been  taking it for granted that they know now since the other women did. We are going to work on that next week as well as talk about respecting each other during the workshop. We had a new girl this week that was quite outspoken, but a little immature. She is obviously pretty young, like my age or younger, and I just think that a lot of it is her age speaking for her, since many of the women look to be around 25 or so. One said she was 21 and all she wanted to do was talk to me the whole workshop! I didn't quite know how to not ignore her, but be respectful as well as listen to the other women. Hopefully with the setting out of ground rules we'll calm it down a little.

We're getting to the end and hopefully we can start revising. I feel like we've had a sudden overhaul of the participants and now it's hard to feel like we're ready to revise. I guess we'll see what comes out of it. I'll be crossing my fingers for sponsorship.

I know we say this every semester, where does  the semester go to? It seems so long at first and then all of a sudden, here we are in November. I mean, NOVEMBER? Already? It's too crazy.

So my thesis is due in two weeks now. It's coming along but I'm getting anxiety that my prompts aren't right for my cirriculum, the definition is just not quite what it needs to be and what am I going to write for 15 pages? I think the 15 pagese will be okay, I'll at least get close. The definition piece is already over 10 and the cirriculum all together will be around 16 pages with the lesson plan for every day and a cirriculum rationale, workshop evaluation, and materials page. So if we're shooting for 35 pages total, I'll be fine with less than 15. I'm going to try to go for fifteen and see what comes out of it because I want to make sure I have a pretty full reflection.

This weeks SpeakOut! was crazy! Last week we wrote a letter to the med cart requesting that meds rounds get pushed back to 8p so more women can come to the workshop. And come they did. We had 16 women and they did not want to stop talking. It was pretty hard to get them to focus some times and they were bickering back and forth a little. I also, of course, cut down on the number of copies this week because we had tons of leftovers last week and it ended up being far too few. That was fun. But we got copies made and everything worked out just fine. They seemed to really like the prompts, especially the Barbie one. One woman had a great letter to Mattel, asking them to think about the product they were making. We also had quite a few funny ones. The prompt about the love song didn't go quite as planned and they were a little out of control. I'm not sure they liked being forced to question the nature of love, either. They talked alot about how long it's been since they've been with someone and how they want that again. I think it shattered their ideal look of love and it wasn't quite what they wanted. But some handled it well and there was some great writing that came out of it.

I also had one woman give me a piece to workshop that was about her wondering when she was going to get out. It was short and had no punctuation, but it was really emotional all the same. I really liked it because I think it gave a different perspective of jail than most outsiders know of. She talked about how she was just waiting for her name to be called and it was interesting to see how they aren't completely sure when they are  going to get out. I don't know if she has a date that is the latest she can be moved or what, but that angst of not knowing was really powerful. It seems like it would be so much easier to handle if you knew that you had 8 months left instead of wondering every day of those 8 months if today will be the day. Maybe that's the jail's system, I don't know. It seems pretty inhumane sometimes, but I do know that there are rules for a reason. We got to see an officer yell at the girls this week and it was a little shocking. You really see then how their freedom is taken away. It's like you're back home under unrelenting parents. Usually the women are playing cards or watching TV when we go in, so it doesn't seem that bad, but then hearing them get yelled at was enough for me. I don't know how I feel about the system, but I also am very empathetic because I know the women and not their crimes. I also have not been affected by their crimes and that changes things a lot also.

New experiences all the time and it's great to experience them.

Once again I should have written this yesterday, but I got busy with calling publishers for the journal and getting that stuff done.

I don't know what I've even done the past week, but I've been busy doing it! I have been researching publishers for the Speak Out! journal. I knew it would be tough to find someone cheap enough, but I contacted Matter Bookstore and Rocky Mountain High School's literary journal and they got me started. When I called Johnson Publishing they said our job run was too small, but she gave me two places to try and they were much more fruitful than anything I could have found on my own. I am very grateful for her help! The two small places have both gotten back to me and they are both around $600, which is $200 too much, but better than over $600 too expensive! I am going to talk to Janelle next week about approaching the printers to ask them to possibly donate some of the copies since we are Non-Profit and we are giving them away for free. We will see how that goes, cross your fingers!

Janelle and I also talked about getting the past journals out to businesses around town instead of just Matter. I called some today and all were very excited about it! Great news. So we should be getting them out next week and hopefully at the end of the semester we can just drop off our new copies. Then we can see if those locations were fruitful or not and possibly scope out new locations or keep these. We are going to give them to both branches of the public library, La Familia/The Family Center, Reader's Cove, Mugs, and of course Matter. Sunflower is a maybe and then we might do the student center on campus or Cups up on Elizabeth. I am pretty excited about this.

The workshop this week went well. Dana Elkun came and facilitated for us. It was great to have her there and she had some great prompts. The women really reacted well to her and seemed to get quite a bit out of her prompts. In fact, we ran out of time and couldn't do everything because we had so much to say about the other two. It was awesome. I'm not sure I have any great insights or discoveries this week about what went on. Two of our leaders have left and I miss them a lot. That is the downside to doing this at a detention center, the women are constantly changing and moving, but it's great to get to know so many different women. A new girl was definitely a leader. She seemed to be pretty well schooled and had a lot of great insight into the writing. What I thought was interesting with her, is that she seemed to want to write about her incarceration more than that other women. When she suggested it, they were like, no way. She seemed to have more of my thoughts about it all, a little more distanced in the sense that it seemed very foreign to her to be there, whereas the other women seem almost to accept it as something that happened and they maybe expected it to happen? At the same time, she wanted to talk about it, while the other women wanted to keep a certain emotional distance from it. It's a very strange dynamic and I don't know what to make of it because I don't want to make judgments. Maybe I'll have more insight next week.

All in all, everything is going great and I'm very excited about how it is all coming together.

This week has been busy with school and working on my thesis. I am starting to get somewhere with it. I guess I've learned that I need a more clear cut goal when working on large projects. My mistake and now a good learning process. Hopefully I'm doing more quality work now than I was before.

I started my cirriculum and got the first draft done. Now I need to through and revise it and narrow my focus a bit. It got away from gender issues and now we're honing back in. Hopefully I will have better prompts next week. That is my goal for this afternoon- fix up the cirriculum! This weekend I need to get a draft of my formal paper written up and sent out to Tobi.

I am also looking into publishers for the Speak Out! journal. I got ahold of North 40 News in LaPorte and they are looking into the cheapest way to publish. I asked to make sure this was a free service and he said yes... hopefully he didn't misunderstand me. I also talked to Citizen Publishing in Fort Collins. The adivsor at Rocky Mountain High School referred me to them, as they have published their Literary Magazine, "The Looking Glass," with them in the past. I couldn't originally find them online and found a place in PA with the same name. I sent an inquiry email, we'll see what we get back! I found out from North 40 News that this was incorrect, he gave me the correct phone number, so now we're squared away! Both Citizen (the Colorado one) and North 40 should be getting back to me about quotes. Johnson Printing just called me back as I was writing this and referred me to two smaller companies that could do whatever quantity we liked. At big companies like Johnson, 500 is their minimum and I'm not sure we can afford that.

The workshop went well this week, but I felt that there was a little hesitation. We had three new girls and were missing some familiar faces. Some just weren't able to come because of med rounds and one or two were released. We have definite leaders emerging and that is great, hopefully (for us, not necessarily for them) they are able to be here for the rest of the semester. I do know one lady who is leaving and I find I have formed an attachment with her. It will be sad to see her go, but I am very happy for her. Hopefully she keeps writing and is able to make that a positive part of her life.

We talked about slightly heavier subjects this time. We did a prompt with Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and talked about roles we, as women, are expected to take in life and how rules have been set out for us. The prompt called up a lot of issues and there was a little bickering going on. They also discussed it for quite a while. We probably should have cut them off a little earlier. Next time I'll know. We then talked about what we would change if we were an authority figure in the city or country. There was a lot of talk about rehabilitation centers in Fort Collins and the avaliablity of a safe place for teens. These are very real concerns and they seemed to deeply affect the women. It was interesting to hear what they wanted. I could have thought of a safe place for teens because I think that is a real concern for any parent, whatever their social standing. However, the rehabilitation centers was not something I will probably ever need for myself, though you never know how circumstances will change. With that said, it forced me to think outside myself and think about what  the community needs. Rehabilitation centers are not only good for those who need them, but for the community around them. Maybe by taking part in a successful rehabilitation, these women could find a good-paying job and pull themselves out of their current class. Maybe they could provide a better influence for their children and stop the cycle of abuse and neglect. I don't know how centers such as these are started, but it seems like someone needs to start pushing for it. I would think that people already have and maybe there just isn't the funding for it. It's something to keep in mind and see what can be done about it.

Each week these women highlight their differences and similarities to my life. As has been said many times over: they are just humans like me. We have wants, needs, and desires. We want freedom, though each may be different, we want love and affection and we want to provide a good life  for our children, whether right now or in the future.

Another week of workshops at the jail and another week of new discoveries.

We keep having small numbers of women show up, but I guess that's because med rounds come in the middle of the workshop, so hopefully they can get that changed and more women can show up. At first I liked the smaller numbers because I felt more comfortable, but now I want more to come and more to share! Also, I find I'm becoming attached to the women that come regularly. One should be getting out in two weeks and I'm sad to see her go, though haapy for her at the same time.

I think this is important to my thesis as I find the more I get into the workshops and read about other literacy centers, the more I find that the scope of a community literacy center is not just to help the disadvantaged, but to create bonds between different sectors of the community that would not normally interact. From observation, I find that these women seem to come from poorer neighborhoods, ones in which crime, drugs, and delinquent behavior are more normal that what I'm used to. This is purely judgmental and could be entirely wrong. I simply am picking up stereotypes, such as referring to boys as "homies" in a very matter of fact way, the offhand way in which they talk about having children when they themselves were just children and of things such as drinking, like I talked about in my last blog. They come from a different culture and most seem to bond under this culture, which makes me think that most have come to the jail from that. This culture and this part of town, especially in Fort Collins where I am part of the university community, is one that I'm not normally going to come into contact. From what I've heard from native Fort Collins residents, the area over by Poudre High School is about the poorest. The most contact I have with that area is riding my bike through it. However, through the CLC, I've had the chance to learn about these women and experience their culture in a roundabout way, and have learned to be compassionate with them. I do not totally know how to relate to them and I would not thrive in their environment, but it has put us together in a positive atmosphere where we can both take away things from each other that hopefully dissipate stereotypes.

I am reading an article from Tobi about a CLC in Pittsburg and in it, some of the same observations come up. Students come to the CLC expecting to "teach" kids about literacy. What they find is the students are simply a person to bounce ideas off of or someone to help develop a point; they act more as a guide than a teacher. In these encounters, the student learns the actual feelings of a disadvantaged youth and learns to understand where some of their actions are coming from- such as motivations for joining a gang. Through this, there becomes a heightened cultural awareness and a crossing of cultural boundries. Hopefully, this allows for some community bonding that may only be between a couple of people, but those are a couple of people who are not engaging in racism or hasty judgments. I'm not sure I'm totally at this place yet. Through writing this post, I'm still making judgments, but at this time, I think that I am creating these judgments and trying to use them as tools to come to an understanding of where these women are coming from and what they have to fight through to even simply live. However, by the end, I'm hoping my assumptions and understandings of these women will change even more.

I think CLC's are important, not only to show people what they can achieve and how they can be heard if they wish, and not even just to further educate people, but to bring the community closer together. It is a place for people of different classes to get together and learn to interact in positive ways. It is a place for class assumptions to be broken down. It is a place to show us that we are all simply people in different circumstances. We can relate and we can create bonds of friendship rather than power relationships. Power relationships are important for societies to function, but there are places and times for them and in a place such as a CLC, there is little need for class or heirarchy. It is a place where we come to learn from each other and expand our minds so we can become better citizens.

I meant to write this yesterday while I was in the office, but the time slipped right by. Seems like that is how this week went. Too much stuff to do in too little time.

We got to go back to the jail for another workshop this week after missing last. It was a much smaller group and I think I liked that. Although I don't want to limit how many women can experience the workshop, as I would feel like I was tellings someone they couldn't experience something new, I think it was nice to be a little bit more intimate. Also, there were a couple of outspoken women who were absent and that allowed a couple of the quieter ones to speak up. I think it was a great workshop and I really enjoyed it.

You could already see people coming out of their shells. One woman shared quite a bit of her writing and it was great to hear her talk about it and be open. She did like to talk about drinking a lot and that struck me. Being a college student, drinking is nothing forgein to me. Also, going to places such as Vegas and the mountains (camping in particular) to drink is also not forgein to me. And even more than that, just walking around campus, how many times can you hear people talking about how they want to get drunk tonight, were drunk last night, or are still drunk? College kids are very open about it. I guess what struck me was one, that in the setting of a sort of class and a place for writing, that I guess I view as a little more professional, I would never talk about my drinking experiences, and seldom do I hear other writers talking about their drinking experiences. Maybe another reason it stuck out at me was that I am graduating this semester and in general thinking about moving on with my life to a job, to a family, to a different part of the country and growing up in general. I do not view heavy drinking as a regular part of that and so to hear somone be so open about it was a little jarring. With all that said, I do not think it is all that unusual for a person her age (I'm not sure she's a whole lot older than me, but how do I really know) to talk about such things. People drink heavily well into their thirties. There is definitely a different culture represented in the jail than I am used to. I'm not sure her speaking of drinking was specific to the culture of the jail, but maybe a culture that I am not part of outside of the jail as well. This is not articulate at all because I am having trouble fulling articulating in my own mind what I think about it. There are so many factors that go into a drinking culture. There is no way it is relegated to one demographic, there is no culture or sex that is above it. Drinking proliferates our lives in different ways, why then do I feel like it was such a jarring thing to hear? I think it was simply the setting and it attested to the fact that it is not a classroom setting, it is not what I am traditionally used to and thus the topics and "rules" for the setting change. For those women, they are used to being open about anything and everything, it seems. They have no one else to talk to and they have no one else to confide in. That feeling of comraderie transfers into the workshop, though not necessarily onto us as facilitators.

There was once again a lot of talk about children. Many of those women don't seem much older than me and I just can't imagine having kids already. Our lives are so different, yet we all have the same wants and desires. We write about places and our places can be the same and our experiences can be the same. We can all go to some place like South Padre Island and enjoy the beach and swimming and boating. We can enjoy time with our families and friends. Our life choices may have been different, but ultimately we are all alike.

This week was pretty uneventful for me. I've spent my time getting more things organized with Speak Out!. I have also continued my research on Community Literacy Centers around the country.

We didn't have a workshop this week and that was kind of disappointing, but convenient for me as I had let myself get behind in a class and had 500 pages of reading to do for Wednesday! It made my life a little bit easier to have the time. However, I was really looking forward to doing the workshop and seeing what came out of it this week. Oh well, next week will be that much more exciting. I think we have some great prompts set up and hopefully they will be exciting for the women and  get them writing, as well as learning. Thank Mandy, for all your hard work!

I have been looking at Salt Lake Community College's Community Writing Center as well as 826 Valencia and Seattle. Both are really cool organizations and I've spent my full office hours both times just looking at one website. They have so much to offer. Salt Lake really focuses on the community as a whole instead of underserved populations. That is a great idea because I think it builds community in such a different way. In Fort Collins, I don't think that building a community of writers is as important for our CLC because there are other organizations that are doing that already. I like how we have taken the creative writing aspect of their CWC and translated it to underserved populations. With 826, I love how they take kids and put them in a creative atmosphere. I also like how they do not necessarily cater to low-income children, but that they take them in as anyone else. The sense of community between the middle class and lower classes that they build is priceless. I also like how they take a fun approach to learning. Letting the kids express themselves in a positive manner is indisposable at their ages. Another great thing is providing publishing for these kids. I would have died to have my name in a publication that looked like theirs do when I was younger. That is something they can show off for life and really start builidng their sense of contribution to their community at a young age.

I am going to start researching the databases again for more comprehensive and conclusive evidence about how community literacy centers affect the people they serve. On the 826 websites, they have kids writing about their experiences with the center, so there is some quotable evidence, but on the Salt Lake one, there is nothing to prove that they are having a positive effect. We'll see where the research takes me.

So we had our first Speak Out! Women's Writing Workshop at the Larimer County Detention Center on Tuesday. I was surprisingly not nervous, but was a little apprehensive and reserved. I just wasn't sure what was going to happen and how exactly it all worked. I had an idea because of creative writing classes and wasn't nervous about the actual execution, but how I would be recieved and how I should relate to the women.

When they came in, some were really quiet and others chatty. We had two women who were really outspoken and a couple others who were shy, but spoke up often. It was great to hear that some were so excited to be there. Others were a little apprehensive, but that is great too because hopefully we will be able to open their lives to writing and expressing themselves and next time an opportunity arises such as this, they can get excited for it.

This workshop was a little hard for me because I wasn't sure how to present myself. I knew I couldn't walk in there and announce I was graduating this semester and then hopefully was going to go work for some type of publication or publishing house, or even literacy center, as I would someone else. I felt that it could be percieved as me showing off and letting them know what they were missing. Most of those women have not had an experience like mine and might never. Instead, I just said I was a student and was excited about the opportunity I had for working with them.

We then did introductions for them and after some ground rules, started right in with the acrostic poem. This one didn't get a whole lot of responses and they were pretty timid. One woman spoke up and did a great job, creating not only a sentence, but a small story with it. After that no one else spoke up. I think they were intimidated. We then moved on to reading two poems, one was about a name and the other beginnings. We had them write for about 5 minutes and then shared. No one spoke up at first, so I read mine. I had written about my name and how I wasn't comfortable in it. Then a couple of women shared and they had some great, unique stories to tell. Some wrote about their name, but most wrote about beginnings. It was interesting because many wrote about beginnings with their children instead of their own beginnings. I couldn't believe how open they were about young pregnancies and some heartaches, right off the bat. Perhaps because they live in such a small community and most of them probably already know these details about them. They might not have thought twice about sharing. I also think that I have these ideas about young pregnancies. I can't even imagine having a child at 17, let alone 14! It would have changed my life. But beyond that, they had completely different experiences growing up. I knew a girl in middle school who had baby in sixth grade, and another who lived more like these girls have. So I have been exposed to these different experiences, but not for quite some time.

This workshop is definitely going to open my eyes to another way of writing and expressing ones self. Already I think they have great voices and are pretty good writers. I was wondering during the workshop what I would think of the writing if it was coming from a classmate. But I don't think it necessarily matters. There is a different standard here and they are setting the bar high for themselves. It's great to see.

So another week has gone by and we're that much closer to having our first workshop at the jail. It's getting more exciting as the days progress. Mandy is doing a great job updating the prompts and schedules so we have something to do the first couple of weeks. I have been perusing the prompts again and taking from my list ones I think would be interesting to do the first week.

Today I've been trying to figure out what we need printed and how many copies of each. I'm not exactly sure what to expect and how to go about all of this, so I'm just getting it lined up and ready to print when we have the numbers and I have more information.

I also worked more on interview questions for Todd Simmons at Matter. The interview is on Tuesday, we'll see how it goes! I have narrowed the scope of my questions after I really thought about why I wanted to do the interview for myself, and not just for the CLC. I brought the scope into why and how he affects the community and vice versa. Here are a few sample questions:

What do you feel the definition of grassroots publishing is?

What are your motivations as a community publisher?

How much interaction is there between you, the publisher and the authors?

Do you feel your relationship with the community has grown, either personally or as a bookstore, since you began the publication?

Why did you decide to focus directly on the community rather than, like a traditional journal, inviting general submissions?

What, if any, are your green practices when publishing?

Can you tell me more about your new initiative with community literacy?

I'm hoping to gain some insight into other versions of community literacy outside of a traditional literacy center, such as this one. Hopefully he'll give me a good reference to go to next as well.

Have a good week until next time!

This is my blog for last week, so I will have two this week!

Last week I familiarized myself with the office and the computer. I had to figure out the camera and how to upload pictures onto the computer. I read through Mandy's wonderfully orgainzed SpeakOut folder and read many of the prompts. I started generating my own list of favorite prompts from these lists that I can pull off of once we start the workshops. I read through the way that past interns have organized their plans for each week so that I can get a feel for what I'll be doing. I am excited and a little nervous for the workshops to start. Like Mandy said, I'm just going to have to start to understand what I need to be doing.

I also started my research for my thesis. I have been searching for CLC's at other universities and have found a surprising lack of them. It doesn't seem that many campuses have any type of literacy center and that disappoints me. It is such a great way to create the link between university and community as well as a great resource for those who are struggling with literacy. I have restricted my search to universities so far, just to have an organized way to search. I have also changed my search terms as little as possible so that I can make sure I have exhausted the results before I move onto a new search. I hope to find more universities with literacy centers as my search terms change.

I also have an interview with Todd Simmons at Matter Bookstore on Tuesday, September 18, which I have been trying to prepare for, but don't feel ready. I searched for interview questions online, but of course they simply give me tips on how to ace an interview. Not what I need. So, I need to contact Tobi and go over stuff before Tuesday, yikes! Hopefully this goes well.

Those were my doings for last week and this week will probably be more of the same!

My name is Sydney Fox and I will be interning for just the fall semester and although my stay is short, I'm totally excited to be here. I hope to help find ways to improve the writing workshops and possibly cultivate some ideas on how to move the press out of CSU and allow it to expand.

Welcome to my blog and hopefully I have some interesting and insightful  things to say!