Starting college is very close now and I have to get into shape. Preparation is always the key, not necessarily to good teaching but to levels of confidence - which is helpful to me but vital to students especially if you meet them for the first time a third of the way through their course.

Here is a list of texts and writers I shall be working with over the next few months. I always find that my own writing is influenced by the writing of others.

Plays
The Tempest - Shakespeare
Othello - Shakespeare
Translations - Brian Friel

Poetry
from The Penguin Book of American Verse
Anne Bradstreet
Longfellow
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
H.D.
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
Robert Lowell
Allen Ginsberg
Sylvia Plath
Nikki Giovanni
Ai

This all seems rather optimistic looking at this list now, we shall see.

I went into college today to try and make peace with my fears. Try and get a feel of the place after so much of a gap. It felt as if I had not been away at all. When I start back it will swallow me whole. Take up so much time and energy. And a smiling student came running up to me so pleased to see me, could not wait till I was teaching again. It was good to see her.