4,723 Words...

...that's how much my combined required reflections of my first ten-day residency at Hamline added up to. That's eleven pages in Word. I don't even use word, but I put the reflections in there to see how much it counted up to. That was probably a waste of my time.

But really, I'm not sure if there's much I have to expound upon in terms of the actual educational value of the workshops, lectures, readings and such and such. It was a fun time full of interesting work and cool people. I'm super pumped to get on the stick and start sending stuff to my new advisor and getting chapters completed.

There are a few things I'll remember from the trip that are worth putting down, or at least a solid warm-up to doing a lot more reviews today:

* I surprisingly went on way fewer rants about James Frey's Fiction Factory than I thought I would while I was there. Mostly just one with a solid guy named Riley Conway, though we had a better time talking about "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" so it was all good.

* Speaking of Riley, I could find no web presence for him, but as I looked for one, I found this Facebook photo for some other Riley Conway, and it's pretty great:


* Other rad people who I will mention that DO have websites to link to: Naomi Kinsman Downing, Jill Davis, Tracy Pagel Wells, Georgia Beaverson, Christopher Campbell, Jamie Kallio and Polly McCann. I'm sure there's more, but I'd have to keep digging on Facebook to find them, and I'm trying to do less of that stuff these days, you know?

* Games were big that week, and not always drinking ones. My roommate/"Buddy" (those aren't sneer quotes...it's what the school calls the people who show up a day early to show the news kids where the bathrooms and stuff are) Peter brought this game called Dixit which became a minor sensation and caused me to gain a new catch phrase:

Yeah, it's probably better you didn't ask any questions.

The other big thing I hadn't heard of yet is Zumba. This is popular now? My pal Alicia was teaching it in the mornings, but I wasn't getting up at 6:30 for God Himself let alone aerobic booty dancing. But now I'm seeing commercials for this on TV, and it's like a bunch of women participating in some kind of synchronized rave. Do you think E makes you lose weight? I'm only half kidding about that.

* The other big news of the week was that Gene Yang coming to speak to the class. I feel pretty safe in saying that his appearance kind of blew the minds of most of my classmates. I mean, I'd almost go as far as saying it was like some kind of revival although there were less organ solos and people fainting and more PowerPoint slides of ROM Spaceknight

Anyway, I'm going to go off on all the stuff I observed on the comics side of things this week over at The Cool Kids Table, but in the meantime I thought I'd share the list of comics (ten kids comics and five more adult ones) I wrote up for the rest of the people in the program after about the fifth person came up to me and started asking "Are there any more of these 'graphic novels' I can read?" Here we go:

1. Blankets by Craig Thompson
2. The Comics of Hope Larson
3. Owly by Andy Runton
4. Smile by Raina Telgemeier
5. Selections From The TOON Books Line Edited By Francoise Mouly
6. Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi
7. Mouse Guard by David Petersen
8. Saltwater Taffy: The Seaside Adventures of Jack And Benny by Matthew Loux
9. Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane by Sean McKeever, Takeshi Miyazawa & David Hahn
10. Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

1. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth by Chris Ware
2. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
3. It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken by Seth
4. Wilson by Daniel Clowes
5. Love & Rockets by Los Bros. Hernandez