I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see the back of 2011. Really — I can’t. It was a year full of professional milestones, and I had a wonderful time teaching my first classes at Wooster this fall and getting to know the town and college, but it was harder on the personal front. I’m looking forward to 2012 with optimism and anticipation. I fully expect the spring to be crazy — I’m teaching three classes rather than two, and my senior IS students will be finishing their projects — but I also hope it will be rejuvenating. I’ve been amazed by how widespread this sentiment about the new year has been. I can’t think of another year when I’ve heard so many people express relief at the passing of the old year and hope for the new one, in a way that seems heartfelt rather than rote. I guess it’s just been a hard one for all of us. May 2012 bring positive change for you, too.

Also, mysterious Mayan calendar predictions aside, isn’t “twenty-twelve” just so much more satisfying to say than “twenty-eleven”?

I didn’t get as much work done on Killingly this year as I meant to, mostly for the above-mentioned personal reasons, plus that whole “first semester of teaching” thing, which is pretty time-consuming. But I did get some work done! And I’m delighted to say that I’ll have a student assistant helping me to dig up more research material this spring. If all goes well, I hope to finish the book in summer 2012. I’ve also been writing some nonfiction, partly inspired by the reading I’ve done with one of my IS students.

In March, I’ll be back in Austin briefly to give a reading at UT before zipping down to San Antonio to present a paper at ASECS 2012: “Delarivier Manley Understands the Ladies Better than You: The Female Wits and Feminocentric Satire.” I’m also hoping to attend Wiscon this spring. Anybody else planning to be in Madison?

I meant to post a multitude of things in the last month or so, some still open in tabs from the first time I read them. (I prune my tabs regularly, but still, it’s no wonder my Firefox loves to give me the spinny rainbow wheel.) Here are a few of them:

• Lev Grossman on what fantasy is.
• An insightful post on Anne McCaffrey and her work.
• The Guardian’s obituary for Russell Hoban.
• Kristin Cashore on reading like a writer.
• Katha Pollitt on Christopher Hitchens.
• NPR’s top 5 YA novels of the year.
• A call for papers on Georgette Heyer at the Journal for Popular Romance Studies.
• A Vintage Smith College tumblr.
• Diana Peterfreund on love triangles in YA and love diagrams of Jane Austen novels.
• The Band of Thebes Best LGBT Books of 2011 list (with recs from me).
• Rachel Signer’s piece at OccupyWriters, my favorite there so far.
• What Middletown Read.
• Miette’s podcast of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”
• Boing Boing’s 2011 gift guide: a little late, okay, but still full of interesting stuff, including many books.
• Shauna Ahern’s basic ratio method for converting wheat-based cookies to gluten-free, plus a molasses cookie recipe I’m planning to make soon. (My mother and I made date pinwheel cookies and quinoa flake jam cookies for Christmas.)

And finally, something that makes a dreary January day a little brighter, at least if you grew up with the Buffy kids and still like a good vampire show now and then. 2011 would not have been possible without yoga and Netflix streaming.

A very happy new year to you all.

I spent most of Friday and Saturday at the third and final TILTS 2011 conference at UT. I’m not exactly a digital humanist by trade, though I’ve worked on digital humanities projects (like eComma). But I’m interested in humanities computing, to use the older phrase, and the breadth of this conference’s speakers was really wonderful — linguists, literary critics, anthropologists, bibliographers, librarians, and others. Intellectually and socially, it was a nice send-off.

Today I cleaned out — well, 95% cleaned out — the cube I’ve been sharing with T. since 2005, our second year in grad school. Then I stopped at the co-op and ran into Rita, who sold us Lahrs the Saab. I’ve been experiencing a lot of serendipitous meetings lately, even though many of my friends from graduate school have decamped for other cities. It’s strange to be getting ready to leave myself. I’ve been living here for seven years now, and I’m going to miss it terribly, excited as I am about my new job in Wooster.

And now, links to share!

First of all, the fabulous Malinda Lo recommended Alcestis (as well as books by Jacqueline Carey and Robin McKinley) in a short piece she did for NPR last week. This was up on NPR’s Facebook page, as well, which resulted in a number of my friends leaving “holy crap, I know her!” comments on the NPR post. Sometimes social media does give one a warm and fuzzy feeling!

On Thursday night, the 2011 Lambda Literary Awards were announced. Alcestis didn’t win its category, sadly, but it sounds like it was a great evening, and all the winners deserve many congratulations!

250 books by women all men should read. (Also all people, but this is a response to an unsurprisingly dude-dominated reading list from Esquire.)

The opening of Jeffrey Eugenides’s upcoming The Marriage Plot. I want it now.

A Times travel piece on Lake Geneva, emphasis on the Byron/Shelley/Polidori era of its history.

A super sensible piece on ebook piracy by Cecilia Tan.

A Q&A by lovely Austin bookstore BookPeople with Robin Black, primarily about her short stories.

The real origins of Memorial Day.

For some less-heartening news, “worst carbon emissions ever leave climate on the brink.” And Laila Lalami posts Tom Lutz’s open letter to his UC Riverside colleagues and students about the demolition of the UC system. I’m not sure which of those links is scarier.

I’m still finalizing my reading lists and syllabi, which means that I’m still reading post-apocalyptic novels, though now I’m back to some I’ve read before. At the moment I’m re-reading Riddley Walker. I’d forgotten just how virtuosic it is. I wish everybody who loved Cloud Atlas knew about this book, too.

Chronologically, as it seems easiest:

Last Friday, I defended my dissertation in the Fleur Cowles Room at the Harry Ransom Center. (You want to follow that photo link, I promise.) Fleur Cowles was one of the sponsors of the internship I participated in at the Ransom Center, so it felt like a nice conclusion to my years as a graduate student to be in that pale-yellow room full of paintings of tigers and flowers and at least one unicorn. The defense itself went swimmingly, as did the dinner and drinks we decamped for afterward. It was really nice night.

This week, I finished up the line edits I’d made while re-reading the dissertation yet again before the defense, and yesterday I officially filed to graduate. A very strange feeling, I can tell you. But pleasant, too. I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom.

And then: last night, Alcestis won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction from the Publishing Triangle. I wasn’t able to get to New York to attend the ceremony, unfortunately, but I followed the live-tweets (!), and got a report from Soho’s Mark Doten, who attended on my behalf and accepted the award. I hear that some very nice things were said about the book, and I am so honored and touched. Here’s Lambda Literary’s lovely write-up of the awards ceremony, with a photo of the winners who were present.

On a sadder note, I was sorry to see earlier today that Joanna Russ has died after a series of strokes. If you haven’t read How to Suppress Women’s Writing, now’s a good time. (It continually makes me happy to know that there’s a UT Press edition of that book.) If nothing else, read the cover, which in itself is enough to get a good conversation started with students. I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to use the book or its cover next fall, but it’ll appear in one of my spring classes. For more about Russ and her literary career, see this excellent tribute at io9.

I’m still a bit dazed from the last few weeks, but I’ll be moving on soon to more course-planning and Killingly-writing. And planning my move to Wooster!

I love doing giveaways on Goodreads — there’s something delightful about watching the number tick up as more people enter. Right now the giveaway’s only actually been accessible for three days, I think, and more than 360 people have requested the book. (Last year’s ARC giveaway got up to over 1000, I think.) I’d rather like to hug them all.

This week has been full of dissertation, but I took a break on Thursday night to go see Robyn at ACL Live as part of her Body Talk tour. If you like electro-pop and have a chance to see her, I highly recommend it. Somebody’s uploaded a few short videos from the show to YouTube; this is the best one. If you think you hear an echo, that’s the entire venue singing along. (Also, see this interesting documentary clip about the “dynamic textile” liquid art used in Robyn’s “Indestructible” video.)

I’ll post again soon with more literary links. I’m working on my laptop right now, and, as always, half the things I’ve been meaning to mention here are open in tabs on my desktop. Someday I’ll develop the habit of tagging things on delicious right away rather than leaving them open for a few days first. For now, I’ll just point out that Paul Lisicky will be reading at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT campus on Wednesday, February 23, at 7:30, and that UT Theatre & Dance is currently staging The Threepenny Opera.

The Blanton Museum Book Club meeting was really lovely — we met in one of the galleries while the museum was open for Third Thursday, next to some very fitting art. It’s been a little while since I’ve talked to a group about Alcestis, and I’ve been thinking so much about Killingly lately that it was fun for me to compare the two projects and consider, as I talked with the group about the book, what I’m doing differently this time.

Have to get back to dissertation revisions now, but here, a whole bushel of links:

• A rejection letter in kind, to Gertrude Stein.
• A border collie that knows more than 1000 names of objects (and is now working on grammar).
• Jubal Early doing his bit for the mode of self-defensive autobiography. (No, not that Jubal Early, the real Jubal Anderson Early [ouch at that web design]. Who is apparently one of Nathan Fillion’s ancestors. What.)
• Via Jessa Crispin, an Edith Wharton short story in which she snarks about book clubs… published, in PDF, by the Library of America. As they introduce it: “During Story of the Week’s first year, we have been gratified to learn (via e-mail messages, blog posts, and phone calls) that an increasing number of readers are using selections for reading groups, the classroom, and library events. And so it is with a bit of trepidation that we offer, in commemoration of Edith Wharton’s birthday on January 24, a story that makes fun of such gatherings by describing one of the more dysfunctional reading discussions in the history of literature.” Heh.
• Maud Newton “on creating the feeling you want the reader to feel“, which opens with the question “Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” What’s interesting here is that this isn’t a “write what you know” question — it’s not about whether or not writers need to feel what their characters feel, but about whether they need to be able to evoke the same state in themselves that they will evoke in their readers. I’m not sure that’s possible, exactly. I think the fact of being the writer of the work always tempers, even if just slightly, the feeling that will be fully accessible to readers — if you’ve done your job right.

A quick reminder that on this Thursday (the 20th), I’ll be leading a discussion of Alcestis at the Blanton Museum Book Club, at 7 pm. The book club will meet in the Susman Gallery on the second floor of the museum. Since it’s Third Thursday, the museum will be open till 9 pm. See the Blanton website for directions and more information on the current exhibitions.

I’m back from a conference and trying to get myself together. This takes more effort than you’d expect, when in the wake of cross-country trips and one of the Worst Migraines of All Time. Ugh. But I’m slowly making progress, and part of that progress involves posting some reminders here about recent and upcoming news.

Thing 1: I will be leading a discussion of Alcestis for the Blanton Museum of Art Book Club in Austin on January 20. (Tiny sidenote: I’m not actually a graduate of the Michener Program, as that link suggests — my creative writing master’s degree is from the UT English department. I am, however, replacing Ted Hughes as the subject of this book club meeting. No, I am not ever going to get tired of mentioning that.) This discussion is linked to the Robert Wilson Alceste print exhibition currently running at the Blanton. I believe we’ll start at 7 pm, but I’ll try to get confirmation of that this week and will update here. If you’re in the Austin area and want to talk about the book, about misbehaving gods, about historical fiction and adaptation — come by and chat!

Thing 2: Many thanks to the fabulous Karen Healey for including Alcestis in her list of favorite books of the year! (Karen’s novel Guardian of the Dead is awaiting me on my Kindle, to be read on my next trip — since I really can’t justify too much pleasure reading when I’m not traveling, this month.)

Thing 3: The delightful Hipster Book Club people asked me to contribute a top 5 list for their end-of-the-year collection. Go to page 2 of that index and you can enjoy my ramblings about my favorite works of the year featuring post-apocalyptic themes. (My original list was chock full of links, but apparently those got lost somewhere along the way. Ah well.)

Thing 4: I feel weird about doing this, but as I’ve seen a number of other writers mention their Hugo/Nebula eligibility lately — Alcestis is eligible for nomination in the fantasy novel category for both the Nebula Awards (for SFWA members) and the Hugos (if you’re a WSFS member).  I’m not sure if I’m Campbell-eligible this year, but I’ll let you know when I find out.

And a link to conclude: a short NPR piece on who really wrote the first detective novel. The tone of the piece is a little strange — oddly disparaging about mystery-novel clichés, considering that they weren’t clichés when the first one was written — but the information is interesting.

So! To make up for that brief absence, here’s a nice announcement: the Blanton Museum Book Club will be reading Alcestis and discussing it on January 20, 2011. I’ll be leading the discussion. This book club meeting is linked to the prints exhibition Robert Wilson in Four Acts, which just opened at the Blanton and runs through March 13, 2011. Here’s the Blanton’s description of the exhibition:

Artist Robert Wilson—a University of Texas at Austin alumnus, native Texan, and The Blanton’s 2011 Gala honoree—is best known for his video and theatre work. However, as part of UT’s 1986 Guest Artist in Printmaking Program, Wilson made two suites of prints. Alcestis is named for the wife of King Admetus from Euripides’ eponymous 438 BC Greek tragedy who offers herself as a sacrifice upon learning that her husband will die unless he can find another to take his place. Alceste illustrates Wilson’s stage design for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1767 opera of the same name, based on Euripides’ myth. Robert Wilson in Four Acts presents these suites alongside a study for Alceste and video documentation of Wilson’s production of Gluck’s opera.

And here’s the amusing part: if you click the Book Club link above, you’ll see that it still lists the January 20 book selection as Ted Hughes’s translation of Alcestis (the Euripides version). But no, my friends — I have replaced Ted Hughes! I feel as though I ought to notify my alma mater about this. </Sylvia Plath jokes>

Also, here are a few links I’ve collected during the week:

• Ellen Ripley Saved My Life: a post by Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown. This is the third of three related essays, and speaking as someone whose notion of a strong woman was also unduly affected, in my teenage years, by Joss Whedon’s psyche — it’s amazing.
• A charming slideshow of doodles left on the whiteboards in the main library (the PCL) at UT.
• And another charming interview with Justin Cronin about The Passage, this one at Goodreads.
• Foxes playing in the London snow.

One of my favorite songs from their latest album:

First of all, I was nowhere near campus earlier this week when the shooter opened fire — I was still in Oregon, on the last day of a nice long visit with my mother, who turned 60 this week. I was, however, emailing back and forth with my dissertation director, who was stuck in his office while the SWAT teams searched our building and who, earlier, saw the shooter fire into the pavement near the Dobie Mall building across the street. Another former colleague from the Ransom Center was also quoted in the local news because she was out in that courtyard when the gunshots started. It’s terrible that the shooter died and mystifying that he chose this way to die, but I’m so glad he didn’t actually shoot anyone else in the process.

Anyway: I’m still in catch-up mode right now — I did work a fair amount while I was in Oregon, but this semester continues to be more hectic than I expected. So here, have a big list of links:

• Ann Patchett on plot in the WSJ (outliners represent!).
• Laura Miller on Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon.
• Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical fiction about real people.
• A recap of the Margaret Atwood/Ursula K. Le Guin conversation about SF recently held in Portland. I am so sad to have missed this! I was even in Oregon when it happened, but about six hours away and being stomped by a migraine, so.
• Sarah Prineas guest-blogging against authorial self-promotion online.
• An earth-like planet that may sustain life has been found, about 20 light-years away.

And finally, two links relevant to my plans for the evening:

• An interview with Paul Harding, the author of Tinkers.
• Cocorosieland. (They’re playing at Emo’s tonight! I’m so excited.)