Welp, my sabbatical is officially over as our professional development day was Friday and classes started yesterday, so I am back to work. Now that my sabbatical is over, I can reflect on how well I met my goals. These were my two proposed projects:

• Read and research the application of multimodal texts in composition and literature and how they impact students’ media literacy in order to design interdisciplinary, thematic courses for [various comp classes] as well as assignments for creative writing and literature courses 
• Write the first draft of an original collection of short stories of 40,000 words (~80 pages single-spaced or 160 pages double-spaced) to enhance my teaching of creative writing

I did not do either of those.

Wait, that’s not true. I finally read all of “Beyoncé and Social Media: Authenticity and the Presentation of the Self” by Melissa Avdeeff fromThe Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism, edited by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, an excerpt of which inspired the media literacy topic in the first place.

And I did take these two classes that I said would help me with my short story collection:

1. Voices of Color Workshop I – A workshop for all underrepresented writers of color, where we take a process-driven approach to create our own work that accurately depicts our respective communities’ values in our own words. We examine global story models to see how we can better write our lived experience in the face of western systems of oppression and patriarchy
2. Storytelling for Social Justice – Craft your passion for justice through urgent stories that address pressing social issues in this course.

Also, not for nothing, I did get accepted to the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, which was also supposed to help me complete the collection. And I did do the proposed genealogical research that I said needed to be done to complete the collection by interviewing my great-aunt and then my biological father.

Here’s what I did instead

While at Joshua Tree (Aug-Oct/seven weeks), I did the following:

• Started a draft of a novel, the idea of which I’ve had kicking around for eons.
• Interviewed those two family members*
• Visited the Noah Purifoy Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum*
• Went to see the Transmission sculpture*
• Went to two ceremonies at Wind Walkers Medicine Wheel* / blogged about one
• Visited Idyllwild, CA, which I can only describe as Stars Hollow*
• Took the Voices of Color Workshop
• Saw my daughter graduate from flight school to be a flight attendant

After I left Joshua Tree, I did the following that I probably wouldn’t have done during a regular school year:

1. Visited where I grew up as research for the novel
   • I also was able to introduce my longest running friends to two of my new closest friends
   • I also went to my college alma mater which led to me going to a free concert
   • A friend also gifted me two days at a writing retreat
2. Saw my folks
3. Visited my best friend (would normally do but definitely wouldn’t have stayed as long)
4. Won/completed NaNoWriMo
5. Took the Storytelling for Social Justice class
6. Took a screenwriting class
7. Finished the first draft of a pilot
8. Went to Hawaii
9. Rewrote my first class in the comp sequence to focus on interviewing family members and picture book biographies
10. Outlined the curriculum for my third class in the comp sequence to focus on interviewing family members and digital media
11. Participated in the SOL Challenge
12. Attempted being an influencer, failed
13. Went to Greece
14. Combed my (dread)locs out
15. Read a total of 44 books for my two projects, which sounds like a lot but exactly half (22) of those were picture book biographies

* = things that will go in/impact the short story collection that I still plan to write

So as it turns out, the research I did for my short story collection did influence my course redesign, just not in the way I intended. I also wrote way more words on the novel draft (166,630 to be exact but who’s counting) than I planned for the collection. Given both of those things and all of the stuff I outlined above, I’d say the sabbatical was a success.

I should also note that my skin looks AMAZING, and I hope that lasts.