Now that it’s October and Fall is well under way, we are back into a routine (at our house anyway) of scheduling and schooling. Some of this is formal education, some of it just life. Like navigating through the days, evenings, and weekends of a teenager on the go and mediating the transition of a young girl on her way to pre-teen.
Outside of that excitement, I’m also keeping up with cool finds on the Internet. This month’s Roundup offers links to goodies for lovers of story, whether you enjoy reading them or writing them.
#Watch
Blank on Blank is a collection of animated video interviews from PBS spotlighting celebrities from all corners of creativity and notoriety. Neil Young, Bette Davis, Nora Ephron.
And this one with Stevie Wonder, where he talks about the Keys of Life.
“I’ve never accepted stupidity and ignorance as making me then determine how good I was or how less I was.”
Careful, you’ll get lost in these short videos, but they do make for great lunchtime viewing.
#Listen
Podcasts are still all the rage these days with an endless list of opportunities to subscribe to one or another. It’s tough to choose. If you enjoy listening to stories, LeVar Burton hosts his podcast (which I’ve mentioned before), where he reads short stories for grown-ups.
But there’s another podcast of…tidbits, really. Excerpts from essays and books as read by the author himself, Michael Perry, on his podcast, ReWriting. This episode, “Guitar Girls,” in particular settles in nicely, with five minutes of Happy:
“Life goes better if you have a sense of pitch.”
Fall into more episodes HERE.
#Learn
I bet you didn’t know there is a tiny treasure-trove of free online courses from the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. The IWP regularly offers mass open online courses (MOOC) for writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and now it has packaged several of those past courses into what they call MOOC-PACKS. So former students can revisit the lessons. Or new students to dive into them for the first time. Or, teachers of writing can incorporate them.
MOOC-Pack (mook-pak) n. The core contents of an IWP MOOC, packaged with a guide that explains how to use it to teach a class or lead a study group.
Visit the IWP Distance Learning MOOC-PACK Library for courses like How Writers Write Fiction 2016: Storied Women. In skimming the overview of each, you’ll learn a little about the faculty and glimpse at the list of authors they will spotlight throughout (Naomi Jackson, Margot Livesey, Rebecca Makkai–oh my!).
Closer to home, tune in next Wednesday for a Q&A with Michael Shou-Yung Shum about his debut novel, Queen of Spades (there’s a giveaway!).
And generate a few of your own new stories by signing up for Principles & Prompts, a fun, low-stakes 6-week online writing class aimed at inspiring your muse and keeping your pen busy. Registration ends November 3rd!
You can 
I began transcribing the entries to share with family members, and she became real to me through her words. Who was Hattie? She loved puzzles and games, especially solitaire, and she and her husband, William, played cards often with neighbors. She recorded scores of local baseball games. She looked forward to getting the mail and reading material. She enjoyed listening to the radio, especially news programs and serials. She butchered hogs on her kitchen table. She didn’t like to garden. She tended to be stout and then fat, helped along by her fondness for food and the difficulty she had in physical movement in later years. She was keenly interested in both local and national politics and remembered the anniversary of the death of FDR every year. She seems never to have lost her humor or her sense of wonder and engagement.
National Poetry Month is off and running
