The Spaces In Between

Today I want to write and post my 2023 Year in Review post as I didn’t do it in January 2024 like I usually do, and then I will get to writing my 2024 review as well! As always, if you are interested in previous year in reviews, you can find them here:  2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2012.

Overall, 2023 was a good year! Indigo and I started to feel more connected to our Quaker community, and started to make friends with other covid-conscious people in the Fingerlakes area. We lived a full year in our house, and became more adept at handling the quirks and challenges that come with an 1880’s farm-house that has had many DIY renovations. (We did have a stressful plumping situation where the well pump kept going off every 30 seconds, thankfully it turned out not to be a broken pipe, but rather that we needed a new pressure tank.)

In terms of teaching, in the Spring I taught Intro to WQTS again, as well as a new class Body Politics. Many of my Body Politics students were repeat students from the Fall, and I enjoyed the challenge of making sure I wasn’t repeating too many materials on my syllabus. Before teaching at Wells, students usually only took one or two classes with me, so I could re-teach many favorite and familiar texts. At Wells, as the sole instructor, I needed to make sure that my classes included the entire breadth and depth of a WGSS curriculum.

I also taught Senior Seminar with two students writing a senior thesis, and an independent study, Feminist Theory, with two students, a first year and a senior. Feminist Theory was one of my favorite classes, I loved sharing my favorite writers and theorists with students, and it was great to watch their relationship grow over the course of the semester. The two of them met once a week to talk about the readings, and created a collective notes document about their conversation, and then all three of us met once a week to talk about the topics and theories of the week. For the final they created a “Feminist Survival Kit” inspired by Sara Ahmed’s kit in “Living a Feminist Life.”

In the spring I continued my foraging adventures, and learned how to make dandelion jelly! We also tried to make lilac jelly, and struggled to get the pectin and sugar ratios right, so mostly ended up with lilac syrup. It was still delicious, it has a kind of pineapple/citrus flavor. We also attended several weddings, including my sister’s in April, and Indigo’s best friends Em and El in May. And a former student of mine from DePauw came to visit us for a weekend!

The highlight of 2023 was a trip to England in the summer–we visited London, Canterbury, and Yorkshire and Indigo met my extended family for the first time. We spent time with my best friend Kavita–who Indigo met in summer 2022 in Vermont, and celebrated my god-son’s third birthday! I especially loved our time in Yorkshire with the Hunter side of the family, visiting with my Grandma’s sisters and brothers. I took Indigo to my favorite place in the world, Robin Hood’s Bay, and proposed to them. (They had already proposed to me at Christmas 2022, but I wanted to ask them too!) It was also lovely to spend time with my sister, Emily who was living in London at the time.

In August, right before the semester started I turned in my Review materials, highlighting the teaching and research that I had completed in my first year to be assessed by a committee. Along with descriptions of my classes, it also included information about my research plans, and copies of my chapter on representations of drag in children’s books, and my essay about drag kids for an Intro to Women and Gender Studies textbook. In January 2024, I received news that I had passed my Review, and my contract was renewed, affirming I was on track to go up for tenure in Fall 2026.

Fall 2023 was a lot easier in than Fall 2022 in terms of teaching. I finally started to feel like I had my feet under me, and was beginning to understand the unique ways that Wells functioned. I taught Intro again (this was an every semester offering at Wells). One of the big changes I made was that the zine project became more focused on Wells history. I took my students’ to the Wells’ library where Tiffany Raymond, library director and archivist, brought materials from the archives for them to examine. It was a fantastic way for them to explore the history of a women’s college, and to think about whose stories get included and excluded in an archive. I also hoped that it would help them feel connected to Wells through understanding her past, and that it might spark an interest in shaping her present and future.

I taught another new course, a Gateway (first-year seminar) called Identity and Belonging in the Outdoors. It was based on my Queer Nature course that I taught at DePauw with Christy Holmes. At Wells, it was also a collaborative course; I taught it with Jen Myers, who taught Sustainability. We had a fantastic time, we went on fieldtrips to the Harriet Tubman museum, went kayaking, visited Long Point State Park, participated in a collaborative art installation organized by Anna Ialeggio, and cooked together. As always, I learned a lot from the experience of co-teaching, and I enjoyed having a class entirely of first-year students. I also grappled with AI submitted assignments for the first time and the ethical struggles associated with its use and policing of that use.

I also taught another new(ish) class (based on my class Trans Representations) called Transgender Studies. This was a small class–only 5 students, but they were all students who had taken my courses before, and we had lively discussions every class period. I added several new authors to my syllabus: Sabrina Imbler, DeShaun Harrison, Kyle Lukoff, and Kate Bornstein among others, and students responded really well to the new readings. They especially enjoyed Imbler’s essay on the cuttlefish in their book How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. I also added a few podcast interviews which they seemed to enjoy.

We also experimented a bit with Chat GPT in the classroom, prompting it to create a podcast script between three authors we had read that day (DeShaun Harrison, Alok Menon-Vaid, and Sabrina Imbler) on the topic of fatness, trans studies, and the body. We critiqued the output, revised our prompt with direct quotes and ideas from readings, and then analyzed the new resulting script. I have many ethical questions about AI (privacy, environmental impact, plagiarism, and more) but I know it is something I need to learn more about as it becomes a part of our lives. I want to help students use it thoughtfully and carefully, and also to point out what is missing when we depend on AI to do our work.

One thing I struggled with at Wells was students completing the readings. They often complained they didn’t have time to do it all. While it was frustrating, I tried to respond with curiosity. I was shocked when I asked them how long it took them to read a 25 page chapter that was written by an academic in what I considered to be fairly accessible writing (I think it was a chapter about trans men in the early 20th century by Emily Skidmore) and students said “an hour or hour and half.” One student said it took her two hours to read 25 pages. She noted that she realized she was quite slow, and often tried to use text to speech to get through her work. To help students I started recording myself reading class materials out-loud. This was helpful on many levels—as someone who reads very fast when I am silent reading, it can be hard to calculate how long it might take someone else. Sometimes it took me 30-45 minutes to read out loud an article that I considered “short” and thus I was able to have a better understanding of how long it might take students to read it. This also enabled me to give them better estimates of how much time they should be setting aside for readings each day. And it provided me a different understanding of texts, some of which I have taught 10+ times, as I noticed different things while reading out loud.

Finally, I taught a Gardening class alongside Ernie Olson and Laura McClusky. This was a 1 credit course that fulfilled a “Life Skills” requirement, and met for 7 weeks at the start of the semester. Each of us was responsible for 2 weeks of the curriculum. I taught about edible weeds one week, and common garden herbs for my second week. In the second half of the semester, I taught a 7 week Cooking class (also Life Skills requirement) with James Miranda. We made salsa (some students had never had fresh tomatoes from a garden before), omelettes, pizza, home-made pasta, stir-fry, and did a Chopped competition on the last day (Indigo and Laura McClusky were our judges). It was SO much fun. My favorite part was that when asked what they learned, one student commented that she felt like she had learned that it was okay to make mistakes, and that mistakes were a part of the learning process. James demonstrated this on the first day, mixing up sugar and salt and accidently making our Cornelian cherry compote inedible.

On a personal note, the beginning of Fall 2023 was really difficult–within two weeks Indigo lost a friend Joe to suicide, a member of our Quaker congregation fell and died during our Meeting in the garden, and we had to make the difficult decision to euthanize my parents’ dog, Kaylee, while pet-sitting for them. September was full of grief.

Also that Fall, Indigo started a Masters program at Syracuse University in Marriage and Family Therapy. I was able to see River, my guide-son several times, in September at the Delaware beach, October when I was in Maryland for NWSA, and in November for River’s birthday. I continued my mushroom hunting and foraging adventures, with a focus on exploring acorns. It is quite a process to make them edible, involving hours of cracking and cleaning, days of leaching the tannins out, and then more time roasting and grinding. Another Fall highlight was staying in cabins at Buttermilk Falls with Melissa, Tina, and Mia who have become dear friends of ours! (This has since become an annual tradition).

We ended the year with a Winter Solstice party, celebrating the longest day on a night of 14 degrees. Several friends joined us by the woodstove in our garage, and around a campfire in our driveway to enjoy soup and hot chocolate!