GPOYW.

Even with the housing situation beginning to settle, things are busier than ever! I owe you major updates, but don’t have many tangible things to show for it yet. I’m involved in lots of new projects that are beginning to come together all at once, which means that most of my time outside of class that’s not devoted to school work is still spent working. Here’s the run-down:

• The awesome news is that I’ll be graduating in May! With a double major, at that: Media, Communication, and Culture (through the interdisciplinary program here), and French. I’ve already begun work on my senior project, which investigates the American South as a culture, the idea of geography informing identity, and how all of that has manifested itself through my family history. We’ve been in Alabama (mostly in the same city) since right after the Civil War. Don’t know how just yet, but there’s some kind of book/album that will come out of it.
• Speaking of graduation and next semester, here’s the class line-up so far: French phonetics and linguistics, French literature (something 17th c.?), cultural anthropology + lab, Photo 418, and a one hour for-credit internship with Slash Pine Press. Slash Pine will publish a chapbook (handmade) in the spring, as well as organize a poetry festival.
• Post-graduation plans? I’m trying to get back to France for the summer — for the Cannes Film Festival as an intern, but perhaps back to Paris thereafter. Maybe to get certified to teach French, maybe just for a quick visit and a little tooling around town to see friends. All still very much in the works, nothing solid yet. Hello couch-surfing and 99-centimes-baguettes!
• Then to New York? Question mark? If I can find full-time work I will jump on it, but based on what other grads have been experiencing, full-time work means waiting tables, which doesn’t much lead anywhere but waiting in the other sense. So I may apply for more/other internships to get more experience and shove my foot through some doors. I considered grad school, but waiting on all my transfer credit to come through from abroad meant I lost a lot of time. Then, you know…there’s that other bit about not knowing what I want to commit myself to just yet. The smorgasbord goes something like: MLIS, MFA in book arts, art/rare books conservation, museum studies, interdisciplinary art, linguistics. Oh, the future. What a mystery you are.
• I’ve got a new gig redesigning a site and publishing exhibition catalogs/photography anthologies for a project here in town (more on that later). I’m taking on a book project of my own, as well; I’m assembling a portfolio of the photography I generated during the year I lived abroad, and have a small budget from one of the colleges here at UA. I’ll be printing with Blurb.com, a self-publishing service, and I’m anxious to see the results and print quality. Do any of you have experience with Blurb’s photo books?