You might be thinking, “Gosh she’s gullible,” but teaching at a community college for almost thirty years has taught me that the absence of financial resources magnifies all problems to an often unbelievable degree. If you’ve got money to spare, when your car breaks down, you get it fixed. It’s inconvenient. But when you’re living on the edge, a breakdown triggers an avalanche, like you lose your job because you can’t get to work and your stress triggers an autoimmune disorder, and on it goes. Sure, there are those students whose grandmother seems to die at least five times in one semester, and who halfway into the semester say they didn’t do their homework because they had no idea a book was required… but even those kinds of excuses can be hiding larger problems like ADHD or chronic shame. So I’ve learned to take their problems seriously and seek solutions that match.
Anyway-love you guys! Would rather teach at SUNY Adirondack than most private colleges any day.
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My novel Blue Woman Burning was published by Emperor Books, an imprint of Red Penguin Books, in the fall of 2021: "In the cold descending breeze of the Altiplano between Chile and Bolivia, Fallon’s narcissistic mother bursts into flames before her family’s eyes. The inexplicable nature of their loss marks each family member in a different way."
Against the Grain, my latest novel, will be released on Earth Day 2022: “Against the Grain combines gorgeous poetry and romance with heart-stopping action, as the daughter of a rich CEO joins forces with a logger’s son to stop a huge lumber company from destroying an ancient redwood forest. The trees themselves become surprisingly powerful characters in this rich, multilayered novel. After reading Against the Grain, you’ll never look at a tree in the same way again,” says Matt Witten, bestselling author of The Necklace.
My book of short stories, Strange Appetites, won the Adirondack Center for Writing People's Choice Award.
I love all that is absurd, odd, and beautiful.
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