I was selected to be a public fellow in the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities’ 2019-20 interdisciplinary research seminar on “PLAY”!
The fellowship brings together scholars, students and artists from University of Tulsa and the Tulsa community to discuss the concept of Play through wide-ranging materials, perspectives and expertise. Our cohort includes professors of literature, media studies, education, and game development, as well as students of art history and biology. Edgar Fabian Frias, artist/performer/psychotherapist and fellow Tulsa Artist Fellow, will also participate in the seminar! We’ll meet once a week for the fall, and then organize public-facing engagement with the topic in spring 2020.
Here’s the concept defined by the OCH: “Play is a fundamentally inventive social activity in which we craft rules, experiment with boundaries, find new opportunities for expression, and engage in creative work. Both a noun and a verb, the word itself is wildly expansive and can describe everything from musical and dramatic performance to sporting events and apps on our phones. Play is among the first things we do as children in order to test the affordances of a complicated world and try to understand—and perhaps even change—its bewildering rules and constraints. Yet we sometimes imagine that such activities have to be pushed aside as part of the growth into adulthood, treating them as somehow opposed to things like work, seriousness, and maturity.”
In rejection news, the Sewanee Conference did not offer me a scholarship in fiction. But I hope to try again next year, as I heard a rumor they’re adding Nonfiction!
In a near-miss, Ploughshares notified me that my essay “The Elvis Room” was a finalist for their Emerging Writers Contest prize, and that it was passed on to judge Leslie Jamison. Even though she didn’t choose it, I’m chuffed that a writer I admire read my work, and that the editors/readers of PShares responded strongly enough to make the piece a finalist.