I left town to attend my under-grad college roommate’s wedding and visit friends who still lived in the area. Since few of my friends from undergrad are familiar with NSSWM, I spent a great deal of time explaining what it is I actually do, which turned out to be good practice.
One the highlights of my trip (aside from the wedding stuff) was visiting my old English professors at Westminster College. Susan Gunter invited me to come talk to her class (a survey class in British/American lit) about what I do; kind of a here’s-what-you-can-do-with-an-English-degree-besides-teach spiel. While the class didn’t have many questions, the ones they had were good ones, so I had fun with it. Susan emailed me to say several of her students came up to her afterwards and said my talk was very helpful. It’s so nice to get instant gratification, isn’t it?
You expect things to pile up while on vacation, and plan accordingly, but I discovered I neglected to adequately plan for how my vacation would affect the blog. Pre-vaction I thought, “I’ll post Friday’s Feast early, not update for a few days, and all will be well.” Well, I didn’t think about a few things. Like the fact that several of the things I wanted to talk about are now a little out-dated, or that choosing what to write about after being gone would be so stinking hard!
However, one aspect of my vacation did help me decide what to write about.
If you haven’t heard, the Library of Congress is launching new PSAs in support of the Lifelong Literary campaign. Go here to check out the cool new videos, done pro bono by The Geppetto Group, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and the Brigham Young University (BYU) Ad Lab.
Over the weekend I met one of the BYU students who worked on those ads. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a chance to drill him about the process and make my own suggestions about which books/worlds they should use as we were in a large group going to a haunted house. ~Sigh~ I’ll have to content myself with talking into the void.
I thought their choices of the worlds to go to were excellent, since most of those worlds (Hogwarts, Narnia, Oz, Camelot) involve multiple books. Now, if they were going to create similar commercials aimed at getting more teenagers to read, what worlds should they use? What about for adults? I would love to take a train to Pern, Alagaesia, Tortall, Earthsea or Landover, just to name a few places that readily come to mind and have names more distinctive than The Empire or Earth in 3578. Where would you like to go?