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A few weeks ago I started the graduate certificate program in Quilt Studies at The University of Nebraska - Lincoln. I am here to report dear reader, that I am not so book smart. I find myself coming to the page nervous that I am too out of practice to be a student, too distracted to be a reader, and too dumb to comprehend anything more than seven minutes after I’ve read it.
Yesterday I was driving thinking about one of the readings I did, delighting in how much it changed me. How it reorganized my insides and made me think about everything about craft and the history of the world in a whole new way. Then I pictured explaining to someone what it was I had read - and I couldn’t remember anything. I could recall almost no details, not even what it was that I read that had changed me. My body had the experience of transformation but my mind did not.
I come here today curious and worried, but also holding it all lightly. Is it my meds? Do they make me more forgetful? Has a decade of phone addiction made me actually stupid? Is it that I don’t have a practice of note taking and I need to be more active about comprehending while I read? Is it that I am just not cut out for this type of learning? Do I sort of not care about dates and details and am a somatic learner of feeling and change but not of facts?
In my class I am currently taking there are no tests (thank you god) but I do need to be writing about what it is I am reading. I am so accustomed to reporting back on my own experience of the landscape of living that I am clumsy in my efforts to understand this new way of sharing what I know. This new way of taking in the history of the world and synthesizing it for a professor and for my classmates.
I find myself being stretched in new ways. I started looking into full MA and MFA programs, dreaming bigger about future public spaces, and I don’t want to give up. I don’t want to give up trying to understand what I am reading and remembering the contents of my textbook. I don’t want to give up being a student of the past and how it informs my future, especially around art making and space making. Also am I allowed to skim the parts about some old guys blowing glass and skip to the chapter about Black Mountain College? Learning where to skim and where to soak is its own skill to build.
I find this to be true outside of school too, although the textbook challenges me in new ways. My expectations around what reading means to me can also shift. At night when I read it becomes a practice of presence and winding down. On my walks I find that listening to a book helps me retain the contents better. It makes me want to be a better teacher and offer more entry points for understanding the materials of learning. More worksheets, audio books, video lectures, reading lists. Breakout rooms as mini research portals for better understanding of our own histories.
Perhaps I am not book smart, but I will carry on and I will keep practicing. It seems to be a muscle that I am truly out of shape with. As I lift my little weights every week with Stella I also lift the little weights of reading. Sometimes having to lift the same one over and over just to catch half the meaning of a sentence.
I am alive and dedicated to the slow crawl of knowledge. What a blessing.
A QUILT IS SOMETHING HUMAN : RETURNS IN OCTOBER
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My favorite place in the whole world to be is QUILT CLASS! You’ve heard of it! You’ve thought about attending! And now is the time!
⭐ → Saturdays 9am PT / 12pm ET: October 7, 14, 21, 28
OR → Tuesdays 7am PT / 10am ET: October 10, 17, 24, 31
ALL YOU NEED TO DO BETWEEN NOW AND THEN IS FIGURE OUT HOW TO THREAD A SEWING MACHINE AND SEW A LINE
NOT EVEN A STRAIGHT ONE
JUST A LINE
Really looking forward to the first lecture in The People’s Quilting Bee this week
I listened to Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies and liked it so much I am now listening to the Happiness Project - which as a mentally ill queer had always rolled my eyes at. But if I have learned one thing in life it is that whatever I roll my eyes at usually works in my favor.
Circling the drain with this one
Success on Substack: Craft a Subscription Newsletter Worth Reading was the Number One class on Skillshare in August - Skillshare is free for the first 30 days and it is also so fun and there are so many classes to explore. Thank you to everyone who has taken class and told me they loved it
“I LOVE Marlee's newsletter so much that I started a free trial of Skillshare just to take this course. There's so many accessible steps to take even for me who started my Substack newsletter almost 5 months ago. Thanks Marlee for your work and encouraging us to share our art :)”
I bought this hat from Copycat Video Press
Common Threads Press is accepting submissions for publication
My vision has been too blurry for my prescription for years and I’d finally like to see straight so I have an eye exam tomorrow
The latest from in
VEIL OPENER! 🌬️ Autumnal Plant Magic Workshop ~ September 20, 2023 with Liz Migliorelli / Sister Spinster
