Still Alive!

It's good to be publishing again! I won't say 'writing' since I've been writing all week. Oxford's term began this last week. For those wondering, I've been taking British Landscape classes up until now. This week, I moved on to Oxford tutorials.

Tutorials are the traditional Oxford (and Cambridge) way of studying. You meet one-on-one with a teacher (called a "tutor") and present an essay answer a question he has posed to you. After reading your essay, you and the tutor discuss the form and content-mostly content if you're already writing well.

These began this week. Additionally, lectures began. Lectures are quite what they sound like: you go and listen to a wonderful British accent discuss obscure topics.

Last week I got to meet my tutors in a group setting. Both of them are wonderful, but I am especially fond of my Creative Writing tutor. He's just brilliant and instantly likeable.

For Creative Writing, we were told to write something evoking some part of Oxford. For Poetry in English, I was to discuss the intellectual poetry of Donne and Herbert, two of my very favorite poems. Thus, I began the week with good feelings about the work to be done. Everything would be marvellously fun.

And, of course, it was. I wrote a poem about Autumn in Oxford (since I'm getting to experience my first proper autumn) which was "Structurally impressive" though the vocabularly expressed my "crush on the 16th century", as my tutor described it. He was absolutely wonderful at giving painless criticism, a valued skill in such a profession.

For Poetry in English, I spent hours in Donne's The Extasie and Herbert's Providence, two examples of the 16th century poetry on which I have said crush. This was especially lovely after being told that I would have piles and piles of secondary sources. Both of my classes are only working from primary texts, which is the most comfortable kind of research for me. Especially when one of the primary texts is Oxford, itself.

That, very, very briefly, was my first week of Oxford classes. Tutorials went well, research went marvellous. All is well in Oxford.