Writing your family history

This is an unabashed ad for my family history course (starts next Thursday). We have places left and it would be really nice to get a few more students. Part of the unabashedness of this ad is that the more students I get the more money there is for the UK (where I am spending a full three hours of my time on my London ancestors). Mostly, though, it's because this course really benefits by a few more participants. Most are better with small classes, but oral history and family stories get way more interesting when we have more stories to share and to get excited about.

I won't be teaching this course again this year, and not at all next year. After next year, who knows what's happening with my life? I feel a bit sad, saying it. I love this course. It's produced some fabulous student memories. I get the most fascinating people, with pasts and families and the wish to learn skills so that they can tell about them. Evening courses go in cycles, however, and the cycle for this one is over for now, and who knows if I will be teaching evening courses at all when it's ready to be offered again.

I'm rather pleased that we have the minimum numbers so that I can teach a favourite subject one final time.

(no subject)

Since the theme this month is women in writing (it wasn't intended to be, but what with the discussion on Mary Victoria's blog and the stuff that keeps popping up everywhere else, it has become so), some graphs need to be added to the mix: http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010

When I see a bunch of graphs, I find several ways into them. My least favourite way was as a woman writer of novels, for easily the most depressing view of these graphs is the relative amount of attention given female novelists. How good the individual novels are or are not is kinda irrelevant, when you look at the pretty pictures overall - women just don't get given the same amount of comment space. This means that we're all (as reader, another angle from which I was looking at these pretty pictures) we are less likely to hear about a new novel by a woman.

And now I want to say "Look ye, and despair!" Except it's not a case for despair, it's a case for fighting for equality of opportunity.