An Email to My Students, Now That Our University is Sending Them Home During the COVID-19 Crisis

Hi, folks:

Just a few updates, since ENG 257: Creative Nonfiction will be held remotely for the rest of the semester ….

Required Readings

As originally listed, plus hourly emails from the University on topics including: how to move out of your dorm room in 15 minutes; how to travel by plane, train, or bus without breathing; and why your family still needs to pay your on-campus food and housing costs even though they will now be feeding and housing you at home.

Attendance

Instead of arriving to class 5-10 min late, as usual, “because my printer is effed up,” you should now log in 5-10 min late to our video chat “because my connection is effed up.”

Writing assignments

In lieu of the essay originally due on May 6, please write a 5,000-word piece on how your family copes/implodes during the remainder of the semester. Suggested themes: reclaiming the room your little brother thought was now his; not being allowed to go out with your “contagious” friends; and learning that because of food shortages, an entire box of Cascadian Farms Organic Granola no longer qualifies as an “afternoon snack” and that, in fact, “without the income from your campus job there may be no granola in this house ever again, kiddo.”

Workshopping each other’s writing

This will now be done online on Blackboard. Instead of listening as Hannah critiques Jordan’s travel story, then saying, “Hannah pretty much summed up what I was going to say” and echoing her anyway almost word for word, you will now do so in writing. Instead of interrupting your classmates to explain why your own piece that confused and/or bored them is actually not confusing or boring at all, and is a super-intentional homage to David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” but with more footnotes, you will do so in an 800-word paragraph at the bottom of the thread that no one will ever have to read.

My extreme lameness at operating my own laptop and getting links to work

Is no longer your job to solve. It will now be the job of my own college-exiled offspring.

Office hours

Will be conducted on Thursdays via Skype. So, as usual, I will send around a signup list, you will choose a slot, and then on Thursday, 30 to 90 minutes after your slot is over, you will email me to say you can’t come in because you “woke up today feeling super sick.” The only difference from before: you may, in fact, feel super sick.

Food and drink

Can now obviously be consumed with abandon during class. Women: Revel in your freedom to eat anything from carrots to Cooler Ranch Doritos® without glancing around to see if you’re being judged for eating too much or too little. All genders: Burp. Slurp. Chew like a combine harvester. This is your one silver lining, so enjoy the hell out of it, people, while I toast your health with this handle of Ketel One.

Best,

Prof. S

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America’s only journal of comic verse, and teaches humor writing, poetry writing, and journalism in upstate New York. Her work has appeared in The American Bystander, The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The Satirist, and other magazines and newspapers. Her comic poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award) is often mistaken by online shoppers for some kind of porn. Twitter handle: @MelissaBalmain