Week 6: Famous Last Words... 69 days

The past couple of weeks have been busy with too much stuff, and the same is true for the weeks to come, so I made a big decision this week: I'm not going to try to keep working on the Brer Rabbit book during the semester, at least not doing the writing. For the writing, I'll just stick to my African Tricksters project in this class, and then I'll get back to writing for the Brer Rabbit book after the end of the semester. That was a hard decision, but I've got over 100 Brer Rabbit stories written, so I think it's safe to take a pause, and then I'll jump right back into it when the semester is over and still be able to finish the book in early July, and the African rabbit trickster book in early August, so that sounds good: a summer of rabbit tricksters!

My countdown clocks says 69 days right now... so, that is how long till the end of my OU teaching career, but also the beginning of my new writing career. Yay for endings that are also beginnings! I decided to do one of the Tech Tips and put a countdown here in my blog post.

Mission AccomplishedCountdown

And I did some good writing today, even if it is just a short story-cycle: it's Tortoise and the King's Magic Drum from Nigeria. It was really exciting to come to this material after having worked so much on African American stories in the U.S. and the Caribbean: now I feel so much more confident about recognizing distinctively African folktale motifs and seeing how they appear in both African and African American stories! 

And, of course, since I am currently learning to drum, it was exciting to have the magical food object be a drum! For an illustration, I found this whole webpage about an iyaalu bata drum which is an important drum in Yoruba musical performance and rituals, and the webpage also explains that the Yoruba people credit Eshu with the creation of drums, and Eshu is also associated with trickster traditions being a kind of trickster-god. So that was exciting to learn about!

from the

Grinnell College

Musicial Instruments Collection

website