I am driving, and my sister is sitting next to me, telling me what she remembers about the last time we went to Bisbee. “You were such a jerk,” she’s saying. “You told me to wear a sundress—and then you came out in pants. And I had to sit on that hard metal seat in a mining hat, into the depths of a freezing cold mine. For an hour.” 

I tell her I don’t remember that. She looks at me sideways like sisters do.

Read the rest of this flash essay in Reflections, Issue 17, Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place, & Nature, April 2026.

After I found out I was going to have a baby, I started filming one second of every day. I used an app that allows you to select one second from a video, add it to a calendar, and then, when you’re done, mash the seconds into one single video. I wanted to show the little person inside me—the little person who’d taken a year and a half and artificial insemination to conceive—what life was like in the year before his birth: how often we traveled (we took 18 plane rides), how we prepared for his arrival (spoiler: we forgot to buy diapers), how our lives made room for his precious life. I got eight months of footage before he decided to arrive early, so there’s a little bit of a gap, but I kept going after he was born. His first bath, nap, babble. Firsts turned into regular days.

The video compilation of his first year is very misleading. There is only one video of him crying, for instance. I wanted to capture his little goat cry, the helpless little wail of an infant, but even though he cried practically every day (what infant doesn’t?), once felt like enough. There are only a few of me, too, and yet the two of us were inseparable. Maybe I just didn’t like the way I looked most of the time; after all, I was postpartum, swollen, tired, hormonal. Video makes it easy to be completely honest and selective, all at the same time.

Most of the clips are of him—his name is Riley—looking up at me or his dad, batting at toys, tasting things like avocado and sweet potatoes for the first time, balancing a spoon in his chubby baby grip, wobbling to a stand, cruising along the furniture, and for the last few weeks, sitting on a blanket in the park with us. Those last few weeks were the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in the videos, it looks like we’re just enjoying spring mornings in the desert. In one clip, you can hear me say “another Saturday in quarantine,” but that’s the only clue you’ll find. We were completely isolated. Where is that world captured? Maybe it doesn’t need to be. After all, the world of a baby is no larger than as far as they can see, which for much of the first year, isn’t that far away at all. Honest, and selective.

As the years go on, so does Riley. His first year of miraculous changes turned into year two, and three, and four, and five. I don’t know how long I will do this, this daily memory-keeping. It’s kind of an obsession now. As of his sixth birthday next month, he will have 2,462 seconds, his entire life compressed as I wanted to remember it, into approximately 41 minutes.

*****

Read the rest of the article here: https://longreads.com/2025/05/30/memory-video-digital-forgetting/

Fejn thobb il-qalb jimxu r-riglejn.
Where the heart lives, there the legs walk. –Maltese expression 

Caffe Cordina, Valletta, Malta, 2004  

I am twenty years old and have just eaten what I think is the most perfect pastry in the world. But I think I’m in love with the pastry because I’m young and I’m sitting at a cafe in Malta, and maybe it has nothing to do at all with what is on my plate. Perhaps it is also because I’m enamoured with the word pastizzi, the way it rolls off the tongue, the ahh long and drawn out, the izzi strong on the front and soft on the back, a “t” tucked away in the middle, eet-zee. To be fair, it is also delicious, all flaky and buttery, diamond-shaped and filled with ricotta cheese and pepper, crunchy creases in the dough, and I’ve never in my life eaten something so stuffed with promise, and fortune, and youth. So maybe, I think to myself, flipping through the orientation guide to the summer job I’ve taken here, my adventure in Malta just about to start, it is the most perfect pastry in the world.

See the rest here at https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-12-cities/cities-pastizzi/.

In “It Wasn’t What I Came for But I’m Sure Glad I Stayed: From Writing Studies to SoTL,” Kristin Winet tells the story of how she discovered SoTL after she’d already established herself within a disciplinary career. She describes her struggle with letting go of her disciplinary identity to redefine herself, her professional life, and a professional community within SoTL. Looking back, she realizes she has “always thrived in liminal spaces.” Her journey will resonate with anyone who has considered leaving the traditional academic pathway leading towards a tenured faculty position. 

Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa6.10

Although studies have shown the benefits of co-teaching between experienced and novice instructors, there has been little research on mentoring relationships between faculty and postdoctoral scholars who co-teach. To address this issue, the authors created a postdoctoral teaching certificate that includes pedagogical training and a short-term, intensive co-teaching partner ship with a faculty mentor. They examine pre- and post-survey data from the first cohort of eight co-teaching teams in spring 2022 and provide a list of recommendations for practice. Takeaways from a spring 2023 survey administered to research mentors who had postdocs in the program are included.

Read the article here or see below!

For many postdoctoral scholars who plan to pursue a career in academia, learning to teach will be a key element of their success, but teaching opportunities are not commonly part of most postdoctoral positions. Inspired by our recent membership in the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), we developed a two-semester, “just-in-time, just-enough” postdoctoral certificate in teaching excellence that combines pedagogical training and participation in faculty learning communities with a short-term, intensive mentored co-teaching experience. 

End-of-year happy hour with the 2021-2022 postdoc fellows in this study

Read the article here!

Looking Back on Year One: J… by Kristin Winet

Although companies have long used email to correspond directly with consumers in times of crisis (George & Pratt, 2012), the Covid-19 pandemic has incited an unprecedented flood of emails to our inboxes from companies reassuring us that “we’re all in this together.” As composition scholars begin to investigate how organizations have responded to this pandemic, this article explores the rise of the “we’re here for you” email, a rapidly developing genre that reveals an unsettling relationship with the voice behind our consumer products and also a paradigm shift in how organizations connect with consumers during times of crisis.

Read it here or see the .pdf below!

In which I go to the deep south to investigate alligator-hunting culture.

IF YOU DRIVE A HALF-HOUR south from Mobile, Alabama, you will find your-self on the shores of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. The waters here aren’t clear at all but are perfectly dark and mysterious, the kind you can’t artificially saturate with a camera filter or lighten up by fiddling with the contrast. These waters are simply gray, murky gray, the perfect place for an animal to hide, the perfect place for a man with a boat to slice through the waters in the middle of the night with a flashlight, looking for the tell-tale amber-red glare of an alligator’s eyes, like a bicycle reflector.

On a July day every summer, when the humidity is already so thick you can wipe the air away with your hand, thousands of hopefuls sit at their computer screens and start hitting the refresh button over and over again at exactly 8 a.m., hoping this will be their year. They’ve partnered up with friends to increase their chances, hedged their bets by applying for various zones, and have probably been applying for years. Because they recently implemented a preference point system, the system will increase the likelihood of a repeat registrant being selected as long as the applicant continues to apply year after year. What no one will tell you is that it’s basically a lottery, although it’s not actually a lottery, because lotteries are technically illegal in Alabama (for religious reasons, of course). The state calls it a “random selection process” instead, which is really just a nice way of saying it’s a lottery. Everyone is in on the joke. On that July day, all fingers are poised on the keyboards, waiting for the page to update. When it finally does, players can begin the process of scrolling through the 125-200 names that have been selected, hoping to find their names on the list. If they do, they’re given one week to accept.

The state of Alabama decides exactly how many tags to allot on a year-to-year basis, depending on the estimated population of residents in the swamp at the time and how many gators can die without compromising the ecosystem. It only costs $22 to enter. Since most people work in groups to increase their chances, everyone will submit their names to all the zones in the hopes they’ll get a tag for one of them: Southwest zone, Southeast zone, West Central zone, and Lake Eufaula zone. Of course, hopeful winners can pay by credit card, but ballots are completely non-refundable. Each winner must be at least 16 years old, is allowed to harvest only one animal, and must attend the official one-day training camp here at Five Rivers in Spanish Fort prior to the actual event.

The dates are very specific. Each zone has its own unique window of time, and those who win a tag must adhere, under no uncertain terms, to the very narrow timeframe allotted them. There is no exception. The Southwest zone, for instance, begins at Official Sunset Time on the second Thursday in August until Official Sunrise Time on the second Sunday in August, and from Official Sunset Time on the third Thursday in August until Official Sunrise Time on the third Sunday in August. The hunt must be done in the dark, too—boats can only be out from Official Sunset to Official Sunrise, and the whole endeavor must succeed or fail before daybreak. The dates and times are chosen each year and strictly enforced by The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the same group who holds the random selection process every summer.

It’s a team effort from beginning to end.

Read the full story in Witness Magazine.

In this piece, I write about when heartbreak, violence, and a new beginning collide in one of the world’s holiest cities. 

My favorite activity in Sunday School was when our teacher would hand out construction paper and crayons and ask us to illustrate scenes from the Bible. My little sister and I spent hours trading paper colors and trying our hands at depicting famous moments: Moses and the burning bush, Noah and his animals, Mary Magdalene in an empty tomb, and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Moses always had a big nose, hairy eyebrows, and a thorny wreath around his head — I still do not know where we got this idea — and Adam and Eve looked a lot like our Ken and Barbie dolls, with shapely bodies that in no way resembled actual human bodies. Every time we colored scenes like these from the Bible, my sister and I bonded over that construction paper, inventing and imagining our own ways into the stories we heard every Sunday while our mom sang in the choir and our dad sat in the audience down the hall in the sanctuary. And after every Sunday school, we proudly pinned our masterpieces to the refrigerator, where they’d sit, lopsided under the magnet, until the next week, when we could pin up a new one.

This was how I learned the stories of the Bible. It was also how I came to understand the land of Israel. For most of my life, this tiny sliver in the Middle East has always been a menagerie of scenes rendered with crayon onto brightly colored construction paper. I preferred this world of crayon and paper, where I could take an ancient story and make it my own, one that usually featured female characters with big blue eyes, straight-up eyelashes, and bow-shaped lips. I was pretty shy, the girl always buried in her coloring books, and I loved being the creator of my characters’ destinies. Sometimes, after Sunday school let out, I’d imagine a different reality for the women, Eve on a horse, riding out of Eden, her hair flowing in the wind; Mary Magdalene as a mermaid princess reigning over the Dead Sea. In this world of ideas, I could make the women independent, adventurous; I could do whatever I wanted with them.

I decided, early on, that I would be a writer when I grew up. But not a fiction writer, not like the artist I was when no one was looking. I decided I would be a real-life writer, one whose writing subsisted on having adventures that went further than her backyard. That kind of writer, I imagined, would let me become like the women I wanted my biblical women to be: strong, perpetually interesting, unafraid. To practice my writing skills, I started keeping a journal when I was five years old, documenting the goings-on of the suburban neighborhood in which we lived. To this day, when I’m traveling, I only take a notebook and a pen, never a laptop, to record my experiences. I’ve got a whole shelf of battered journals on a bookshelf in my living room.

Read the full story in The Smart Set.