Different teachers and lecturers have shaped my life and I’m reflecting on this as the memorial service for one of my undergrad lecturers was held recently. I didn’t attend, but he was, and will probably remain to my mind, one of the most memorable people I have ever encountered within education or beyond it. By existing, he introduced students to a different way of being even as he introduced the class to Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

The thing about education is not how much you are taught, but how much you forget, only to stumble over faintly familiar ideas, concepts and facts much later, and repeatedly, until you properly need to lean on them. These lessons are waiting patiently, and furthermore when you come back to them, you will likely remember your first tentative encounter.

At least that’s what I think when I recall sitting in a middle row of a darkened classroom, watching films, or slides flicker into view one by one, while learning about art, and advertising, as well as film, and fairy tales in Communications 101 so long ago. 

It was a different world but I take it with me, the reels go round, and it influences me, and hence my writing. Speaking of which, another experimental piece in response to a call out has been enthusiastically accepted and will be published in a couple of weeks. My lecturer, a poet himself, wouldn’t have understand details, manipulating text randomly provided by an algorithm, but he’d recognise the impulse.

_{^{Steady as she goes, the 2022 writing update:}}

• Rejections: 118
• Pending: 65
• Acceptances by publisher: 20
• Acceptances by work: 25
• Published: 21