Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Kristin Berkey-Abbott
A poet, a scholar, a teacher, a wanna-be mystic--always wrestling with the temptation to run away to join an intentional community--but would it be contemplative? social justice oriented? creative? in the mountains? in the inner city?--may as well stay planted and wrestle with these tensions and contradictions here, at the edge of America.
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- farewell
- poem
- satisfying
- sunday
- quilting
- labor
- woes
- quilt
- camp
- days
All posts (27)
It has been a week-end of restocking supply shelves and catching up on maintenance tasks. Even after 2 trips to the grocery store on Friday, I woke up yesterday and realized we had forgotten to get toilet paper. So it was off to Walmart, and if I go to Walmart, why not stock up on other items, like baking...
Some of my more interesting teaching ideas come when I get towards the end of what I have planned, and there's still a lot of class time left. Some days, I just finish. Some days I come up with something else because I've already let the class go early in the last week or two, and I don't want students to start to...
I am tired this morning--it's a good tired because of a more intense week of good stuff, but a good tired is still tired. Let me collect some fragments before they float away:--One of my colleagues at Spartanburg Methodist College has been bringing in watermelon from her garden, which seems miraculous to me. I've...
In late 2022 and early 2023, I first heard about ChatGPT and the current incarnation(s?) of artificial intelligence, I heard a lot of experts telling us that machines/programs/AI can't learn the way humans can learn. Then they'd explain the creation process of these technologies and how humans programmed them to...
As a teacher, I have had students do peer editing a variety of ways: in pairs, in groups of 4-5, as a big group passing papers to the left every ___ minutes, online as a discussion thread, and so on. My new approach with peer editing in my two different creative writing classes has gone better than any other...
Yesterday was a fairly good day. At church, as I was moving through the communion liturgy, I could feel my throat about to crack, and sure enough, I went into a coughing fit. Because I was at the words of institution, I felt weird about having someone else speak the words--Lutherans believe that only ordained or...
Yesterday was an overscheduled Saturday, full of rewarding activities, but almost too full. I had Zoom calls, one after another, along with a conference call with the church council which was meeting in Bristol, and a phone call to catch up with my sister. I volunteered at the Lutheridge Camp Store, a frustrating...
Even though my friends tease me for my apocalyptic mindset, my ability to see dystopia lurking around every development, I am not always quick to see immediate, personal danger in world developments. I remember a leadership team meeting in early February of 2020, when our college president mentioned this strange new...
It's been a good week, but I feel behind, in the way that I often do once the semester gets underway. I was shocked yesterday when I wrote in my bullet journal: "Teaching Plans, Week 5." Let me capture a few notes from the week:Writing:--This week's short story writing made me think of earlier writing I've done....
In later years, when I wonder why my blogging fell off a cliff in the past week, let me remember 2 factors. Tech woes kept me offline or otherwise engaged for several days: an internet outage one day, followed by my authenticator app not working and then being glitchy.But I've also been writing a short story! Once...
Page 1 of 3