Student projects

I seem to be attracting a lot of them.

There was this one. This was a couple of years ago, and I didn't find out about it until afterwards. The person never contacted me directly, but followed my blog for a while and made some interesting observations.

Last fall a music student at Chapman University asked if he could use "Sestina, Inspired by Rumi" as the basis for a musical composition, his senior project.

More recently, I was the subject of an AP English project on display here.

And in the last couple of days, I got email from a Master's student in literature, at Diponegoro University in Indonesia, whose thesis is at least in part an analysis of the "Those Blues" poems from KFI. I guess that makes me literature.

In addition, a member of our tariqa is writing her dissertation on the role that poetry plays in the lives of the Qadiri-Rifai. Of course I participated in the survey, and will likely be contributing in more depth as time goes on.

Well... alhumdullilah. My parents were both teachers (among other things) their whole working lives. As a child, I wanted (or expected) to be. I've done some teaching, but ended up mostly going a different route, and I don't regret it: I love my job (crazy-making though it sometimes is), and I'm in public education, which is the Right Place for me. Now, through poetry, through this miraculous unasked-for gift from Allah, I seem to be becoming a teacher unawares.

It was and always has been about communication. It was and always has been about connection. If I've inspired a few here and there, I'm doing my job.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside