Numerous faculty asked if I wanted them write a post for my departure as Program Coordinator and I felt bad about asking them to do more work, but what they also didn’t know is that they have already given me too much power and all I sow is chaos carefully crafted as normalcy. I might as well wield this power one last time on our website (newly updated and designed by current LIS student, Michelle Carino!)
My experience as PC in the last several years? 10/10, would recommend. Thank you for letting me be your cheerleader, chocolate-supplier, unqualified tech support, anxious instructor, and that annoying presence in your inboxes, you know, the one with all the frogs.
If my only legacy is an actual LIS frog mascot, I would be so honored. Don’t let the dream die in my absence. Do not let the LIS frog go gentle into that good night.
My Work Dad, Rich Gazan, has always encouraged me to post updates on some cool stuff I’ve been doing outside of LIS, but I screeched like a panicked pterodactyl every time, and though that has not deterred him thus far, he has suggested it one last time. And who am I to deny my overlord, on this, my last day?
So, anyway, I published a short story with Tor.Com last year, entitled “Blood in the Thread.” That was pretty nuts and lots of nice people read it! It is now in two Best Of 2021 anthologies, one with Tor.Com and another with Neon Hemlock. Radical.
Another short story, “Monsters Calling Home” found a place in a horror anthology, What One Wouldn’t Do, edited by Scott J. Moses, which became a whole physical book that you can buy. Wild!
I somehow got a literary agent through all of this, which also seems like a prolonged hallucination and yet it continues to be so in reality. The good news is this has enabled me to work on two short novellas (one a botanical space horror, the other a queer, mecha Urashima Taro retelling), and a whole mess of a novel that will be something, someday, maybe. The bad news is that to do dangerous things like follow my dreams or whatever, I have to give up this crazy rewarding job with LIS.
Thanks for letting me run around asking questions, sharing questionable YouTube videos, learning a bunch of stuff about the UH System (a never-ending labyrinth), doing a bunch of things as the Kid Behind the Curtain, teaching a class (haha, whose idea was that?), and basically having fun for the past four years. It’s been a really good time.
Thus, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams: So long, and thanks for all the fish.