The prompt for today was about syllabus-writing… but I’m not writing syllabuses anymore (although if I were, MYFest ideas and strategies would be all over the place!). So, since that prompt wasn’t relevant, I picked one that I wanted to do instead: the dinner party defying time and space. I have learned about new authors and educators this summer, while also deepening my understanding of people I had heard of before. Now I want to have dinner with them!

So, it was hard just to limit myself to 5 people to invite (I now have a dining room table that seats 6)… so here are the 5 guests I would so like to sit down and talk with: Octavia Butler and adrienne maree brown (who came up repeatedly in MYFest contexts, but especially thanks to Heather and Karen), along with Gloria Anzaldúa (whom I learned about from Felecia in the Dark Matter y la Facultad workshop) and Grace Lee Boggs (whom I learned about from Mia), and also my beloved Ashley Bryan, whose voice we got to hear thanks to the magic of video recording in one of the Readers Theater sessions (together with Helen too!).

Oh my gosh, I get the shivers just thinking about the magic that could result from those writers, thinkers, educators, storytellers, activists there at the same table together. I would be enraptured. 🙂

And hey, since we are defying time and space here, we could also defy the size of my dinner table, so I could also invite Felecia and Mia and Karen and Heather and Helen, who are my MYFest links to these brilliant, beautiful people. How awesome would that be???

Images used in the collage:
Gloria Anzaldua from Flickr
Ashley Bryan at NPR
adrienne maree brown at Wikimedia
Octavia Butler at Wikimedia
Grace Lee Boggs at Wikimedia