Collaboration in the Writing Classroom

"Collaboration in the Writing Classroom: Can Pedagogy and Technology Get Along?" is now available via Google Docs. The slideshow is part of a teaching demonstration RBM delivered to The Denver Writing Project in June.

What Endured

Below you can view cover artwork designed by RBM for Writings from the 2009 Summer Institute, an anthology of The Denver Writing Project. The shoes depicted belong to RBM's extended family in Guatemala, circa 1960.

Check back here for the text of RBM's contribution to the anthology, "What Endured: Looking for Boyhood Lost at Sea."

A Meeting of Storytellers

In July RBM will attend the 2009 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, outside Dallas. Two of the conference's keynote addresses, by travel writer Paul Theroux and This American Life host Ira Glass, are open to the public. There's more information and a link to tickets online at the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism at the University of North Texas.

Check back in the coming weeks for a story RBM has submitted to the conference, about the ethics of manufacturing human hair, from Asia, into American retail products.

The Stories the Writer Knows to Be True in His Life

A slideshow and an essay RBM presented to the 2009 Federation Rhetoric Symposium in Commerce, Texas, is now available via Google Docs. Above: midnight on presentation day.

Where Faculty Must Buy Their Own Paperclips

Update: a 2009 interview by RBM with four Colorado State University composition scholars is now available via Google Docs. For current issues of the CSU English Department's Freestone, visit the department's new website.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale; or, Into the Wild

On Saturday, April 4, Colorado State University's English Department will host its annual Graduate Literary Criticism Symposium. Below you'll find the full schedule of on-campus panels, which are free and open to the public.

Update:  RBM's submission, "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale; or, Into the Wild," is now available via Google Docs.

Royal Gorge Games 2008

One weekend each year, in late summer, dozens of men and women whose first passion is to drop from cliffs and skyscrapers gather quietly in southern Colorado. Their "exit point," with a bungee cord or without, is the world's highest suspension bridge.

Update -- along with the photos below, an essay by RBM on the gathering can now be found at Suss.

Slideshow: Royal Gorge Games 2008

Postscript (Feb. 8, 2010) -- There's news today that Emmar Properties, builder of a tower envied by BASE jumpers worldwide, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has indefinitely closed mankind's tallest structure just a month after its opening. The BBC reports the shutdown comes after "an unexpectedly high number of visitors and problems with the power supply."

In January, days after the opening, two men from the United Arab Emirates, Nasr Al Niyadi and Omar Al Hegelan, set a new record for the highest building BASE jump by leaping from a crane at the Burj Khalifa's 160th floor (2,205 feet). Below, a montage of their jumps, which were sanctioned by Emmar Properties: