Amy E. Weldon
Writer. Teacher. Seeker.
Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, is professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and codirector of its biennial Luther College Writers Festival. She is the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save The World (Cascade Books, 2018), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (Bowen Press Books, 2019), and Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2023.
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I describe my own goals with two interrelated Teaching Verbs: destabilize and rebuild. They aren’t what I do to students—they are what I help students do with their own assumptions, ideas, and skills.
The Cheapskate Intellectual
A journey through matters of spirit, sustainability, and self-reliance
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Frankenstein’s GPT.
On Valentine’s Day 2023, an AI chatbot came to life. A NYT tech writer named Kevin Roose engaged it in conversation. It told him its name was Sydney. And then – apparently out of nowhere – it confessed it wanted to crash the internet. It wanted to dominate the world. [Adding a devil emoji – […]
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Mycelia, manuscripts, and me: 360 degrees of life.
“[We must think of fungi] not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” – Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures Fungi burst borders and boundaries. Of matter, of thought, of mental categories. They tendril between previously discrete things […]
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Hilary Mantel, 1952-2022: Monsters, mentors, inspirations.
This is the book – and this is the writer – to whom I owe everything. When did The Giant, O’Brien cross my path? Sometime around my transition from 20th c. MA to 21st c. Ph.D student, when I was devising scholarly research topics and writing and publishing short stories on the side and groping […]
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