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.
More about Amy
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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Fake Drake, boxing, and Byron.
“May you live in interesting times,” says an apocryphal Chinese curse. And for a Romanticist writing about Byron, boxing, and the celebrity culture of Regency England, the news that AI can now fake even more human creations is “interesting” indeed. Now AI has made a “song” by Drake and The Weeknd that neither artist authorized […]
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Almost too easy.
Teaching can be a challenge. But then life hands you an event that banishes questions about the “relevance” of multiple texts you’re teaching, all at once. Come for the Frankenstein, stay for the Half-Earth, Our Malady, and Nineteen Eighty-four. (With a side of Mrs. Dalloway – what IS that thing in the sky everyone’s looking […]
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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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