Hello everyone out there!
It's been a long time since I have posted to this blog site. I am fortunate that blogspot has forgiven me and not relinquished my membership. Things have been busy.
Last semester I had seven classes to teach. Three of them were at Seneca College's Markham campus and three of them were at Seneca College's York campus. I also taught a beat reporting class with the University of Toronto Scarborough campus (UTSC) and Centennial College's Journalism program. I co-taught that class with Ellin Bessner who is excellent to work with. I had a lot of fun and the semester was great. Of course there was some anxiety working on the front lines as a teacher with H1N1 being such a huge deal for many people. It was an interesting experience to navigate through the health issues of some of the students, plus dealing with my own bout of flu, that was not H1N1.
This semester has been extremely interesting. I am teaching two news announcing courses at Seneca College's York campus. Plus, I am teaching a magazine journalism course with UTSC-Centennial. This year, the magazine journalism students have a chance to get their stories published on my magazine Donna Magazine. As well, I started working at George Brown College teaching skills for college English. It is in the continuing education program and this is my first time teaching in the continuing education. I must say the students are great and I am truly enjoying the experience. Many years ago, I used to be a student taking an acting course at George Brown College. I have also taken French courses in continuing education at Concordia University - so I am not a stranger to continuing education.
There are many exciting things I have been up to. I have now written 35 books. My latest one is called Smoking. Even though I have not stopped smoking, I wanted to write something that would still help those people see how they could quit by including stories from people who have successfully quit. In my mind - I have set my quit date - and it will happen. I will write it down when I have a calendar that goes that far to make sure it is the exact date I would want.
I have also started a new online portal called Donna Magazine's Salon Utopia. It's a place for me to showcase some of the files I was able to salvage from the master's research I did at Concordia University that ended in part with my graduation in 1999. It's been fun to set up that site and I did it all myself. I did receive some excellent technical guidance from Register.com, HostPapa, my hosting company, and motivation from Kent James who I also did a story on for Suite101.com.
I have some writing work I am doing for an NGO, plus some other plans in the works. I am working on publishing another book soon and have been busy promoting my efforts. Having your own business is a lot of work - however, I would not call what I do completely a one-woman show. Many people do help in their own way.
Well...there's the update from me on how things have been going. Thanks to my student Jennifer Winters at George Brown College who helped to inspire me to update this blog. I will certainly make more of an effort to do so. For daily content, please do check out Donna Magazine.
