A shorter clip of this was posted on Facebook earlier in the year, and it resonated with me. So I decided to watch the longer version of the YouTube clip of a commencement speech given by J.K. Rowling on the subject of the unexpected benefits of failure. 

The beginning of the New Year is typically the time we begin to re-evaluate the past year and make up our minds to better ourselves in the future. But we often have difficulty admitting defeat, even to ourselves, because in our modern society failure carries a negative connotation rather than a positive one. But perhpas it should be different. It's normal to feel some negativity and self-loathing after failing, but that should not last long. It should be soon followed by positive re-focusing of one's energies to strive to be better next time. Joanne nails these points in her own brilliant way. 

It's a little longer than the clip posted on Facebook, but well worth watching. The author of the famous Harry Potter series talks about the most valuable lesson she ever learned in one of the best commencement speeches I've ever heard. 

I've been meaning to post this talk of Joanne's for awhile now, but today it hits home more, so I'm finishing this post and sharing it with the world. Because sometimes you need silver linings when the rainbow fades to pale. 

​May we shoulder onward through our defeats and come out victorious in the end!

This is a crossover post from my Senior Portfolio class from last Fall 2015 semester. I am posting it here because I know a lot of my reader friends dig reading cool free stores online. Researching things like this is pretty much what my Senior Capstone was all about.

Source: Jones, Josh. "100 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Women Writers (Read 20 for Free Online)." Open Culture: The Best Free Cultural & Educational Media on the Web. N.p., 1 Aug. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.


Link: http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/the-100-best-sci-fi-stories-by-women-writers.html


The whole list of 100 best sci-fi stories by women can be found here: http://iansales.com/2013/07/10/the-list-100-great-science-fiction-stories-by-women/

Researching other resources for this project of planning a class in women's speculative fiction goes has been intense and educational for me. Research for this project goes beyond the standard critical journal articles on theory or analysis. Sometimes you have other ideas for how to view your audience. 

Now, who is my audience, beyond the literature professors here at USFSP who will be viewing the course Google Site I created for the project and who I will be presenting for at the send of the semester? The answer is, of course, any future students who decide that want to cast their lot with me and spend a semester reading and discussing otherworldly, fantastic, and creepy books and stories. I know they will be college students. And as a college student myself, I know that many of them will be flat broke and working two-to-three part time jobs just to afford to sit in my classroom. Therefore, I have determined to make it one of my personal goals to make the course reading materials as cheap as possible, and you can't get any cheaper than free! 

I just happened today to do a general Google search on "best women science fiction short stories" and the first result was the link posted above from a free educational blog. The article was posted by a gentleman, I'm going to assume he is a literature teacher based on the other articles he has posted to Open Culture (I found those by clicking on his byline link at the end of the article). The article contains information about a list compiled on another man in the field of science fiction. The original poster's page had a list of one-hundred of the best science fiction short stories written by women, along with a link to see where the stories could be found: anthology, collection, or online sources were given. Mr. Josh Jones took this list and narrowed it down to only those stories which could be read online for FREE. Mr. Jones' list is comprised of twenty stories that can be read online for free. Don't you just love the Internet? I do. 

Mr. Jones' article was posted to Open Culture in August 2013, so there is the possibility that some of the links don't work anymore. I'm going to have to check them all, and if I use any of them they will have to be checked periodically to make sure they are still active. I know from the experience of being a student that there is nothing more frustrating than having reading assignments online and when you click the links to read them...ERROR! FILE NOT FOUND! Going to do my damnedest as a professor to avoid that scenario. 

There are short stories on this list that I may add to the reading canon, namely: ‘The Cartographer Bees and the Anarchist Wasps’ by E Lily Yu, ‘Spider the Artist’ by Nnedi Okrafor, ‘Eros, Philia, Agape’ by Rachel Swirsky, ‘A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel’ by Yoon Ha Lee, and ‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars’ by Mary Robinette Kowal. Of the original one-hunded story list, five of them are on my canon already. I need to evaluate more of them.