Praeterita

So I was on a panel at Columbia College Chicago's Story Week Festival, and above is a rough cut of the video that was shot during the event. By the way, that opening image is of Dan Sinker, the journalist who did the whole fake Rahm Emmanuel Twitter account thing. Two points: a) he teaches at Columbia College; b) if you don't follow American politics or know about the recent Chicago mayoral election, you won't know what the hell I'm talking about. The whole video gives you clips of the events that took place throughout the day. If you can't wait, and want to skip to the part where Patty introduces our panel, it's at about the 4 minute 38 second mark. The panel I was on was called Story and the Arts. Patty (my wife, the writer whose debut short story collection has just been published, Associate Professor in the Fiction Writing department, etc) had the idea of asking people who work in a broad range of disciplines at Columbia to give 15 minute presentations about...