Note: I submitted this article for the monthly English Department Newsletter. This blog post includes an updated graphic.
For over a month now, I’ve posted a YouTube video each day. Teaching virtual classes with students I never see in person stole away one of my greatest joys of teaching – holding books up at the front of the room, enthusiastically telling students about them, and passing them around the room for people to decide if they would like to read them. My book talks died out in the virtual environment. I tried. I used the Goodreads.com website to show books and shared it on my screen to talk about the books during live sessions, but it felt less than ideal. Thus, around Halloween, I decided to start posting online book talks through YouTube (usually around 5 minutes long).
In addition to posting videos that could inspire my students, I found a really friendly community of people called #booktube, as well as authors who share writer’s craft videos and call themselves #authortube. The booktubers mostly post reviews, reading updates, book hauls, “To Be Read” (TBR) lists, and “tag” videos in which they answer questions and tag one another to answer the same questions. The authortubers often debate traditional publishing versus self-publishing issues and they answer questions with their inside information from their own successes and failures. Interacting with these communities has felt like being in heaven, but I must warn you my TBR list doubled in size in the last month.
The combination of these creative activities, along with participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Nonfiction November, has sparked a creative renaissance in my mind. I find myself not only reading more, but writing more as well (as evidenced by me writing this article).
Remember, every day is a good day for a book talk. Peace! – Jeremy
P.S. If you visit my YouTube channel, feel free to check out the Latino Club Cinco de Mayo festival videos from 2014 to 2019 and a video of the old LHS building’s final moments as what was left of the building collapsed down into a pile of rubble and dust (featuring screams of horror from Bessie Alexander).
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