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andrewduval.bsky.social
Andrew Duval
@andrewduval.bsky.social
370 followers 420 following 180 posts
Layer enthusiast. Teaching middle schoolers to write at Frankenstories.org.
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andrewduval.bsky.social
Recently spent 2 weeks in the US, teaching Frankenstories writing classes at 6 schools across 3 states. Feeling super buoyant; the students and teachers were so enthusiastic, and we learned a lot from each other. Here’s a video that captures a small slice of the classroom energy.
November 29, 2025 at 12:35 PM
andrewduval.bsky.social
HOW TO ESTABLISH A DENTAL FLOSSING ROUTINE THAT WILL MAKE YOUR DENTIST WEEP FOR JOY

For everyone who voted for our SXSW EDU workshop on improv ideas for whole-class writing, here is the killer flossing advice I promised.
MY GOLD STAR FLOSSING ADVICE. A smiling tooth. A note to say you should read the whole post but if you want the short answer it's floss in the morning and make brushing a reward for flossing.
November 27, 2025 at 12:57 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
SXSW EDU Update: Our "Improv ideas to transform class writing" workshop was accepted, so @biblioracle.bsky.social , Danielle Witten, and I will be in Austin on Mar 11 delivering something fun. (I hope.) Thanks to everyone who voted for us! 🎭 🎉 And...
Screenshot of SXSW session record for "Using Improv Ideas to Transform Your Class Writing"
November 27, 2025 at 12:41 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
@thevogelman.bsky.social fyi I was spruiking Poetry Pauses at an Australian English teachers workshop last week. I recommended four books but said of “all of them, stop what you’re doing and buy Poetry Pauses, it’s excellent and will make you think about poetry in a cross-genre way”
Workshop photo from back of room with four recommended books on projector: Poetry Toolbox, Ode Less Travelled, Wishes Lies and Dreams, Poetry Pauses
November 23, 2025 at 9:12 PM
andrewduval.bsky.social
A meme depicting a crowd of swimmers running from the ocean while a giant cat dominates the horizon. The swimmers are labelled with fields of study such as history, biology, sociology etc. The kaiju cat wields lightning and is labelled “epistemology”.
October 31, 2025 at 10:56 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
And one with a moire pattern in the bg to mimic the scan lines on your book cover (though I can't find a similar straight line pattern, and I'm not making one 😂)
August 18, 2025 at 1:35 PM
andrewduval.bsky.social
I meant to post this earlier, but I was thinking your graphics could use a little less-is-more streamlining. Here are some alts.
August 18, 2025 at 1:35 PM
andrewduval.bsky.social
Hey, if anyone wants to do me a favour, can you pop over to the SXSW EDU Panelpicker and drop a vote for a workshop proposal I'm doing with @biblioracle.bsky.social and Danielle Witten?

Just click this link, create an account, and slam that heart button: participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
SXSW EDU 2026 VOTE NOW PANELPICKER PROPOSAL COMMUNITY VOTING AUGUST 5–24: Using Improve Ideas to Transform Student Writing with John Warner, Danielle Witten and Andrew Duval
August 10, 2025 at 10:30 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
May 26, 2025 at 9:28 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
Testing new random text & image prompt pairings in Frankenstories and coughed up an almond on this one
Random Frankenstories text and image pair. The text says, "Imagine they are the new Santa", while the image is a gloomy CSI-style crime scene photo with detectives, forensics, and a body under a sheet.
May 19, 2025 at 2:29 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
CHALLENGE 2 (Harder): Munitionette goes dancing after work
By day, my hands are raw from solvents, blackened at the edges from graphite, and red-creased where the gloves rub too tight. We’re packed shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the munitions plant, the machines roaring so loud you have to shout to be heard. We churn out shell casings like clockwork—precision, focus, and no room for error. One wrong move, and someone down the line could pay for it in blood. I measure twice, press once, and count every screw like a prayer. At 6:00 sharp, the bell shrieks and we scatter, lungs full of powdery air, hair clumped with sweat. I bike home through the dusk with my dress stuffed in a paper bag, the streets dim with rationed light. My skin smells of metal and fatigue, but by 8:00 I’m someone else entirely. A touch of powder, a swipe of crimson on my lips, the careful tug of silk stockings up my thighs. My fingers, stained from the factory, hide behind white gloves. My curls are pinned just so, and I slip into the club like a polished gem. In the dim light and jazz haze, I become the woman they think they know—sugar-voiced, feather-light, someone whose most pressing concern is whether to waltz or fox-trot. They don’t ask about my days, not really. They ask where I buy my shoes. They tell me to be careful, sweetheart. They say the war is no place for a girl like me. I nod and smile, sip my gin fizz, and think about how I spent the morning threading detonators into 75-millimeter shells. I can feel the world shifting under our heels. More men gone every month, more women filing in beside me on the factory floor. Once, I danced beside soldiers. Now, it’s girls in overalls and borrowed dresses, laughing louder, holding each other up. I wonder if someday the whole floor will be full of women like me, not waiting to be asked, but claiming the dance for ourselves. I think about the other side sometimes. The German girls—because there must be German girls—bending over machines just like mine, pressing wires into explosives with careful h… STORY 2B With delicate white fingertips, she squeezes three drops of lime juice into her gin. Her fingers have no trace of grease, soot, or cordite. An hour to clean them. Wholly satisfying. Under the howl of trumpets, he talks about her kissable mouth. Proffers a cigarette while his glistening eyes dribble down her bare neck. Leans too close. He doesn’t know she's a factory girl. Can't conceive of it. She can tell by the way he tries to shield her from other men. He can't imagine that four hours ago, her sleeveless dress was a denim boiler suit; her bobbed brown hair was plastered with sweat; her silk pumps were wooden clogs protecting her soles from a foundry floor so hot it burns leather shoes straight off your feet. He’s seen her foxtrotting. He hasn’t seen her with fifty other sweaty girls, machining shells destined for German flesh in Ypres. He is oblivious but insistent, so Marjorie humours him. She’s here to dance with women, but she’s patient. Each week, the ratio between the sexes widens, as two by two the men are led to war. She finishes her drink and lets him lead her back to the dance. By her count, in six weeks this club will be as free as the foundry. This man will be in Europe, where even now a German girl just like Marjorie is rendering the instrument of his death, smiling in anticipation of her own night on the dance floor. STORY 2C The powder clings to her skin, yellow as old bruises. Every shift leaves her luminous, marked like a ghost. At the dance hall, she watches the lights jitter across lacquered shoes, lace collars, vacant eyes. The men look at her like they’ve earned her just by surviving this long. “Smile, love,” one says, already sliding his hand toward her hip. She gives him the kind of smile that isn’t a smile at all. She dances anyway, with Eileen, whose wrists are fine-boned as matchsticks and who knows how to lead. They move close, whispering, nothing flirtatious, just a hush in the roar. They step in rhythm to scratchy records and the steady churn of grief beneath the floorboards. A soldier stumbles past, uniform smelling of sweat and damp wool, eyes glassy with gin. His friend’s missing half a face. They nod at her like she’s part of the scenery. “You’ll dance with her but not with us?” someone jeers. She doesn’t answer. The song ends. Eileen presses her palm briefly—warm, certain—and disappears into the crowd. Later, in the alley, she smokes. Her fingertips glow like a warning. One man approaches, fumbling with a match, his smile all need and nerves. She turns her head. In the pause, he seems to shrink—like the men at the factory, blurred outlines before the siren calls them to vanish into the smoke. She flicks ash, watches it fall. Somewhere, distant thunder. Or maybe not thunder at all.
May 12, 2025 at 3:47 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
CHALLENGE 1 (Easy): A post-apocalyptic prenatal ski heist
Lyra adjusted her goggles against the stinging midnight sand, the curved moon casting enough light to trace Soren's silhouette ahead. Their twin shadows stretched across rippled dunes that had swallowed this city decades ago. The weathered hickory skis cut silent paths through fine-grained powder. "Three minutes," Soren whispered, squeezing her hand. His palm brushed her swollen belly through layers of patched thermals. The half-buried mall loomed ahead, massive concrete pillars jutting from sand like ancient monuments. Rusted metal signs creaked in the night wind. "Remember, I'll be at the north entrance before second moonset." Lyra patted the sealed pouch of rot-meat, pungent even through the airtight polymer. "Waste crabs can't resist this." Soren checked the makeshift blade strapped to his thigh. "Just be careful. Nothing heroic." "Says the man breaking into a deathzone for baby skis," she teased, but leaned to kiss him fiercely. They parted—Lyra carving wide, graceful arcs across the open expanse. Behind her, the clicks and chittering grew louder as waste crabs emerged, scuttling sideways with their translucent shells and too-many eyes. Soren slipped sideways through a sandblasted service entrance, timing his movements with Lyra's distant whoops. Twenty minutes later, they reconvened, breathless, skiing fast toward the horizon. In Soren's pack: a pair of pristine children's skis, red plastic still bright against the colourless world. "For when the dunes become playgrounds," he panted. Lyra's hand found his, fingers interlocking as they glided forward under falling stars. They arrived after midnight, with the moon falling bright as a flare overhead and the dunes ebbing the day’s last heat. From the roof of a ruined Chipotle, they scanned the half-buried mega-mall with a spyglass and noted: Hoarder guards; dotted campfires; possible entrances. He would attack here; she would enter there. The wind was good. They didn't have long. They unwrapped the bait, gagging. Maika buried the stinking-but-valuable plastic bag to collect on their way out. Sitting upwind, they held hands and talked of the baby. Jamal smiled at the insistent elbow-bulge in Maika's domed belly. Then, as empty buildings downwind began to rattle with claws, they kissed and parted. Jamal paraded the bait west of the mall, skiing between sand-choked ruins, a hundred decaying rats dangling from the rod over his shoulder. And the waste crabs sprang dog-like from abandoned condos and scuttled after him, a frenzied, jagged, hungry tide. At the mall, legs burning, Jamal herring-boned up a sandbank piled against an unguarded wall. The crabs scrabbled onto the roof behind him, until finally, at the collapsed glass dome, breathless, he lobbed the rats inside and the waste crabs streamed after, falling into campfires and the startled screams of the Hoarders. His heart was still hammering when Maika glided back to Chipotle. "Done," she said, holding up two pristine pairs of skis: one child-sized, as planned—and one larger. "For her to grow into," Maika grinned. Jamal kissed her. "Our girl," he said. "Our precious girl."
May 12, 2025 at 3:47 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
Last week, I had a lot of fun presenting "Bot or Not?: The tell-tale signs of AI writing" at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English Middle Years Conference.

In the workshop, we tried to determine whether short pieces of text, in a variety of genres, were written by a human or an LLM.
May 12, 2025 at 3:47 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
Here's an industry paper he authored in 2007: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Extract: Our research shows that under a medium range greenhouse gas environment, it is expected that there will be an increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones over the Australian region and that these cyclones will move further south. This has serious implications for the heavily populated areas of coastal southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales as it implies that return periods of severe tropical cyclones (Cat 3+) could be halved on average over the 2000–2050 period.
March 5, 2025 at 2:46 AM
andrewduval.bsky.social
As Brisbane-Home-of-Bluey gets hit with its first cyclone in 50 years, I think about how 20 years ago I worked for IAG, where CEO Mike Hawker tried to push the AUS gov on climate change policy, saying global warming will drive cyclones south and the nation is not prepared for a Brisbane wipeout.
Radar of tropical cyclone Alfred rolling towards Brisbane
March 5, 2025 at 2:44 AM