After completing my PhD, I worked for two years teaching academic writing as a lecturer at my graduate institution. My office – well, my cubicle, which I shared with the lovely Sarah Birge — was in the chemistry building. Directly outside the door was an emergency shower and a trauma blanket. On particularly trying teaching […]
My ten-year high school reunion was in 2009. I traveled back to Charlotte, North Carolina eager to see my close friends, harboring only a few secret desires that the demigods of high school vengeance had punished those who deserved a comeuppance. But I was anxious about the possibility of being plummeted, immediately and this time […]
The first book I ever taught to undergraduates was Jamaica Kincaid’s An Autobiography of My Mother. I was a TA in Terry Doody’s Twentieth-Century British Literature course at Rice University. That morning I had downed what was just a ridiculous amount of grape juice. I still don’t know why I did that. It did not end […]
So it turns out that, in addition to trying to exit important academic interviews through hotel bathrooms, I also fail spectacularly at keeping a regular blogging schedule. But in the spirit of Failing Loudly — meh. Whatever. Because after a (much needed) mid-August week of vacation at Lake Lure, North Carolina — home of the […]
Oh, dear readers. While my plan is to fail loudly once per week, this week a trip to Toronto for IRSCL happily interfered. And, while I was away, the University Press of Mississippi sent me the author’s copies of my forthcoming book, Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature! So I’m […]
I don’t remember precisely what we were talking about, but I do remember that I was in a seminar on eighteenth-century British literature during my first year of graduate school. This was the same seminar in which I called this gentleman ben-juh-min rather than ben-yah-meen, because of course I did. I mean, Walter Benjamin had been […]
Book Two* is tentatively titled How Children See, and me and Book Two? We’re currently in the honeymoon stage. I love Book Two with the uncritical and (ironically) blind adoration I only can feel for a project I haven’t really figured out yet. Me and Book Two? We’re wandering, pinkies linked, through farmers’ markets on Saturday mornings, […]
It took me two tries to get into graduate school. Year One was a wash, ending in an offer with no money to an institution in a city I couldn’t afford to live in — and an admit to the MA program, not the PhD program to which I’d applied. Year Two involved an awkward […]
Failing Loudly 