Photo courtesy of Sidney Chansamone

I feel like a first post should set the tone, but since these essays exist precisely to fill in the cracks around the Big Important Academic Things that I’m meant to do, I can’t say what that tone is.

So, let’s call this the introduction. I’ve even opted to put this under the “About” section.

Officially, I’m working on a PhD in American Literature. I have taught composition and survey courses, though I now work as a Graduate Editor at The Georgia Review, and I’m semi-qualified to comment on American lit and some other culturally adjacent things. Maybe even some writing pedagogy, though I speak only from experience, not from study. I’m also from Florida, live in the South, went to a women’s college in NYC, am part of a union in a right-to-work state, was briefly a very unsuccessful but prestigiously represented model, am obsessed with the problems and pleasures of beauty, and have a lot of feelings about lifted, chromed-out pick-up trucks (they’re a symbol of what is wrong with the modern South).

The Big Important Academic Thing, my dissertation, is about my home state. Figuring out how it went from paradise to pariah in the American narrative. Expect to see small musings from that.

Otherwise, expect ramblings on Southern things, lady things, beauty, worker’s rights, and whatever else gets stuck in my brain. Like most academics, I’ve got an anxiety disorder whose constant churn helps me find strange connections but also will keep me up for hours planning dinner parties for people I’m too embarrassed to ask over. Some essays will be personal, some more purely academic; the majority will be a mixture of both. Usually, these essays will be related to something happening in our shared cultural moment. Let me be that one friend who falls down research holes and then presents my findings—it’ll be just like high school, when I gave you a brief synopsis of 75 pages of Brighton Rock in the four-minute break between second and third period.

The writing is free to whomever wants it—but if you’d like to throw a couple of bucks my way, I’d appreciate it. Eventually, a monthly podcast called “The Book Club” will be available exclusively to subscribers as well.

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