Landing here did not involve a glamorous journey.

Typical, yes, but definitely not glamorous:

Girl goes to college to become a professional bibliophile. Girl realizes this is not a thing. Girl graduates with a BA in English with a concentration in Writing and a minor in French instead. Girl turns her nose up at editing jobs. Girl goes to graduate school to spend more time writing and pro-bibliophiling. Girl graduates with an MFA in Creative Writing and $60,000 in student loan debt. Girl cries to college advisor that it will be impossible to pay for all the writing she did. College advisor offers girl a job as an adjunct. Girl thinks that sounds fancy. Girl is very, very wrong, and spends a decade teaching hundreds of freshman at a dozen different college campuses, sometimes eight or nine classes in a semester, sometimes for as little as four dollars an hour. And remember, girl wanted to WRITE, not do math.

Happy ending: Girl turns out to love teaching. Girl is neither fancy now nor rich nor a successful writer. But she does get up every morning excited to go to school.

Teaching core classes to college freshmen is always a special experience—you get hope and idealism and sheer energy wound together with fear and insecurity and fresh, uninked looseleaf. You get wide eyes and reluctant writers and disorganized notes and first-ever Bs and faster growth than you can even make sense of.

Then there are upper-level classes like Creative Writing Workshop and American Literature and Modern Speculative Fiction where students come to class because they love the subject, they’re curious about their professor, or they’re desperate for the credits. These are the students who prove that converting reluctant readers/writers/workshoppers is the greatest joy of teaching.

And then there’s the experience of teaching classes I’ve designed myself, which require minute attention from the first inkling to the final exam. Typically the least predictable, usually the most fun, and always the one that lets me feel like I really did become a professional bibliophile.

Courses I’ve Designed

  • Food & Literature

    Since pen first met parchment, food has served as inspiration and as a tool to enhance characterization, develop context, drive plot, and build imagery, and what better reason to spend a semester reading novels that excel at capturing the essence of food and cooking and their many effects on the cultures of the world?

    The course’s primary texts are Banana Heart Summer by Merlinda Bobis; Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes; Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel; The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister; and Dinner with Friends by Donald Marguiles. Every semester’s highlight is the array of dishes students serve with their final presentations.

  • The Personal Essay

    Personal essay is one of the most lively and resonant literary forms. It gives writers the opportunity to go beyond the boundaries of the standard essay by using various stylistic techniques including dialogue, setting, character, and a conversational tone.

    In this class, students learn to share experiences, observations, and beliefs in the narrative form. Like other forms of essay, a personal narrative’s success depends on the author’s use of structure, dialogue, point of view, detail, tense, tone, and style. Drawing on their own encounters in and surveillance of the world around them, students experiment with these tools and techniques to create a variety of personal narratives and, ultimately, a polished and publishable portfolio of their strongest pieces.

  • Bridge Seminar: <br> The Overstory

    Bridge Seminar was designed to close the gap in writing instruction and practice between the first-year writing courses interrupted in Spring 2020 and later coursework. It aimed to integrate the goals and topics of first-year courses, guiding students as they engaged in academic writing as a means of practicing close critical reading, thinking, argument, and revision.

    In this iteration of the course, we closely examined The Overstory by Richard Powers in conjunction with other environmental writing from the past two centuries. We focused on the role of literature in environmentalism and social change and considered our own ability and obligation to effect change.

  • Hamilton: <br> Legacy & Lyric

    Hamilton: An American Musical is based on Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, and it centers on legacy, lyric, memory, revision, language, and rhetoric–all essential themes for writers seeking to improve their craft. In this course, we consider the techniques Lin-Manuel Miranda used to create Hamilton, from relying on primary documents to consulting biographies to envisioning moments through the lens of a writer of historical fiction.

    Supporting readings include excerpts from The Federalist and other other selections from Hamilton's extensive writings; founding documents like Common Sense, The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution; critical work on Hamilton, the Chernow biography itself; selections of Lin-Manuel Miranda's writing; even a scene of Macbeth when there’s time. Course themes include sources and the ways they're used, legacy, language, race, immigration, class, gender, tragic heroism, and even the key use of a comma in an important Hamilton letter.