Yesterday, 6 May 2019, at the stroke of high noon, I uploaded my final grades for Spring 2019, so there’s another one in the books — the 18th of my academic years at East Tennessee State University.

It was a busy one! As teacher, writer, reader, editor, graduate program coordinator, colleague, etc., my life on campus scrambled headlong through the calendar from the Tuesday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in January through the graduation ceremony on Saturday, May the Fourth (and some intensive grading on Sunday and Monday).

Leesa & I selfie in front of the English door to Burleson Hall, ETSU

Here are the highlights:

  • Teacher: Two sections of ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865. Because I was picking up management of the English Honors-in-Discipline Program for a colleague who was on Non-Instructional Assignment (NIA or sabbatical), I was scheduled to teach only one section, but when budget problems arose just before the semester began, I picked up a second section of the same course to help out. I say they were the same course, but that’s not exactly true; one was live in the classroom, and the other was online. I had a good semester with sixty-some students; the live class had seven or eight students more than the online class. Both classes had terrific students in them. And, of course, some not so terrific. One observation from the semester (certainly not a blanket statement): the most disengaged, apathetic students (thankfully, only a few of them) tended to be white and Christian and male. I don’t know what that says, but sharing these characteristics myself, I found it more than a little disappointing.
  • Writer: Early in the semester, I did the final edit of “Brown’s Early Biographers and Reception, 1815-1940s,” an essay that I wrote as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. Throughout the semester, I also worked on the final three stories that completed the first draft of the short story collection that I have in progress. The collection, tentatively titled A Twilight Reel: Stories, is made up of twelve stories, each one taking place in a different month of 1999 and all set in and around historical and fictional Runion, NC (the “home” setting for Gabriel’s Songbook). I finished drafting “Decoration Day” (May) on 2/1/2019, “Conversion” (June) on 3/16/2019, and “Witness Tree” (December) on 5/3/2019. I continued rewarding work with other writers, who help me in various ways: Tess Lloyd, Tamara Baxter, Robert Kottage, Cate Strain, and Jeff Mann.
  • Reader: I read some great stuff this semester. I continue to work through a couple of things by Thomas Merton: daily readings from his journal and nightly readings in his spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. In addition to these and all that I read for ENGL 2110 (from indigenous American creation stories and trickster tales to the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson), I was able to read Possession by A. S. Byatt, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, Blood Harmony by Lana Austin, Chenoo by Joseph Bruchac, and The Overstory by Richard Powers.
  • Editor: My co-editors (Karen A. Weyler and Robert M. Battistini) made it through two intensive rounds (January and April) of “final” editing for The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1801-1807, volume three of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, which will be published sometime this summer. It’s a career project coming to what I hope is a graceful (and final) end; Karen, Robert, and I have been working on this scholarly edition for a dozen years (maybe more).
  • Assistant Chair for Graduate Studies: I managed and mentored and tested and signed off on a tremendous group of young colleagues in our Master of Arts Program in English, ten of whom graduated this past Saturday, May the Fourth. Congratulations to all!
Oh, yeah, I’m still a proud papa, of course. Raleigh graduated on May the Fourth with a Master of Arts in Brand and Media Strategy. Above, he and Lacy move into celebration mode after the ceremony in the ETSU mini-dome. Lacy earned her Master of Arts in English (yes, one of my crew). Leesa and I are very proud of them both, as are Lacy’s parents Mike and Debbie, who are somewhere just outside the frame.
  • Colleague: We were all caught up in the whirlwind of Spring 2019, but we managed a couple of good meals at El Charolais, some good meetings (as meetings go), many good moments, a terrific Spring Literary Festival, and more. I hope I was a good to and for my great colleagues. In my not-so-humble opinion, I work with the greatest group of people on the ETSU campus. Now, if we could only convince the administrative moneybags of that fact.