Now that the 2018 spring semester is over and I’ve gotten past the always-surprising empty feeling of not knowing what to do with nothing much to do, I’m starting to think about what’s next.

Teaching: That’s easy. This summer I’ll teach ENGL 2110: American Literature I in Summer I and ENGL 3956: Fairy Tales for the Ages in Summer II. Then in Fall 2018, I’ll teach ENGL 4012: American Novel (Gothic Edition), ENGL 5500: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, and ENGL 5950: Methods of Research. I’ll also direct one honors thesis. So, that’s the rest of the year taken care of as far as teaching goes.

Academic Writing (Scholarship): Co-editors Robert Battistini and Karen Weyler and I will, I hope, complete the editing of The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1801-1807, Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Charles Brockden Brown. I have a number of projects that I’ll eventually go ahead with, but I don’t feel pressured to do so in the immediate future. I want to write an essay on a little known early American poet named Samuel Joseph Smith. I will complete (and attempt to publish) an edition of a little remembered nineteenth-century American novel by Catherine Ann Warfield titled The Household of Bouverie; or, The Elixir of Gold (1860). I would eventually like to write and publish a significant essay or a monograph on American Indian literature.

Creative Writing: I’m three short stories away from completing a twelve-story collection tentatively titled A Twilight Reel. The collection is a made up of often interrelated stories that take place over a year in Runion, Madison County, North Carolina, my “little postage stamp of earth.” Each of the twelve stories takes place in a different month in 1999. I’ve completed drafts of the stories for January, February, March, April, July, August, September, October, and November. So, most every day this summer, I’ll be working on the stories for May, June, and December, each of which is in some stage of drafting.

I have some significant work done on two different novels: A Summer Abroad and Antaeus. Although the latter is the more advanced — at over 230 pages so far — I recently realized that this should probably be the third in a group of novels featuring a character currently named Ezra MacRae. As a result of this realization, I’m also beginning another novel — tentatively titled Chart Hits — to be the first featuring MacRae. Not sure how that will play out. The other piece, A Summer Abroad, is based on the summer of 1979, which I spent traveling around Europe with AESU 616.

Finally, I have a batch of (mostly) new songs that I hope to recored together as a new album sometime in the next year. One song, “Freedom, Love, and Forgiveness,” is older — from the 1990s — but in recent years it has been revitalized as Leesa and I sing it together. A new song that seems to be grabbing people’s attention is “Complaints.” A couple of songs grew out of lines that Gabriel Tanner writes in Gabriel’s Songbook; I liked the fragments I wrote for the novel, so I fleshed them out in to full songs: “Siren, Sing” and “Catch That Train.”

I guess I’m planning like I’m in my thirties, even though I’ll turn sixty this year. I’m certainly happy to have accomplished all I have so far, but chasing all these other projects seem to keep me vital and happy.