Whoever, wherever, whenever you are, welcome! I’m so glad our paths are crossing, if only for this brief moment …
I am an English professor in New York City. My interdisciplinary interests and expertise bridge happiness studies & well-being, science fiction & utopia, self-care & social hope, education & pedagogy, parapsychology, medical humanities, “invisible” illness, healing, grief, trauma, writing studies, digital humanities, critical data studies, storytelling, tarot, astrology, and nature.
I’m a teacher. I’m a researcher. I’m a writer. I’m also a musician and a poet. A tarot reader. A mystic. An intuitive. An empath. A skeptic and a cynic and an idealistic dreamer, all at once. My soul and work are full of tears and laughter and love and loss and joy and pain and silence and words; all the sunshine, all the stars, & all the stories.
I’ve been on an improbable, mystical journey for many years. Living alone in a tent in the wilderness, writing to heal, navigating grief and overlapping illnesses, finding my calling, weaving stories, wandering, wallowing, processing loving losing learning failing flailing growing unburdening dying birthing. Transforming and transmuting. Expanding.
You’re meeting me at a point in my journey when every aspect of my life is in transition. Where timelines are converging & synchronicities are everywhere. It is poignant and inspiring and overwhelming and humbling jumbled jarring and beautiful.
I am working to integrate these experiences and the many layers of my soul through writing a memoir entitled Beautiful War. I’m leaning in hard, desiring & embodying a shift from the academic to the embodied, moving (to borrow from e.e. cummings) from the “best gesture of my brain” to losing “the syntax of things.”
now I am not what I was when the word was forming to say what I am
– William Carlos Williams (The Great American Novel)
I’ve been so deeply immersed in the beauty and power and limits of language. Something is emerging that I can sense, that I’m shaping, but its contours aren’t clear and its destination undetermined. I’m experimenting with form and content. It’s all in process: the work, myself, this space. It is — like the memoir, my soul, the etymology of my last name — a beautiful war. I welcome it all.
And now I welcome you into it. I’ve been so protective of the journey, of the story, of what I’ve lost and who I’m becoming, but the time has come to share it all with the world.
This is an offering. An invitation. Know that you are welcome here, in whatever way feels aligned. You are welcome to engage or expand or support or challenge or cheer or bypass or reflect or heal or love or share or connect or collaborate.
I welcome it all, and I welcome you all. Enjoy the wandering …