...English and Writing

If you've made it this far, you must be a diehard.  Here is where I explain to you why I love English and writing with the white hot passion of a thousands suns.  Are you here by accident? Run while you still can.

I Heart English: by Mary Rogers

Well, I grew up speaking English.  So there's a start.  People tend to stick with ingrained practices.  Language is one example, religion is the other obvious one that comes to mind, but it also my be something as bizarre as why people prefer Legos over Megablocks, you just never know.

But now then:  I started writing, seriously, when I was in high school and oh, was it bad.  In fact, it's painful for me to re-read some of the things I wrote then.  But then again, sometimes it's painful for me to read what I wrote yesterday.  I'm the product of a lot of people who care about my success as a writer and, dare I say it, a scholar. Those people, already know who they are so I won't bore you with a thank you speech right now.  

I majored in English and Writing at McMurry University and it was at McMurry where I fell in love with a particular style of teaching as well as a particular style of learning.  Needless to say, I did great in some classes and not so hot in others.  But I gathered enough information to know that I really love information.  

Information is the real reason I love English.  Do you have any idea how many thousands of years of history and religion and culture inform the literature that we read today?  Did they make you read Hamlet way back when?  Did you hate Hamlet?  I hated Hamlet too!  That was, until I figured out that without writers from hundred of years before Shakespreare, Hamlet never would have existed, and that's because you have to know the background not only of the writer but of the time period and the culture and the EVERYTHING.  Research makes me giddy.  For my final class in Shakespreare, I ended up reading the Catholic Catechism (by choice, mind you) because catholicism informs Shakespeare and his writings.  And if you know that the Immaculate Conception is really the conception of Mary and not of the baby Jesus, then you can understand so. many. more. references that Shakespeare makes.  

But Shakespeare and catholicism are just examples.  Pretty much every book that was ever worth it's weight as a hard back is informed by past literature, and that my friends, is mind blowingly awesome.

I once had a professor that made us read poems (hundreds* of poems).  One of my favorites (how nerdy is that?  I have favorite poems...) is by Alfred Lord Tennyson, here's a snippet:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Glreams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

And THAT is why I love Literature.  Everytime you learn something, every experience you encounter only moves you further and further from your end-goal.  The more you learn the more you realize how much more there is to learn.  

Now then.  All that lofty talk about Shakespeare and never getting to where you want to go is great and all, but this whole English thing doesn't seem very practical.  And you're right.  It's not very practical.  But practicality is so boring!  If I wanted to be practical, I'd stay where I am and crunch numbers for the rest of my days.  

Instead: The end goal is the obtain a Ph.D in English and Literature and secure teaching (I prefer not to clean toilets) job at a university somewhere below the 38th latitude, because let's face it: no one likes the cold.  The University of Hawaii would be an excellent choice.  This warm weather vs cold weather thing is really just for the solidity of my marriage.  My husband likes to live life on the edge, but he does not like the cold.

Beyond teaching, I'm also interested in writing grants, specifically for non-profit organizations.  I have a heart for people in Uganda, orphans in Russia, young women in Sudan, and kiddos who want an education but don't have the means here in the United States.  After lots of hemming and hawing I've realized that helping organizations who help others may be the best use of my writing skills, and those abound, or so I've been told.

*and by hundreds, I really mean about 50.