Note: It’s Throwback Thursday! For this week’s episode, to fan fic or not to fan fic? In these times of AO3, it seems like a silly question, but in 2009, it was a thing. And yes, back then? It was often a gendered distaste. Despite fan fiction creating a line of best-selling Star Trek novels, despite fan fiction basically dating back to Jane Austen if not earlier (what is Northanger Abbey if not YA fan-fic?), Read more…
Look, I know you’ll get it. Yes, you. You’ll get it because you wrote Beowulf fan-fic too (about Wiglaf and also Scyld Scefing), and you translated Beowulf in college, and you have written about how the Old English poem The Wanderer and the folksong Wayfaring Stranger are doing the same things, just one thousand years apart. So yeah, you get it. When a new translation of Beowulf comes out, you read it with great relish Read more…
In 1984, I had just graduated with my BA in English from Marist College (Go Red Foxes!). I was ill-equipped for setting out in the world, to say the least. A shy, plain English major, who didn’t want to be a teacher (at the time, whenever someone asked me my major, the follow up question was, “Oh, so you want to be a teacher?”), who didn’t know what she wanted, I entered the world with Read more…