About Emily J.

When I was 3 years old, I asked my mom to teach me how to read.  Thinking I was too young, she told me that we could start learning when I was 4.  To her surprise, on my 4th birthday I said, “Mom, I’m ready to learn how to read now!”

I’ve been reading non-stop since then.  My tastes have gone from the Nancy Drew series, the Little House on the Prairie series, and Mary Higgins Clark mysteries, to Wallace Stegner, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Hardy.  I studied English (literature and editing) in college as both an undergraduate and graduate student.  Novels are my first passion, especially anything “classic.”  By that, I mean those canonized and important books by dead white men.  I am most drawn to the modernists and the realists, both British and American.

Despite my love of this literature, I found a new passion for forgotten female novelists of the modernist era (1914-1950) while writing my master’s thesis on Dorothy Whipple.  She is one of my favorite authors, despite Virago’s use of her work as the least important type of novel they would publish.  They often called this the Whipple line.  Many female novelists have been forgotten, but thanks to Persephone Books, these women are being republished and remembered.

I also love to write.  I spent the last few years teaching English composition courses at a university near my home.  I enjoy students, and hopefully I convince them to enjoy writing.  I am now in an English Ph.D. program in the Theory and Practice of Professional Communication.  My goal is to become a full-time, tenure track professor someday.  I have been chosen for a research fellowship, so my teaching is on hold while I focus on my school work and research.  I’m also a mother of two little girls.  They keep me busy and happy.

I have been published previously in Sunstone, Indiana English, and Compendium2.  I’m always working on some sort of writing, so this blog is a way for me to self publish and to hone my skills.  I recently spoke with a senior editor at Ms. Magazine about becoming a writer; her first advice to me was “start a blog.”  So, here I am.