I put off my "About Me" page for a really long time. I'm not sure why, but I just didn't have too much to say. However, now that the blog is growing, I wanted to make a few comments about who I am and why I started my blog.
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| My puggies in Christmas costumes. |
About Me: My name is Laura. I have considered myself a reader and a writer for as long as I can remember. Regarding my writing, I am currently working on a funky little collection of strange short stories, and a dystopian novel about a girl who makes fake trees. As for my reading, to me, it's like breathing. I never intended to be an English major, although it would have been a natural choice. I started college as a sociology major, but I was too shy to take qualitative statistics (interviewing kind of freaks me out), so I switched to English at the last minute. After working a retail job for a year after my college graduation, I decided that I wanted to go to school forever, and went to graduate school. I received my M.A. in Literature in 2008, but in the meantime, I started dating an old high school friend. We moved back to our hometown so that he could go back to school, we moved in together, we adopted a couple of pugs named Egon and Freud, and eventually, we got married. Meanwhile, after only one hectic year of adjunct teaching, I managed to snag a full-time gig teaching English at a community college, which I liked so much I temporarily (and perhaps permanently) abandoned my one-time goal of a Ph.D.
Now we have two daughters, Grace and June. Being a mother has changed everything about my life, including my relationship with reading and blogging.
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| The girls |
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| Our wedding. |
About the blog: When I graduated from my M.A. program, I had some serious book discussion withdrawal. I joined some online book clubs and scanned the message boards and schedules at my local library and bookstore, but I live in a small place and there just wasn't much. So, I started my blog, and much more importantly, started reading other peoples' wonderful blogs. It was pretty slow going at the beginning, but eventually, things picked up. I feel like my blog is in its adolescence now: developing nicely, but still with plenty of room to grow. The most important thing that I've gained from blogging is the sense of bookish community that I was really missing. Since having my daughter's, I have wanted to add more about my life to this space, so I am evolving while keeping reading at the core of what I do.
What I blog about: I consider myself to be mostly a reader of contemporary literary fiction. When I was a student, I studied contemporary American fiction, 19th and 20th-century American fiction, trauma studies and psychoanalytic theory. I still like all those things. I also love to read widely and to read things that I never had time for when I was in school: young adult, "classics," creative non-fiction in many categories, poetry, social sciences, and philosophy.
I'm also currently blogging about finances and hoping to get in a little more about my life, my family and about motherhood.
Contact me: I've taken the plunge and set up an email just for the blog. If you have any kindly worded comments or questions (we bookish types are, after all, sensitive souls:)) or you want to give me a free book for review, I would be happy to hear from you and you can reach me at hawthornescarlet at gmail dot com. However, I started this blog to read and discuss things that I love, and not for free books, so I do reserve the right to tell you that I just don't have time to check something out at the moment.
