Autobiography
I'll spare you annotations of my CV. In retrospect, I appear to be a fairly common middle American: grandparents born on family farms who moved to town, their children entered professions in the city, then grandchildren gravitated to metropolises. My ancestors must have been peasants immigrated from Ireland, Holland, and Germany that northwest Iowa Catholic life eventually melded. Only the Irish side maintained ethnic pride, but at least the Teutonic surname (that might mean a field of willows, misspelt, but sounds and looks like weeds in our telling) is uniquely searchable.
When I was a teenager I would come up with pithy quotes and scribble them down in notebooks like buried treasure.
If this were an application essay I would feel compelled to pretend that I always dreamt of becoming a professor who saves the world, and that your approval will contribute to this good purpose. In reality, when you're shy and studious academia finds you. I'm fortunate to have avoided the laboratory, although I spent several years alone in the darkroom listening to an ipod and sloshing liquids. In Boulder for college, Stan Brakhage's orbit unexpectedly introduced me to contemporary art and led to an MFA at UW–Milwaukee. (I've gotten over my 16mm purism and my shame enough to upload these films.) Then a poetry seminar with Lisa Samuels sparked an essay on Gertrude Stein that landed me at Yale. At that point a joint PhD program in Comparative Literature and Film Studies meant that I did not have to choose between French or American literature or film. I could do all three. I took an abstract theme, punctuation and modernism, for my dissertation (certainly there are other subjects that combine Franco-American Lit & cinema more naturally). I've continued to publish work in these areas and consider myself a comparatist.
Now the moment has come for an aphorism but I dare not unearth them from wherever they rest.
I never had a native reason for learning French beyond being born in a city named after a river (re)named by French colonials. The prevalence of French in U.S. schools does not seem particular to old Louisiana, however. I accumulated three or four years total in the hexagon. Not enough to convince them I'm French but some have guessed Austrian or Norwegian and given polite compliments. In Canada, le français is much less unique than Spanish.
Sports are a pastime that I have taken more seriously as a writer than as an athlete. In fact, it was during writing breaks that the drama of the world cup ensnared me. The U.S. victory inspired some commentary and then to cover the pros in Houston. Having complacently followed men's sports as a youngster, it was past time to think of the women's game first. Now that I have a youngster, there hardly seems time to see anything beyond his two feet.
