1.You often reference people’s preconceived notions about you. (From your about page: “If you’re reading this you likely already have an idea of whether you like me and my work or not.”) How would you introduce yourself, and what you do, to someone who has no idea who you are?
I’m a writer. For now, I write a newsletter on culture and politics. In grad school I studied literacy education with a focus on writing pedagogy and assessment, and I often write about education research and policy. (The subject of my first book.) I am a leftist, though I am a critic of modern left-of-center culture, politics, and discourse. (The subject of my second book.) I have bipolar disorder (the subject of my third book and first novel) and I often register my extreme unhappiness with modern mental health and disability cultures (the subject of my forthcoming fourth book). I am a very experienced freelancer with credits all over the place, but I mostly can’t get published in any big places anymore, barely pitch, and have mostly moved on. I’ve done a lot of teaching, especially at the college level, and miss it. (The subject of the first book I ever had under contract, on teaching college writing, which I wrote and was considered not sufficiently academic for the academic press I sold it to and which now sits in my Dropbox, never to be seen.)
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