So, I read a lot. Like, a lot. I think that is fundamentally what I am: a reader.

I am also a teacher of literature and language (or, differently said, reading and writing) at a state university. (The institution calls what I do “English.”) I am even more fundamentally a dad, but that is relatively recent for me. I have been a reader since I was as young as my kids. If, as the poet William Wordsworth says, the child is father to the man, then my dad was the reader my kidself taught me to be. Ponder that one without recourse to a time machine!

When I read, I like to take notes, and the notes often shape themselves into essays. Not everything can be written up for academic publication: in that realm, one needs to know the scholarship of everything one writes on, and that takes time and limits one’s field of action. And I like to ramble.

I do specialize in some things: the transatlantic long eighteenth century, American studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, Indigenous and decolonial studies, poststructuralist theory, composition studies. But although those are my pals and will never be far from my sensibility, this ain’t all that. This is a ramble in the brambles.

Why brambles? Merriam-Webster says that they are “rough prickly shrubs,” but I have always thought of them as that which surrounds the pretty flowers. (M-W says the rose family, including raspberries and blackberries. Berries are in the rose family? Who knew.) Brambles are all the bushy growth around flower and fruit, all that tangle and brush that surround, spill out, spill over. One doesn’t grow the plant for its bramble, but bramble is most of the plant. It leads one away from the center, into the weeds, into the thicket. Into the thick of things. Where the action is!

Come ramble in the bramble with me . . .