Biography
I grew up in a suburb of New York in a loving and intellectual family, and then went off to Swarthmore College. After two years I got married and transferred to Indiana University where my husband John was to start graduate work. I eventually got a BA in Comparative Literature, and an MA and PhD in English Literature from IU. During those years we lived in Rochester and in Rome, and so a lot of my work was done in absentia, which in retrospect I think may have been a good thing in that it led to more original thinking. When we moved here, I got a job in Northwestern’s newly formed Writing Program. I think that that also may have been a lucky break because it gave me a lot of intellectual flexibility. I did not have to become a specialist. I published scholarly articles on Latin literature, Old English poetry, Shakespeare, and nineteen-century American novels. And I wrote a book on the “First Lady of banjo” and Hee Haw star, Roni Stoneman (Pressing On, University of Illinois Press). That was an amazing experience, putting me in contact with a totally different world (worlds, actually). In my teaching I could also be flexible. Although my basic teaching was of the Intermediate and Advanced Composition classes, I also could propose new writing-intensive courses. I taught one of the, if not the first (not sure) women’s lit courses. I also taught a Humanities course, a Jewish-American lit course, and an Asian-American Women’s lit independent study, years before Northwestern established whole programs focusing on those areas. I was also involved in a variety of non-pedagogical activities. I edited the Alumni Magazine for Weinberg (before it was Weinberg) for several years. And I was very active in the Organization of Women Faculty, serving as the first secretary, and later as co-president, and one year running the Kreeger-Wolf Lecture program. Meanwhile I was lucky enough to be raising two delightful daughters. And then, bizarrely, I became a bluegrass musician. I took up the guitar on a whim, but before long John and I were performing around the country (cds at cdbaby.com). Particularly memorable were performances in Brooklyn (two weeks after 9/11, two miles from ground zero), on Grandfather Mountain in NC (before 6000), and in Kentucky (opening for five of the top bluegrass bands in the country, before 1400, of whom probably 1395 were better guitarists than I). As for now: well, I enjoyed working at Northwestern because of the students and my truly wonderful colleagues in the Writing Program and in the university as a whole, but I am also loving retirement. I have become involved in the visual arts, and as usual somehow have not been able to narrow my focus: works in the last three shows I’ve exhibited in have been primarily (but not totally) woodcut prints, embroidery, and weaving. I’m pretty sure this is not the path to success but….