It was a dark and stormy night...

Wait. That's a different story, not mine. I suppose if I were going to write my life history down for you, I'd most likely begin something like this: It was a sunny afternoon in November, a rare sort of day in autumn in Seattle, the day Prairie Brown was born.

Then I'd skip a bunch of uninteresting stuff about learning to walk and talk and pick up the story again after I'd become a full-fledged member of society. This societal membership, at least, the membership into the society that interests me, the society of readers and writers, began when I was four years old and noticed that I could read along with my mother as she chanted the words to Fox in Socks. Since that point, hardly a day has passed that reading wasn't a vital part of my life. Of course, the books have changed a bit over the years, from Dr. Seuss to Roald Dahl to L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott, gradually becoming the novels of the Bronte Sisters and Jane Austin, with some Shakespeare thrown in there for good measure. Lately, I've been finding my reading tastes running a bit toward the weird and macabre. My graduate thesis, written in 2003 at Central Washington University, focuses on the writings of Shirley Jackson, most commonly known for her short story The Lottery, a classic example of American gothic writing. Since graduate school, one of my favorite reading-related activities has been building my Stephen King collection. He's a writer whom I scorned as an undergraduate English major, but for whom I gained admiration when his name came up in my thesis research and I learned that he'd dedicated one of his novels to Shirley Jackson.

My professional life for the past seven years has involved teaching reading and writing, starting at CWU and moving to North Seattle Community College and now back again to CWU. I won't bore you with the rather unremarkable details of the rest of my life. If you want to know more, stop by the University Writing Center and ask me in person. We can have a cup of tea and talk.