Hello Everyone!

I hope you enjoy this blog. Starting it has been an idea I’ve had for a few years now, but it wasn’t until I needed to craft a “creative project” for my very last undergraduate class on digital culture that I finally received the nudge I needed to begin. I am the first to admit that I am not an intuitive inhabitant of the Internet Age, but I really enjoyed putting this blog together, and I hope that I will hear from people out there in the World Wide Web who might surf by and rest on the beach of this archipelago.

As I said, I will have graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in May of 2016. I started back to school when my son was young and have been working my way very slowly toward this English degree for many years. In hindsight, I think I was very blessed to take my classes at such a leisurely pace. I got the chance to really absorb and savor them, and I have to admit that I enjoyed them all—even the ones I was not so good at (like math and science).

As I look back over the years, some classes were particularly important to me. A Biblical and Classical Literature class introduced me to Homer, and as I read The Odyssey and The Iliad, I was enchanted. Even better, an off hand remark by the professor pointing out that these works were even better in the original language gave me the idea to take up Ancient Greek as my college language requirement. I found that I loved all things ancient—language, culture, literature.

A few years after reading Homer, I took a general Renaissance literature class and was introduced to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and again I was blindsided. It was quite a challenge to even read it with elegance, and I had to rely on the footnotes heavily to understand the references, and then there was the density of the verse and imagery! But even with those obstacles, I loved every line, and to this day, I remember thinking for the first time that perhaps there were people over the course of history who tapped into some transcendent realm —and John Milton was one of them.

In fact, staying with Milton, I had one of the best classes of my career when I took a self-directed course to immerse myself in Paradise Lost. Along the way, I read John Rogers’ The Matter of Revolution, which is where the kernel of this blog began. I was fascinated by how the worldview of Milton’s era was so different from ours. Later, my professor pointed out that I was groping for the term “epistimology”: how we humans understand and organize our world.

Yet another favorite field for me is speculative fiction (utopias, dystopias, and all the other sundry *topias) and their creative perspective on how their world was organized. And, now I think you have reached the threshold I am standing upon with this brand new blog. . . . . .