Dear Readers

Welcome to Intersections, the place where the personal and the professional collides. Please allow me to take a moment to introduce both myself and this blog to you, Dear Reader, as I envision this space to become a way for both rhetor and audience to contribute and develop ideas.

I began my academic career — what now seems like a lifetime ago — planning to become a school librarian. I was interested in children’s education and I believed (still do) strongly in the power of books to change a life for the better. Libraries are portals to the universe. Life intervened, of course. I shifted my focus from becoming a librarian to simply studying literature, my first true love. I have always been a reader and a writer. Thinking and talking about books is my jam. But graduating mere months before a pandemic hit may not have been my wisest decision ever. 😂

I sat at home, as most of us did, taking stock of things and wondering what would be next. In July 2021, life again intervened and I decided to apply for my Master’s in Professional Writing & Communication, a subject I knew relatively little about. As an undergrad, I’d taken a basic rhetoric class, but my focus had been on literature, such as postcolonial, feminist, and deconstructivism theories. These ideas resonate with me and the experiences I’ve had, and they remain a key part of how I view the world.

Some of my time as a grad student was spent getting up to speed with this other aspect of writing, the ideas of rhetor, audience, plain language, communication-as-politics, and so on. Although an entirely different way of understanding the work of the writer, it still felt very familiar to me, a sort of homecoming to the literary theories that I already understood and used. To be honest, I see very little difference, and wide areas of overlap, between the ideas of literary criticism and the work of the professional communicator, and that’s what this blog is all about. My hope for this project is to continue to develop these ideas into a cohesive whole that will continue to inform the way I see my work as a communicator, how I relate to my diverse audiences, and how I do my job.

Thanks for coming along on this ride. 🚗