Background/Context
In Spring 2017, I took a seminar on Milton with Professor Daniel P. Gunn in the English Dept at the University of Maine, Farmington. Unexpectedly, I realized that although I had been in the MFA creative writing program at The New School ten years earlier, and in that setting had become more serious about my own writing, and had gained a solid grounding in contemporary poetry through my training as a registered poetry therapist in the 1990s, I still had not had very much exposure to others’ writing, particularly in genres other than poetry and nonfiction. In dialogue with Dan, who at that time was the Chair of the English Dept., and after unexpectedly getting in touch with a profound sense of vocation as a late-blooming literary scholar, I enrolled as an undergraduate student in English at the University of Maine, completing my BA, summa cum laude, in 2020.
In addition to Professor Gunn, Professor Christine Darrohn (1963-2024) was a formative influence on my development as a close reader and literary scholar. In fact, I benefited from the expertise and generosity of the entire English dept faculty. During my time at UMF, I focused primarily on fiction (novels and short stories), and was immersed in many of the canonical authors and works whose books I had never found the time or guidance to read previously. These included, among others, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Phillis Wheatley, D. H. Lawrence, Homer, Dante, Miguel de Cervantes, and many more. I also had the chance to re-read, with a more sophisticated understanding, some of those whom I had read in a course on Novels I had taken in the urban studies program at Worcester State College in 1984 (e.g., Joseph Conrad) and in two seminars on Fiction I had taken at The New School in 2008 (e.g., Charles Dickens, Herman Melville).
I became involved in the PsyArt Foundation, an organization that promotes the psychological study of literature, and began presenting literary criticism papers at their annual conferences. As I more fully embraced my new identity as a literary scholar, I began to submit literary interpretation essays for publication. Below are links to three of my literary analyses of works of fiction, which were published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals between 2020 and 2024.
I entered the PhD program in English at the University of Rhode Island in the Fall of 2020, and have currently completed all of my coursework and have passed my written and oral comprehensive exams. In May of 2025, I passed the oral defense of my dissertation proposal and my proposal was approved. Thus, I am currently “All But Dissertation” in this program, and am actively working on my dissertation. I expect to have my PhD in English (concentration in Literature) by July of 2027. My dissertation focuses on the short stories of the twentieth-century, multi-genre American author Jerome Weidman (1913-1998), primarily those that were published in mass-circulation magazines during the 1930s and 1940s.