Hey, remember when I had a blog?

Well, it turns out I still do, since I kept paying the annual fee to WordPress, because hope springs eternal, I suppose. In my defense, a lot has happened in the last three years:

• I conducted a research project called MONSTER BOOK CLUB. For six months, I read YA novels about monsters and politics with a dozen incredible, brilliant, funny, insightful teenagers. Their theories about the many faces of monstrosity — which is to say, their theories about education, civil rights, marginalization, emotion, mental health, literature, art, youth — will never stop blowing my mind.
• So I wrote a dissertation about it!
• This dissertation made me Dr. Kathleen Kellett. My PhD is in Childhood Studies, or as I frequently tell people, in Taking Kids Seriously.
• I got a full time (!!) academic job, and survived my first year of teaching writing and humanities to undergrad first-years. I learned one million things about pedagogy that I am doing my best to unpack this summer before starting up again in the fall.
  • Also, I got to choose my topic for my spring courses, so obviously they were about monsters.
• Last but extremely not least, I’M ENGAGED. I looked back at my last blog post, in which I talked about Marissa and I saying our first I love you’s. Turns out we still love each other so much that we’re getting married about it!

I think all of that justifies my absence from this space, though I am happy to return, and will do so more regularly at least through the end of the summer, since I have placed “blogging” on the Rotating List of Summer Tasks. As I’m sure we all know, the List must be heeded at all times, or chaos would reign. That’s how everyone manages their time, right?

What I’d like to do is use this space primarily for discussions of what I find to be successful storytelling. This is just a quick little “I’m back” post to remind people that this blog exists, but in the coming weeks, I want to talk about the characters, worlds, and language that have caught my attention recently. This is both what I like to discuss — and what I miss writing about in a more casual way — as well as a blatant appeal for recommendations from anyone reading if you think you have a story that would speak to me. I don’t consider myself a greedy person, except when it comes to stories. My hunger for narrative never, ever ends — it is monstrous in its excess. And monstrosity, as always, is where I like to live.