I am a writer, reader, and "spy in the academy"--a late MFA now teaching composition. I believe that language is a democratic collaboration as tough and alive as an umbilicus--and as likely to choke its intended beneficiary if the delivery is botched by bad circumstances or clumsy maneuvers. As this is an unconference, I feel comfortable confessing that I am an unteacher, to the extent that the system of grading, norming, and benchmarks allows (which isn't very much). I published my first novel in 2002 (Borrowed Light, SMU Press), and am at work on two very different books: a memoir of grief and a great sprawling indescribable fiction that pays tribute to Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Marvin Gaye, the extinct Passenger Pigeon, flea markets, and street-cleaning technologies in Washington, D.C. I am in the early stages of an ambitious third project that seeks to explore the liminal space between these two books. Originally an open studio project I provided at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the project I call House of Memory/Memory Chowdah seeks to make performative and collaborative two singularly private and ultimately social activities: grieving and composition. I half-jokingly call this project "performance rhetoric." I sort of like Slavoj Žižek, actually. Am I disqualified? Recent publications: forthcoming: L'O de Vie, a Palimpsest. An essay comparing Chaucer's Physician's Tale and Histoire d'O. Forthcoming in Dark Chaucer (punctum books) "In a Disorder on Purpose: The Diary and the Status Feed (on Samuel Pepys in the Digital Age," In Creative Nonfiction, Issue 42, Summer 2011, http://tinyurl.com/88yvnut "10 Ways of Looking at S&H Green Stamps," in Defunct Magazine, Spring 2011, http://tinyurl.com/6w8dfss "What the Body is Saying," in Grace and Gravity: An Anthology of Washington Women Writers, ed. Richard Peabody personal blog: CheapBohemian, www.cheapbohemian.net