“Read, Write, Now” is about…well…Reading, Writing, and Now. In other words, flexible enough to let me write about whatever happens to come to mind. But mostly it’s about reading–to some degree the things I am reading, but more specifically about reading as a phenomenon, as a human activity. The reading crisis, reading history, reading theories. In general I’m interested in how reading is imagined in this cultural moment. Everything from the image of reading in Harry Potter and Hannibal Lecter to the reading panic that besets governments from Korea to the USA. Still the “Now” part of “Read, Write, Now” lets me talk about anything, I guess, including the peculiar tendency of New Yorkers to think of those of us residing west of longitude 73 as provincial. A tendency I find….provincial.
I hesitate to say I’m a professor, because I think folks find that off-putting. However, there is nothing for it. Nevertheless, I’m hoping to use this blog not to convey expertise so much as to explore my own writing process. After having worked for ten years on a book manuscript related to African American literature, masculinity, and religion, I’ve started to explore a brand new obsession. Given that I work better when I write for someone, and given that blogging seems to be a new form of reading that’s mushroomed in the last decade, it seems right. Though I’m old fashioned enough to hope that what comes of this is published in paper rather than on a Kindle. I hope you’ll help.
Contact me at pkpowers at verizon dot net
