| I have taught college Freshman Composition at the University of Idaho as a graduate student there. |
| I have twenty hours of graduate work in an MFA in Creative Writing Program and a BA with an English Major at Texas Christian University. I have four poetry publications in national magazines. These are "The Driftwood Review" "Puffin Circus" "The Houston Literary Review" and "quantum poetry magazine." Also, I have a short story published in "Descant: Fort Worth's Journal of Fiction and Poetry" in 2004. I know a lot about creative writing technique and methodology. I've picked up some of these methods from great teachers and professors, but I also stress that to do creative writing well, one has to be true to one's own voice; so that the techniques are there, not as fundamental blueprints, but to help the student find their voice. |
| Literature is a broad subject with many niches, so it is easier to just mention the areas I am most proficient, and leave out the ones I am not. I know quite a bit about British Romanticism, of the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and I know about the cultural and intellectual changes that these poets were concerned with. I also know a lot about modernism, which is the early 20th century movement, involving James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and the poets Eliot, Pound and others. Walt Whitman is a paticular favorite poet of mine, on whom I can elaborate a great deal. Literature of course is so broad that I have a lot of experience in other places, but I am not expert enough in all of those places to feel confortable tutoring them, though those mentioned above, I am okay with. |
| Poetry is probably my best field outside creative writing. Although my Milton is a bit sketchy, I can teach the student a great deal about what they need to know about either a poet, or "explicating" poetry meaning to take apart and understand poetry or even to appreciate a poem. I am knowledge about most major poets writing in English from Shakespeare to the 20th century, not simply from my English degree, but because I am always a student of poetry myself, reading and rereading what people call "the classics" or masterfully written poetry in contemporary anthologies. If the student has trouble understanding what a poet is saying, or has trouble finding the meaning of a poem, I know some good techniques of how to read a complicated image or metaphor. I can explain about imagery, similes, allusions, metaphor and other areas of a poem, as well as the poem's broader meaning. I am also good at letting students acquire their own insights, not simply my insights, because original interpretation is what some teachers might want. |
| I know the basics of most of Shakespeare's major plays including, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet" "Macbeth" "Hamlet" and "Henry V." These plays are where my Shakespeare knowledge is strongest, and I can help students get through the flowery language to understand what Shakespeare is saying, and focus on the most important dramatic moments of the plays. |