From Mississippi to Turkey to Austria with stops along the way in Germany and Scotland, I always manage to find some way to plant something here and there as I move around the globe. The picture above is me standing with a vine I planted at the apartment complex where I lived (by an Orthodox Greek church in Istanbul); I planted it in haste before leaving because I didn’t want to throw it away. Through the care of others after I left, it’s now well-established and producing passionfruit! Wait–is this a gardening blog? Well, yes, in a way, it is. Gardening metaphors will sprout up throughout my pages here.
Why have I moved around, you ask? My profession as an English teacher has taken me from home in Mississippi to a few countries in Europe. All the while I spend my time learning smatterings (or double-helpings) of the languages as I go. But my language learning started well before I started traveling. I began studying German in high school and continued through university; along the way as a student of linguistics, I studied many more languages–some I enjoy singing in, others I can text in, while others are only reminders of how quickly words leave us if we don’t use them. Turkish was the first foreign language I learned in situ; it was a challenging experience that I struggled with while teaching English in Istanbul, Turkey, at Koç Üniversitesi. While that took up most of my time, there was even a week-long stint trying to learn Scottish Gaelic in Scotland on a course run by Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye. In Austria now, I spend my free time collecting dialect words for a Mundartgarten and piecemeal studying Coptic, which is an agonizingly slow undertaking. My ill-fated attempts to learn Slovene while in Carinthia show through glaringly when you see the first planting in the Mundartgarten.
I currently teach at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia. The mainstay of my teaching is in language instruction and English-language pedagogy. This means I teach students to write and teach students how to teach to write among the many other skills one needs as a student (and perhaps future teacher) of English. My teaching portfolio is eclectically varied thanks to the supportive department I work in: I’ve had the pleasure of accompanying students on knowledge-journeys to look at religion in the American South, to analyze script decipherment with all its squiggly twists and turns, and to ruminate on the deliciousness of American short stories. Short stories are a particular favorite of mine, brevity being the soul of wit.
TURKEY: At the beginning and end of this video (in Turkish), you can see the entrance to the church right by my old apartment. If you watch through the video, you’ll see a few great shots of Büyükdere!
AUSTRIA: In this video (in German with English subtitles), you can see an introduction to the university!