Sobriquet 97.1: Back From the Abyss

The past year or so has been a particularly difficult one for me, which is part of the reason it's been nearly two years since I've posted anything on Sobriquet Magazine's eponymous blog. 

As I've written elsewhere on this blog, after spending the better part of a decade attending graduate school in Quebec and central New York, I moved to rural Iowa to take my first job as an English professor in 2011. As one might expect, I enjoyed my fair share of ups and downs during the subsequent half decade. Some of the ups--winning accolades for my teaching, having the opportunity to work closely with inspiring students and brilliant colleagues, publishing some of my scholarship in volumes bearing the imprints of a few of academia's best university presses, traveling to some of the world's most beautiful places, and making some truly wonderful friends--have enriched my life in ways that I cannot understate. Despite those wonderful memories, however, I cannot help but feel my time in Iowa will always be defined by the downs and a pall of desolation enshrouds my recollection of the years I spent in the state. While I may someday draw upon those downs in my writing, I found the experience of living through them was not particularly conducive to writing. 

I mention this difficulty primarily because I feel obliged to provide at least a small amount of continuity to bridge the temporal gap between the J. M. Coetzee blog I maintained as a doctoral student and the blog in its present form. We'll see where it goes from here.