About Me

Of the various genres of writing, I think bio-writing is one of the more difficult styles to accomplish. It requires a degree of self-reflection, which can be difficult, but as "about me" pages seek to portray a desired persona to a selected audience, addressing that audience becomes critical to the cultivation of the portrayed identity. For example, my purpose here is to represent myself as a serious scholar in the field of rhetoric and composition (and a part of me wonders if a serious scholar would spend so much time on meta-reflection about the creation of that persona), so the task becomes one in which I balance my colloquial voice (I am speaking about myself so I should sound like myself) with one that represents authority and confidence about the topics of which I write. In this way, the act of writing becomes splintered; as I write, I'm not thinking solely about who I am--I'm thinking about the audience to which I'm introducing myself. Additionally, our personas are constantly changing, so as writers and people we must be aware and observant of those changes in order to effectively represent who we are as we grow. This is the now-me: I want to contribute to the discourse in my field while continuing to develop my abilities as a great teacher. Achieving both objectives will take some time, so I think an appropriate analogy of the journey is a story I have about a road in Japan. 

​

Sun Road (pictured) used to be the main thoroughfare in the little town of Ono, Hyogo-Ken, Japan. It's a rural town with a comparatively small population, and historically, Sun Road was the destination of a majority of the town's commerce. As time progressed and gave way to the Japanese versions of Wal-Mart, the road became less a destination for commerce and more a pleasant locale for moving from one end of the city to the other. I traveled this road daily as a teacher living abroad, and it was on this road that I realized the latter of my two long-term objectives: I wanted to be a great teacher. It wasn't a striking epiphany, something that happened in an instant. Rather, it developed over several months as I traveled along the road on my way to school. I left a career in retail management to move to Japan after completing my undergraduate degree, and it was on this road that I realized I would never go back. I wanted to engage students, imbibe them with the same passion I have for reading and writing and communicating, and it was this resolve that eventually brought me back to the United States and to graduate school. As a PhD student, I've never lost sight of that objective; I still want to be a great teacher. However, I've become increasingly engaged with the discourse community within the discipline, and in addition to teaching, I want to carve out a place for myself within the disciplines discourse.

Perhaps the road analogy is a bit corny, and maybe a serious scholar wouldn't call attention to the corniness, but again, I have to be true to myself (at least to a degree) and calling attention to my corniness is just something Mark would do. The now-me Mark is working to accomplish his goals, and if describing that process means walking down a road, I'm more than happy to put on his shoes.