Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
I’m a reference librarian by vocation, and my creative and scholarly pursuits have varied over the years, with the most time and energy dedicated to work on the contemporary American writer Joyce Carol Oates. From 1995 to the present, I have created a number of related online resources for the study and appreciation of Oates (we refer to her as “JCO”) including a bibliography, a reference website, and a scholarly journal.
The bibliography includes more than 3,500 entries and is always
“in progress.” JCO is famous for many things, including her
productivity: she’s published an average of 3 books a year for the
last half century, and more than 900 short stories so far.
The reference website called Celestial Timepiece documents
JCO’s books in detail, provides biographical information, tracks
her numerous awards and nominations, and provides a generous
sampling of her stories, poems, and essays in full text.
The last component of this triptych is a peer-reviewed journal
called Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, which has the
honor of being the first of many journals currently hosted on
Gleeson Library’s Scholarship Repository. The journal has
certainly been the most challenging of the three to compile and
edit; if any keen observers have noted a recent lull in publications,
they wouldn’t be wrong to assume that a burst of journal activity
may be coming soon.
What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?
Going deep into a subject is one path to creativity; another is to
follow your curiosity over many seemingly unrelated paths while
having the faith that everything will come together in the end. I
delved deeply into JCO’s work after “discovering” her in the late
1980s and finding her as terrifying and profound as the great
Russian writer Dostoevsky. A few years later, as I began my
library career, my interests and curiosity took me down science
and technology side-paths (fractal geometry, anyone? chaos
theory? “cold fusion”?), and most significantly, HTML and the
“world wide web.” In 1995 I wanted to learn how to make a web
site, and decided to teach myself HTML (the original code behind
web pages) by creating a Joyce Carol Oates bibliography web
site. All of my JCO productions grew from that concurrence; and
in the other direction, my new coding knowledge led me to
becoming the library webmaster for a couple of decades, with the
JCO website serving as my creative testbed for the library
website.
What impact do you hope your work will have on your field
and/or the broader community?
From the beginning I had the hope of providing a free resource for
students, scholars, and fans of JCO’s work, as I pursued my own
interest and curiosity in the subject. This work has led me to work
(however modestly) with JCO’s biographer; filmmakers;
songwriters; the JCO archive at Syracuse University; and with
Joyce Carol Oates herself.
How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and
enhanced your professional journey?
Seeing the amazing and disparate creative paths of so many
different people that CRASE promotes and supports is nothing
less than inspiring. While I can’t follow the paths that others are
pursuing, I feel nonetheless validated in pursuing my paths,
however odd or unrelated they may seem. CRASE is a window
into scholarship and creativity at USF; and it’s an open door to
joining that creative community here.