Okay, since everyone is coming in here pretty much cold, a This Is Me post seems like a pretty good idea.

I'm from Michigan (US state the looks like a mitten, in the middle of all those huge lakes). I'm also something of a homebody. I like to see new places, but I only want to live where every breath and flicker of leaves conveys what my very bones insist is the only proper proportions of water, trees and hills: lots to lots to lots. I'm a local girl, but only for a few generations--French-Canadian, Irish, German, Euro-mutt from the Appalachians, educate selectively and stir vigorously.

I'm also a small-town girl, though this is sometimes oddly mitigated by the small town in question being right next to Ann Arbor (kind of the Greenwich Village of Michigan). Really big cities, like say the capital of Ohio, the state one south where I now live, delight me in small doses but I get cranky when I have to live there.

I was raised blue->white collar by parents who were raised blue collar and poverty line, and my mother was a union officer for years. I was shocked and appalled when I moved down here (away from close proximity to Detroit and the auto unions) and discovered that the university teachers aren't unionized. Shocked, I tell you. It was like someone saying, no, the sun rises in the north hereabouts. My heart-home is academia despite the fact that I frequently find its pretentiousness utterly intolerable; I value good teaching and the self-awareness that promotes good teaching far more highly than raw IQ.

I am politically liberal, fiscally conservative and staunchly republican in the 18th C sense. I'm married, poly, cheerfully bisexual and think people who write well are really sexy. I am, for want of any more pithy description, an esoteric atheist. I don't have any problems with theists, provided they don't try to spoon feed me their god(s), and I'm always up for a good discussion of mysticism.

I have a few spheres of major activity. The most public one, online, is my anime/manga fandoms, for which I squee and fic and meta. I also do website design, professionally or as a past-time depending on whether I'm teaching that term. When I'm teaching, I write a lot more about students and papers and which administrator I want to cluetrout this month. In the spring and summer I also write a lot about gardening.

I love Bujold and Pratchett as much as I love Woolf and Melville, and vice versa; I recommend everyone read bell hooks and Barbara Kingsolver; I teach Neil Gaiman in repertory with William Bradford.

So there we go--a thumbnail sketch. For more detail, you may like to visit alltrees.org or branchandroot.net.