Julie and I met through couchsurfing but discovered we have a great deal in common, including our senses of humor and interest in the interweb as an academic subject. Julie is one of my favorite people with whom to have discussions, as they are both hilarious and rewarding. When I am fortunate enough to spend time with Julie my motto has been “non-stop party wagon” and thanks to that we’ve had some crazy fun experiences together.

What’s something you used to believe in that you don’t believe in anymore?

Well, obviously God.

That’s too easy but I’ll bite: you used to believe in God?

Yeah. I was terrified. I know why it got to be so scary. It’s because they had these things in the Catholic Church they used to give out to children to implant that seed of fear. They gave us glow-in-the-dark rosaries. Ostensibly children were supposed to stay up all night and pray for their infant sins. What kind of sins did I have when I was little? None. But now I don’t do that anymore.

Really? You don’t commit sins anymore? Is that what you’re saying?

I do, I just don’t pray for them.

Agnostic or atheist?

Atheist. I’m 100% sure in my mind.

What classes are you teaching this fall at your college?

I’m teaching the freshmen English that everyone has to take. I’m also taking a remedial one for adult learners that have to take it to get into freshman English. Then I’m teaching a second semester freshman English. So I’ve got lots of freshman. I’m indoctrinating them early.

With what kind of stuff?

I don’t have too much leeway with what I can teach. The school makes their own textbook edited by professors at the university.

Why do they do that?

I don’t know. I think it’s partially so that there’s unity in the course work but I think it’s also about the money they get from it. A lot of places do it.

What’s your favorite thing about Savannah?

I think it’s the aesthetics. It’s the juxtaposition of the old, Spanish moss and the old architecture and the freaks walking around.

The freaks?

SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) students.

Ah, okay. What’s your least favorite thing?

Not being able to walk around at night. I don’t like that.

You don’t think that’s the case anywhere?

I think everywhere. I think my neighborhood is the safest place but it’s still not. I lived in New York City and never felt scared to walk around anywhere at night. It’s like Disneyworld there now.

What’s one of your favorite memories from living in NYC?

Memories of New York were really about some of the routines we got into. My friend Kate and I went to Snacky every week. Every Wednesday night we went to this little hole in the wall in Brooklyn and drank shots of cheap Saki. For some reason it was this huge event every week. It was sort of our own Brooklyn version of taco night.

I don’t know what that is.

It’s when suburban people who are married – that’s the only thing they have to look forward to.

Julie as a kid – her self-proclaimed “apex of coolness”

So, you grew up in suburbia – what caused you to dislike it?

I just sensed it was bland. Knowing it was diluted. It felt cultureless. I knew there was more out there than going to swim practice and taco night.

Yeah, there was Wednesday night at Snacky!

Oh my god, it’s all so circular!

But you didn’t end up hating Georgia over it?

No. I never had anything against the South per se. I like it here. I was surprised when I went to NYC and went to Columbia and it was supposed to be this liberal institution and everything was supposed to be with social justice as the end goal. But it was okay to make fun of Southerners and talk shit about rednecks and it was blatant. I felt a lot of prejudice from my professors about being from Georgia. It renewed my sense of pride, though. For a while I tried to hide my accent, though, which is a weird mixture of North and South because of my parents being from the North but growing up in the South. The last semester I was there I was trying to be the biggest ‘neck ever.

But that’s not who you are, though, is it?

Somewhat.

How so?

I feel like I’m a Southern girl. I love the culture and the food and the centeredness on family. Maybe it’s not distinctly Southern. I don’t know.

Do you see that changing, though? Have you seen that culture being diluted or is the stereotypical Southern culture still there?

It’s different for me because I grew up around Atlanta and most people that live in Atlanta aren’t from there. People say Atlanta isn’t the South. But then I moved down this way and have lived here for seven or eight years in all including living and teaching in a really rural area. In different places it felt more Southern like when the kids were making sure my car was in running order and inviting me to go to the “mud bog.”

What’s that?

Well, it wasn’t even in that town. They had to go to the next town over to the famed “mud bog.” It’s basically a muddy hole and people drive their cars through it. And then if you come to school on Monday with lots of mud caked on your car you’re pretty awesome.

How did this become their thing to do?

I think it’s a way to show off the vehicles. They all had huge trucks with giant tires. And there’s nothing else to do. What are they going to do?

Drink and smoke pot.

Oh, they did that. With my colleagues at the school.

For real?

Oh yeah.

How’d you feel about that?

I thought it was dangerous territory and not at all desirable. But it’s not taboo there.

It’s something they’ve been doing there for years?

Yeah.

So what was it like coming from a situation where you were at an elite Ivy League school like Columbia and then returning to Georgia? Was there a sense of discrimination because you had lived in NYC and left the South?

Not really because I moved back. People asked me why I moved back and when you say you want to be closer to your family and people you care about that feels comfortable to everybody. My boyfriend’s dad was like, “How’d you like living in that big ol’ city?” I told him I was a teacher in Harlem for two years and he couldn’t believe it.

How was it teaching in Harlem?

That was fun. I didn’t have a boss so I could do whatever I want.

Why didn’t you have a boss? What kind of school was this?!

It was a GED program for adults. It was inside one of the public elementary schools there in Harlem. Everybody that lived in that particular neighborhood was from the West Indies so we had a language barrier. I was teaching math, which was laughable because I still can’t calculate a tip. I was literally teaching myself the morning before the lesson what I was going to teach that day. But their scores improved so I guess it worked. But everyone that knew me thought it was pretty outrageous.

Harlem was one of the only places that felt like home because I’d walk to work. I lived in Morningside Heights and would walk to work and people would say hi and greet me and that never happened anywhere else in the city.

Has your sense of style always been what it is or was it influenced by living in NYC? I’ve always liked your fashion sense and hairstyle.

I’ve always dressed abnormally. Maybe just the fact that people in NYC are more willing to take risks and they don’t care. When you live in suburbia they look at you funny if you’re not blending in. I used to be a seamstress and made everything I wore.

In high school?

College. When I became a vegan I decided I was going to be so anti-corporate I was going to sew my own clothes, so fuck you Gap!

Where did the anti-corporate thing come from?

Just getting out of my parents’ house and having more freedom to question some things that may have been at odds with their values and lifestyles.

But a lot of people come out of that and don’t question things.

I don’t know where it comes from. I think it was probably somewhat stemming from an obsession with the Beats and hippie culture.

Did you have friends in high school who were into stuff like that?

Yeah. In high school they had this thing called Marietta Independent Learning Environment (MILE) and they took us out of all our normal classes. There were ten of us who had our classes together and we would become obsessed about the same things together. I remember Vonnegut and Kerouac being passed around. We were allowed to create our own curriculum. So it started with that. We were really into talking about art that wasn’t really in the mainstream high school curriculum.

How did you get chosen for this class?

It was weird. Your teacher would pinpoint you and then you’d have to take this test and it was supposed to test your creativity. I guess I passed it. It’s funny because we’re all still best friends to this day.

It sounds like it changed you in a lot of ways.

I think so. That was my first year being educated outside Catholic school, too. Finding people outside of a class of thirty people.

So the ten of you would have really stood out amongst others?

Yeah, I think so. We were the freaks.

So all that is where the fashion sense comes into play? Exploring your personality through clothing?

Yeah.

And you were that way in college, too?

Yeah, definitely. It was a different sort of thing: long, flowy skirts.

Grateful Dead t-shirts?

Well, I still listen to the Dead to this day but I don’t think I ever owned a shirt. No tie-dye. That was offensive to me even back then.

Do you think you’d get along with 19-year-old Julie?

I think she’d think I was too serious now. I was a lot more – I don’t know if ethereal is the right word, but I feel like I existed a lot more in the clouds back then. I didn’t have any direction. I knew what I liked and didn’t like and wanted to have fun.

So what caused you to find the direction to go into education?

Well, I did always know that I was going to do that. I just thought that anybody could be a teacher and I didn’t have to work that hard if I took that path which turned out to be true in some sense. The further I went along the more serious I got about it. But back then you didn’t have to try very hard to take that route, unfortunately.

But how did it go from there to wanting to pursue the PhD and wanting to teach teachers?

I just realized I was good at it and I was better at it than a lot of my colleagues. [laughs] I wanted to make it worthwhile for kids to be sitting in there. I saw a lot of damage done by poor teachers, especially when you’re teaching writers and you’re squashing them with ideas like the five paragraph essay. No one wants to write anymore or they think they’re a bad writer because they can’t produce this highly structured, arbitrarily composed thing. But the doctorate, in particular, was because I saw how outdated the curriculum was and every time I tried to do anything with new media literacy, bringing in technology or visual literacy – then I’d meet a lot of resistance with the administration. There is all this fear around safety issues.

Do you think you have more freedom at the university level than you did at the high school level?

Oh yeah. I can do pretty much whatever I want. Part of that freedom is being able to justify whatever it is I do.

You can show them studies and information that backs up how and what you’re teaching.

Yeah.

Especially now that people have done the research. It’s not like the Internet is a year old.

At my old high school I was wanting to publish students’ work online and have them do podcasts and they just wanted to have it be within the school and put it on the intranet. And I told them to just forget it.

How come you didn’t want to do that?

I’d do that but it’s ridiculous that people didn’t even want to listen to what the benefits of having that wider audience would have been.

Getting people to learn from other people’s experiences.

Yeah, and kids are highly motivated by having an audience outside their own classroom. A lot of what we do is pseudo-transactional. It’s supposed to have an audience but it doesn’t really. They know it’s just the teacher reading it and then it goes in the recycling bin after they get a grade. There’s no motivation to do anything there.

Do you feel like that’s changing?

Yeah, I do. Just with some of the professional development I’ve been doing with the writing project and working with teachers – I do a lot of the technology and new media professional development and tons of teachers are showing up for this stuff on Saturdays on their own time. From what they tell me they have the hardware, software and wiring now to do it. It used to be that you’d have to get a grant out of your own pocket to get this stuff. Now it’s a given. I think the assumption now is that if your school doesn’t have this stuff it’s deficient.

Julie and some random guy