Episode 17: Dr. Joshua Reid

In this episode, Dr. Josh Reid, Associate Professor of English, talks about how he engages his students with classical and early modern literature. He also shares his favorite books of the year.

Podcast Transcript: 

Dr. Josh Reid

There's a certain way that encountering these stories from the past help us read our present. As Emily Dickinson puts it, Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. So that kind of slant-wise approach of going to the past to encounter our present is an effective way.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
Hi, I'm Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at East Tennessee State University. From the moment I arrived on this campus, I have been inspired by our faculty, their passion for what they do, their belief in the power of higher education, and the way they are transforming the lives of their students. This podcast is dedicated to them, our incredible faculty at ETSU. Hear their stories as they tell us, "Why I Teach." In this episode, we will talk with Dr. Josh Reid, Associate Professor of English and Associate Department Chair in the Department of Literature and Language. Dr. Reid earned his bachelor's degree from Virginia Tech and master's degrees in English and art history, as well as a Ph.D. in English, from the University of Kentucky.

He joined the ETSU faculty in 2012. His areas of specialization include early modern literature, Italian romance epic, literature and visual art, translation studies, and textual editing. Dr. Reid has authored numerous publications and is the general editor for "The Manchester Spenser," Manchester University Press' monograph series on the life and works of Edmund Spenser. In addition to his research and writing, Dr. Reid is committed to teaching excellence. In fact, he is a 2019 recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award.

Enjoy the show. Dr. Reid. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Josh Reid

Thanks so much for having me.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I start my podcast with the same question for every guest. Take me back to your first day of teaching at ETSU as a faculty member. Looking back on that day, what is one piece of advice that you would have given yourself?

Dr. Josh Reid

I would say to myself that you're not alone. When I started in 2012, I was a lecturer at ETSU at Kingsport, which is a wonderful place. I love the faculty, students, and staff, faculty, staff there, so shout-out to them, but it is a bit separated from the main campus and from the department. So, and the classroom itself can feel quite insular. It's wonderful to have control over the class that you have. But also you feel like you're alone there and in that space. And so learning to reach out to the broader teaching community and what it has to offer and the resources that it has has been transformative for me. So, for instance, working with, and cross discipline too, in my department and in other departments and colleges as well. So for instance, Drs. Amy Johnson, Patrick Brown, Alison Barton, some of whom have been on this podcast, and Dr. Susan Epps, we worked together on an instructional development grant to start the Conference for High-Impact Teaching Practices, or CHIIPs. Yeah. And so every August, there's this teaching conversation that happens before the start of it, and that's a way of sharing and opening up the classroom borders. And just recently for me, just this year, I've started co-teaching. So that was not something that I've done before. It feels, you know, it's kind of hard to make that leap and to open that classroom and that control. And it's been a transformative experience. I'm teaching with Dr. Chelsea Wessels in my department, my film colleague. We're teaching a class on monsters in film and literature. And I'm learning so much from what she's bringing to the classroom. She's wonderful at group work in ways that I'm not. In assessment, she's a much faster grader, so that's improved my grading speed as well. And so I just wish I had started that sooner. And so and then, you know, you're not alone in the classroom, either. Right. Your students are there, and they are teaching resources waiting to be tapped and utilized. It's a learning community that you can start from day one, and they have something to teach each other and us over the process of the class. So it's, yeah, we're not alone.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Such great advice, really comforting and a nice way to think of it. Can you tell us a bit more about your background and how you became interested in teaching literature?

Dr. Josh Reid

Yeah, so I was a townie in Blacksburg, Virginia, so went to Virginia Tech, and I came in wanting to write fantasy novels and to be a journalist actually. I wanted one of those options, to be a writer. And then I you know, this happens. This is kind of the same trajectory as many teachers. Yeah. I was in a class that just opened my eyes to what was possible. It was Dr. Tony Colaianne's medieval and Renaissance class. Yeah. And just there was an electricity, kind of magic, an ensorcellment to what he was doing, the way he was leading us, the way he was opening us up to the text, to the material. It was ways of writing and thinking that I hadn't encountered before. And I wanted to, I thought, this is something I want to replicate. And then I took another one of his classes at a very difficult point in my life and realized that literature can be both a solace as well as entertainment, right? It can provide solace and entertain. So in my senior year, I went to that professor and asked him, you know, what made him decide to become a teacher of literature. And he said that, you know, Josh, I these are these texts have given so much to me that I want to give them something in return. And so I thought and so that's basically what he's like, a caretaker of these texts in the classroom. And that's what I've been trying to do ever since. That's kind of how the quest started.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Are there specific teaching methods or approaches that you find particularly effective in engaging students with classical and early modern literature?

Dr. Josh Reid

Oh yeah, because it's a challenge, especially students coming in like, "Why are we reading 'Beowulf'?" "Why are we reading Homer? Dante." Yeah. So I tried to emphasize both what is foreign and what is familiar. And so in terms of what is foreign, this is an opportunity to be kind of like time travelers to a distant place, a foreign land in a foreign time, sometimes even a foreign language. Yeah. And as much as possible, I try to get them exposure to that, the materials of that time. So we use maybe for instance, online facsimiles and online editions. I actually have personal copies of some of these texts. So I will bring in, for instance, a 17th century English translation of an Italian romance epic when we're doing early modern printing or talking about it, and to feel that text, not just the text, but the texture of it. Yeah. The rag pulp, that's different from the way we make paper now. The way it smells, the way the text is set up so different from the way we're familiar with it. There's something again, it's something ensorcelling about it, something magical about it. But also I try to find what's familiar and try to engage with that. So, you know, Spenser's House of Pride in "The Faerie Queene," this is a 1591 poem, the way that it has these kind of, it's a culture of surface and preening surface. And students see a connection to the social media constructions that they make. We make, we connect, we find out how these texts are the foundation for what they read and value now, from Harry Potter to The Witcher video games, and I try to have fun in class. We bring in memes, we do serious play, we, I try to make connections to areas that they're familiar with. So we're talking about an epic simile. They're familiar with CGI and movies. Well, what about SGI, a simile-generated image? And so, and maybe a lot of dad jokes mixed in makes it go down there. But, and I have a background in art history, as you mention, too, and so I like to bring in illustrations and art as an entry point for those texts. Yeah. But through it all, I'm trying to recapture a questioning state of mind. So, you know, Neil Postman has this great quote, an unfortunate quote about education that often students come in as question marks and come out as periods. And so how do we open up the questioning again, where they're looking at these texts and they find it has something to offer them through the questions that they ask and recapturing that sense of wondering about them. And so in a related way actually, and this connects to the you're not alone, we've started this Appalachian premodernist group that -- this is Dr. Brian Maxson, Dr. Julie Fox-Horton, Dr. Crofts, and Dr. Michael Fowler -- we've all worked together, and now it's over 144 strong of regional faculty, students, and kind of international now, too, who are all dedicated to promoting premodern studies. So we bring in speakers to campus. We talk about teaching strategies and ways to reach students. And this semester, the monsters course I mentioned was part of that initiative. We decided the four of us are now teaching monster courses in art history, history, literature, and we have students that are, who we are sharing between the classes. So it's a way, again, of using a community to kind of make these texts live for students.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

What's the most rewarding part of teaching for you? Oh, well, I mean, it's probably a cliche and probably what everyone says, but sometimes truisms are true. It's that spark, that spark of learning and discovery that students have when they surprise themselves. Yeah. So I love teaching general education courses because I often have students coming in who just want that green check on Degree Works -- right -- for this survey that they didn't want to take coming in. And they have a lot of trepidation about writing essays and about reading literature with a capital L. They have what you might call a fixed mindset about it. They think that that's not their thing. "I'm not good at English," they might say at the beginning. Right. But every semester there are these kind of learning sparks that happen because of the nature of the material we teach. Literature speaks to us all; it reads us all. It is, everyone has an entry point to it, and everyone has something to say about it. And the more diverse viewpoints, the better. And as soon as they start realizing that they have something to say about the material, that it's not just something inert that they're hearing me talk about, that they actually can contribute to the class content -- yeah -- there's a there's kind of a shift with the student and with the class community in general. So just like a couple of weeks ago, we, I learned something new in terms of a nuance about John Donne's "The Flea," which I've been reading and teaching for years. And this was something a student said in class. And there's just like this ripple of recognition through the class of, "Wow, this is, and we're learning from each other."  As one student said once, the best part of class was, we're learning from each other. And, and it was, there was a, they didn't even mention me in it. So they're part of the content, they have something to bring, and I get so much out of that. I'm kind of like almost a pedagogical vampire. Like the more they bring, the more sustenance I get. And I had a mentor once tell me that we're our best selves when teaching. And I feel that in those moments, I'm never more present, I'm never more engaged, I'm never more attentive and receptive as in those moments when students are, and I feel like students feel that way as well.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

As you know, ETSU's annual Festival of Ideas brings speakers and guests to our campus to connect the campus and community through conversations and dialogue. In fact, you've been part of the planning committee for Festival of Ideas before. In what ways do you believe the study of literature, especially classics, contributes to our understanding of contemporary society?

Dr. Josh Reid

Yeah, and I'm hearing Mitch Albom is coming next in 2024. So yeah, I've just loved what the Festival of Ideas has brought to campus, I think it's been since 2019, and we've had some unforgettable speakers. I still think of Doris Kearns Goodwin when she came, Mandy Harvey. I got to bring my children to that. They still talk about it. And with election season coming around the bend, I think a lot about last year's last February's Pantsuit Politics, and their advice for navigating a kind of acrid world of partisanship. Yeah. So and I love how, you know, you have this kind of featured speaker too, but how it radiates out into the roundtables that we have with the campus and community and then outward. Yeah. And so I think that's again, that's a model for, for what we're talking about here in terms of what literature can say about culture. And I think literature has a central role into how we understand and operate in society. Jonathan Gottschall has this wonderful book called "The Storytelling Animal," and he says that we should really be called homo fictus because we always tell stories. We process the world through the stories that we tell. Yeah. I mean, obviously we start as children. I mean, my kids just this morning, we were trying to get into the van quickly, and they started talking about, well, a zombie's chasing us. And, you know, that kind of fixing that in a kind of associate narrative, we all get a new sense of urgency and having fun doing it. But we don't stop telling stories. We continue to tell them -- yeah -- about our lives, about each other. When we pass away, we are the stories that we tell about each other. And so given the centrality of stories, it makes sense that studying the oldest stories that we have and most impactful ones that that's essential. You know, they say that history is what happened, but literature is what happens. It taps into what's human in us and what drives us and what we continue to do. Homer is new every morning, but nothing's as old as yesterday's tweet is another way of putting it. And studies have shown that fiction can help improve our empathy because we're walking in another person's shoes from another culture, another time period, another gender, another perspective. They can provide solace and healing through what's called bibliotherapy. In fact, when we were just coming into the COVID pandemic, we had a poetry Zoom event, and President Noland came to that, and it was just reading these poems, many of them classical, helped us provided some resilience and some solace in that moment too. And even a disparate field, seemingly disparate fields, like medicine benefit from stories as well. There's fields like narrative medicine that have shown that the more attention given to analyzing stories and to writing stories by health care practitioners, that their health outcomes have actually improved from that. Yeah. And so it's because the skills that you get from reading and analyzing literature become the skills that you use to analyze and process the world around you. And I'll give just two quick examples from my classes. My monsters class, for instance, we've been looking at a lot about how monsters, how we create monsters through a language of dehumanization and othering. And my students automatically are seeing that happen today in political arena and in, coming out of conflicts. And so they're making that connection, even if these are distant texts from them. And then recently in British literature, we looked at the moment in "Paradise Lost" when Satan enters into Eden and how when he sees Eden, he doesn't see it as a place that he can be in harmony with. He sees it as a place he can dominate, not something he can see as his domicile or home, but something that he sees that he can extract from and take and I had a student, I think the student is a changemaker and interested in environmental issues. She saw that kind of satanic gaze as kind of the seed for the kind of imbalance with their environments that we're dealing with today. So the seeds of all our woe are in these classic texts, and students, when they encounter them, they see a kind of mirror on our contemporary event, and there's a certain way that encountering these stories from the past help us read our present, as Emily Dickinson puts it, Tell the truth, but tell it slant, and so that kind of slant-wise approach of going to the past to encounter our present is an effective way.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Yeah. I had the pleasure of participating in a fun event that you organized last year, the Milton Marathon. Could you tell us a bit about that and the ways that it engages our students and the campus community with literature?

Dr. Josh Reid

Thanks so much for asking about it, and thank you again for coming to it last time. It was fun; thank you. Yeah, it was in November 2022; it happens every two years in even years. And you know, I love hearing, I've heard a few ask, "Is it happening this year?" So it will happen next year. Those listening, please come. Yes. In November 2024. But it was just wonderful seeing President Noland and you and our Dean in College of Arts and Sciences, Joe Bidwell, all in a row opening the poem -- yes -- for us. So this is a public reading of Milton's "Paradise Lost," his 10,565-line work of Biblical fanfiction, the greatest work of Biblical fanfiction ever. And my students in my Milton in His Age class help organize it, promote it. And it's a wonderful experience for them. They're coming up with well, here's a bookmark. I don't know if you have this one. Oh, nice. Yeah. And then they make bookmarks. They create short films to promote it. They write poems and do art. In fact, I had two students publish the poems that they wrote from that experience. It's something about Milton that just unleashes their creativity. And so they put on this event. It's a one-day event. It takes about nine and a half hours to read through the whole poem. But everyone is contributing. The whole community is coming out, both campus and abroad. It's become a kind of a homecoming for former students, former Milton Marathoners, who I had some come down from Ohio last time. Right. We had about 350 come to the event. It's just wild. It's a good example of what we were talking about earlier, is that these classical texts still have life. Right. And we can reanimate them if we find the right approach. And Milton works particularly well in this kind of oral format, reading it out loud because he was blind when he composed a poem, so he sculpted it in sound. So in some ways we're recomposing the poem as we read it. And there's something about that Miltonic blank verse, even if you're not understanding every word that he's saying, I don't understand every word he's saying, that just captivates you. I've looked out and seen individuals in the audience that just stay there for an hour just listening. Yes. And so and it's -- oh, yeah -- and it's I think it's a perfect example of, you know, the QEP has been emphasizing this going beyond the classroom. And this is an initiative that is birthed in the classroom from the content of the class. But it's something that they put out into the world. And when you build it, they come. And I just really want to applaud the ETSU community, my department, as well as everyone here, because the kind of numbers we get for an event like this is unheard of for Milton Marathons. Yeah. In fact, I put in for a Guinness Book of World Records for it, but they came back and said it was too specific. So, but it was, but it says everything about the kind of way that it's been embraced by this community. So it's, I can't wait to see what fall 2024 will bring. That's outstanding. I was thinking you're going to need a bigger room.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Yeah, exactly. Well, and you could probably spend the whole podcast talking about this, but what are some lessons from Milton that still resonate today?

Dr. Josh Reid

That's a fantastic question. There's, I feel like every time I teach him they're new lessons that I learn along the way. But I'll say that, you know, I mentioned, for instance, the something that I've seen more and more because I'm thinking more and more about these issues, I already mentioned the Satan example and with my student the changemaker is is that he's a wonderful early poet dealing with these issues of how we respond to our environment and what we take from it. And he, another example that I didn't, that I mentioned Satan, but there's another example of a demon named Mammon, right, wealth, and he's building Pandemonium, which is a word Milton made up, means all demons. And he's building this home for them, and it's in hell, and he's extracting it from the earth. And it's this wounding process that's compared to kind of like the creation of Adam because he's digging out, spacious, out of this spacious wound, he's digging out ribs of gold. But Milton is criticizing this process as something that is extractive in nature, that it's taking from the earth, and it's damaging it. And my students often think of things like mountaintop removal, for instance, because mountaintops don't grow back. Yeah. And it's, and opposed to that, he gives us an example of Adam and Eve living in harmony with the environment. So how does one live in a space? How does one live within it? How does one thrive within it? That's one thing I often think about, too. But he's such a powerful advocate for liberty, liberty of thought, liberty of expression, his prose work Areopagitica was kind of foundational for our First Amendment. The Founding Fathers found that. And so he is his first itself, he says, is liberated from rhyme. He's a poet that is insists on us taking ourselves seriously and for us to take our liberty seriously and the importance of that and to not take what we've heard and what we've received from what just because of where we were born or where we grew up receiving that for truth, we have to kind of earn it ourselves. Yeah. That's something I've taken from him as well. And finally, and this is I always find this is a beautiful moment in "Paradise Lost" is that we learn from Satan that hell can be a state of mind. You can take it with you wherever you go. He takes it with him to Eden, which is why he can't live within it. But at the end of it, even in the tragedy of Adam and Eve being expelled, they learn that paradise, that you can have paradise within you too. Happier, still. Happier far. And it's a sense of that, you know, we, our state of mind is something that we can construct. And sometimes in that state of mind is something we construct through things like reading, literature, through consuming it. Milton is very fond of digestion metaphors and and eating and changing through what you eat. And in many ways I think he thinks of his works as something we eat, and we mull over, and we are changed through it. So that's a few, those are a few items. I mean, I could go on and on. I'm sure.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Thank you. Excellent. Do you have a favorite lecture or a subject that you teach? Oh, that's hard. That's almost like picking a favorite child. I've been very fortunate in Literature and Language to get to teach a lot of different courses like European and British Literature Surveys, Bible is Literature, Literature and Medicine, I really enjoyed teaching that, Milton in His Age, as we've mentioned, a Renaissance grad course, Literature, Ethics, and Values, the monsters course. But I guess I if I had to pick one, I think it's a Dante course that I've offered three times now. It's a kind of replica of that Dante course that I took as an undergrad at Virginia Tech that meant so much for me. Yeah. And from that professor meant so much for me, too. And I just try to replicate that experience. They read Dante's "Divine Comedy," the "Inferno," "Purgatorio," "Paradiso," so hell, purgatory, heaven. We go through it twice with two different translations. So I get to work with students on what translation means and how that affects the text. We also look at illustrations. The Reece Museum has a full suite of Salvador Dali illustrations, so they can look at those and other illustrators as well. In fact, last time in 2021, I worked with Spenser Brenner, the wonderful Spenser Brenner, on doing a an exhibit on Dante to celebrate his cultural impact. And we had a little "Inferno" reading, kind of like a little Milton Marathon. We call it the Dante Dash. Yeah. So and I find that that's the course that I think students have been responding the most to. There was a Hozier -- Do you like that album, that that artist Hozier? I don't know the artist; Oh, "Take Me to Church." That's one of his songs. Yes, yes. So he made a new album called I think it's "Unreal Unearth." And I got so many emails from former students because it's based on the "Inferno." Oh I didn't know that. Yeah. And it's so wonderful. I'm going to use it next in class, but it just showed the kind of impact that that text had on them. There's something about the journey Dante's making -- yeah -- that connects with our journeys and our stories going back to what Gottschall says and that it can be a guide for us, just as Virgil was a guide for Dante.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I'm certain that I have shared this with you, but since I was an English major undergrad, Dante's "Inferno" was one of my favorite works. Yeah, it still speaks. "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" is the other, but Dante's "Inferno" was an impactful work for an undergraduate student. It's unforgettable.

Dr. Josh Reid
Yeah. Yes, it really is.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I am always seeking good book recommendations. And so since I have an English professor here as a guest, I have to ask you, what are you reading now, and what have been your favorite books or book that you've read in 2023?

Dr. Josh Reid

So, well, the joke here is that English professors don't have time to read what they want. And so that, well, we have this list that we're accumulating that we'll be able to read when we retire. But we, and you know, I have, I'm very fortunate to have a job where I get to reread and teach texts that I love every day. But so I don't get it because I'm an early modernist, I don't read as many contemporary texts. That said, I've been able to fit some in. I'm still reading right now the kind of rereading and reading the works of Jeff VanderMeer because he came to campus. I can't believe we brought him in, this New York bestselling Jeff VanderMeer, the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative, and Dr. Jesse Graves, thanks to him bringing in Jeff VanderMeer to speak and talk about his work. He's one of my favorite living authors. So I you know, after that, he came in October, I've been kind of revisiting his work. And so I'm reading right now one of his wonderful, harrowing novellas called "The Strange Bird." So it's part of his Borne universe. And I think it's going be on AMC. It's been optioned for AMC. So someday down the line you can see it on television. But he writes these strange, wondrous, kind of weird fiction they call it about a kind of possible future, and they're very environmentally focused these texts are, and "The Strange Bird" in particular has a lot to say about the way we treat animals and about the resilience of the environment and how it will live on. Even if it's, if it's damaged, it will live on. So those are very powerful. And the, in terms of the best book I've read in 2023, I mean, there's probably a lot of people would say this so it's not a surprise, but I have to plug it. If I get an opportunity, it has to be Barbara Kingsolver's "Demon Copperhead." Yeah. It's the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. And if anyone hearing this has not read it, give it a try. You have to, I think, obligated to because it's, you know, a wonderful author, of course. But this is a master work, I think a modern classic, built off a classic, "David Copperfield." "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens. And it's it takes place in our region. In fact, I was just driving home for Thanksgiving, and you drive through, and we drive through Jonesville in Virginia. And that's where he's growing up. You can see locations that she used, and he's traipsing around eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia. But it's, there's just something about - I think you've been reading it too -- I read it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's just something about that narrative voice, that demon's. Narrative voice. It's, you're just instantly enthralled. You're connected to him, you're rooting for him to get this kind of exit velocity from the opioid crisis surrounding him; even as it pulls him down, you're just hoping that he can get through it. And it says a lot about our region. It says a lot about the universal human struggle, really just beautifully written too. And if you're into English and have read Charles Dickens, then it's even more wonderful seeing how she's layered on and adapted his the characters and the plots from that novel too -- yeah -- but you don't need to have read "David Copperfield" too; ideally, maybe read "Demon Copperhead" and then go back to "David Copperfield." So you like that one as well? Yes, I did. But I found myself in reading the text laughing and crying at the same time. Yes. You don't think is possible, but also finding the need to read passages out loud because they were so beautifully written that I wanted to hear them. Oh, that's that's lovely; that's a wonderful way to in speaking of strategies for classical texts -- yeah -- listening to them, there's something about making it auditory. Yeah. And hearing the language, tasting it, and the crying and the laughing. That's definitely that, I had those experiences as well. Yeah, yeah. Those are the best texts that can do that, can give you that diversity of emotion in the same moment.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

So I have to ask, this might be a hard question, but again, since I have an English professor here, if you had to name the top three or four books that you think every college student should experience or read during the college years, what might make that list?

Dr. Josh Reid

I'm going to give a terrible answer to this because I think every every English faculty member would give a different list and would probably give a better list because I was I think, so what I decided to do is lean into me. So this is probably not going to be surprising here already hearing my answers so far, is these are texts that, yes, they are difficult. Yes, initially they don't seem like something that students would be receptive to on day one, but they have been the most transformative to me and the most transformative way, have transformed my way of thinking. And when students give them a try and fully commit to the experience, they, they come out changed on the other end, and, you know, to adapt C.S. Lewis, I've never met someone who has fallen out of love with these texts. Sometimes it's harder to fall in love. It's a longer courtship period. So these would, of course, be it would be Dante's "Divine Comedy," which you you said you loved Dante's "Inferno." Right. And Milton's "Paradise Lost." I still say this is Milton's world, we're just living in it. And then it's kind of an oddball, bizarre one. I, well, not so much given my experience. Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Yeah. So again, these might be texts that one needs a guide to get through or encouragement to get through. But I've still met students who read these on their own and come to me and have found something out of them. And they're kind of standing for these texts. Yeah. So I have to give a, I guess an answer that's personal to me. I mean, that's been my experience with them. And I really again, I haven't met anyone who that who has taken the journey with them, who hasn't had their capacities enlarged in some way by -- right -- by that experience. It's a great list. But yeah, it's not that contemporary. Others can write in and disagree with those.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

That's right. Exactly. Finally, Josh, what impact do you hope that you've made on your students? I really hope that I've made them more fully themselves after my courses. I always say to them that we don't just read literature. Literature reads us, they find us. You know, if you're open to it, you're asking the questions. As a student, you're open to the experience. The literature finds us where we are in the story, in our ongoing story of our life, and can help us actualize our potential and take us places if we're receptive to that message. So I'll give a recent example. I had a student, I have a student currently in my British Literature class, and we were reading this wonderful poet called Hester Pulter. She's a 17th century poet whose works have only just now been really discovered and read. She had a manuscript of about 120 poems that was found rediscovered in the '90s and now is in the digital edition. So people are actually finally reading them. And this writer who never had a real chance of publishing these works writes so evocatively of her experiences as a just creative woman who, in the strictures of her time, she writes, "Why must I thus forever be confined against the noble freedom of my mind?" And that speaks to readers today. So I had this student who was responding to her and some of the other women writers, and I'll just read what she said. "Women, however, were silenced for so long in society that I think all the time they spent not speaking beautiful and heartbreaking messages set brewing within them. And meals are often the most delicious when they've had time to marinate." So this is a freshman student thinking about her, what place she has in the world, the challenges she'll face, and what stories she can tell in it. And then she reads Pulter and thinks, "I'm not alone." You know, someone's been there, someone's, you know, faced that. And so her story, her voice joins with Pulter's, and hers won't be silenced. The student’s won't be silenced. And so, and I can't wait to hear her voice in the world.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Thank you, Josh. As an English major, I've really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to an English professor and to hear more about your philosophy of teaching and the ways that you're inspiring our students to study and appreciate and connect with literature. Thanks for listening to "Why I Teach." For more information about Dr. Reid, the College of Arts and Sciences, or this podcast series, visit the ETSU Provost's website at ETSU dot edu slash provost. You can follow me on social media at ETSU Provost, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like and subscribe to "Why I Teach" wherever you listen to podcasts.