About

I’m Mike. I’ve just finished my Masters of Arts in the English at the University of Toronto, and I’m about to start my PhD at the University of Waterloo. When I started my Masters, I hoped to focus on Romantic and Victorian literature. I’m still focused on that, but along the way I’ve often found myself distracted by a a whole whack of different writers, poets, and theorists that have nothing to do with the nineteenth century.

Before I started my Masters I took a year off and worked at a small marketing firm in Ottawa, where I mostly did web writing, web analytics, and search engine optimization. It was pretty neat, but sitting at home all day reading literary criticism, poems, and novels–all the while writing a few essays along the way–is pretty fun too. Then again, new media, changes in print culture, and the future of how we access information is, you know, also surprisingly interesting and relevant to literary criticism.

In my undergrad I wrote for and eventually edited Volume 42 of Golden Words Newspaper. It’s a comedy paper. We basically sat around on office from noon on Sunday to 5 am Monday, writing, socializing, and trying to put together 12-24 pages of content. We exchanged advertising space for pizza and Pakistani cuisine, which we then used to bait new writers and layout/graphics staff.

I’m starting this blog because I like writing things, and (aside from a few tongue-in-cheek haikus) Twitter’s 140 characters doesn’t always cut it.