About

I started Lit Alive! back in 2018 when the world seemed to catch on fire. Instinctively I reverted back to my literary roots. My first fire box contained the literary classics. For some reason I worried that they would be thrown away. I wanted to connect what was past with what was present. I set out to see what connections I could find between literary classics, which I wanted to save, and the place where I was living, Atlanta, which I didn’t understand very well. My bias was and is that outside of academia literary works are read mainly for their value to contemporary life. That was a year+-long project of monthly entries, with photos and sound clips of literary excerpts read by Atlanta residents. These are the Atlanta blogs. The restrictions of the challenge (classics, Atlanta, local) yielded some interesting, unexpected convergences.

Today the world is really burning and my questions are different. I’m amassing a new fire box. Now I want to know what relevance people find in literary works at all. When do these works come up in regular life? Are they “used” in any way? What is being celebrated, what is not? The blog entries now are built around literary sightings of any kind in any contemporary setting, outside of academia, that I encounter. These sightings are not very frequent, not within my control, and cannot be predicted, which makes for exciting discoveries. 

These projects are always about more than what they seem. Recently I’ve learned that the term for someone like me is “third culture kid.” As a military BRAT born at West Point and raised in Germany, Italy, and California, primed to live later in Japan and Canada and Georgia, I’ve never had a strong sense of home and have always felt between cultures. As perhaps do many people today. It means that I’m always searching, and literary works are one route for the search.