Reading and Evaluating Narrative Scholarship

Picture me in Ardmore, Alabama, during the long dry summer of 1987. ¹ I am, at that time, thirty-five years old with hopeful eyes and just this side of handsome, living largely on my dreams of an epic writing life while doing my lesser daytime job teaching at a local university. The local university was UAH, say U-AHHH, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the university of “the empty head,” ² which itself was living largely on its own dream of achieving seriously higher status as a recognized center of space science, engineering, and materials technology. ³