Past Meets Present: Day 1, Kalamazoo

John beat me to the post today on a Kzoo-themed update! I will echo his plug for our roundtable: Saturday, May 11, 10AM (Session 382): Blogging the Medieval(ist) World.

In the spirit of my planned comments for this roundtable concerning the development of a new blog, I am going to attempt something a little different this year and actually blog from the conference. I know – it’s a brave new world (or new to me – others have been doing this for years!). I am going to give this a try this time and see how it goes.

To that end…

Day 1: The Journey Begins – Past Meets Present

I always get a bit frantic right before taking off for Kzoo. It falls right in my last week of classes and before finals – not the least stressful time of the semester. And, yet, I smile every time I get news (these days, over Facebook) of an old friend who is making the same journey, generally in the midst of just as much chaos as I am. I wrote last year on this blog – Recap: Kzoo, Jobs, Travel, Research, and Teaching – about the joy in reunions and the continued connection Kalamazoo gives me with colleagues now across the map. Tonight, I know there will be a lively band of us, buying drinks for each other at Waldo’s, shaking off the haze of travel, celebrating good news, and taking advantage of the time we have to reconnect. It seems just a moment in time ago that we were all grad students – some of us more intimidated by Kzoo than others – trying to forge a future in this strange, highly specialized, and exciting (sometimes exotic) discipline. To think, now, how we have found our paths and made careers in this profession we love is worth a toast or three.

To the ‘Zoo!