with a scholar's vigorous rigor, and she lives love with a poet's steadfast commitment to the vitality and veracity of language, and she dreams love with an artist's inimitable imagination.
Seeing Red is a love story, a story of desire and intrigue and mystery, a story of teaching and learning, a story that sears the heart with a seer's prophetic vision. With unsettling insight, Pauline understands how research in the social sciences must begin with stories that help readers revisit and revision their understanding of the fabric of daily lives. In the novel Straight Man by Richard Russo, the narrator is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., chair of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Devereaux observes: “Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can't remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions” (p. 201). Pauline is a wise scholar, and she engages in “reasoned discourse” with stiletto sharp precision, but her wisdom extends to an appreciation of the limits of “reasoned discourse,” and so she acknowledges how other ways of knowing— artistic, poetic, narrative, autobiographical, artographic, creative, emotional, imaginative—are also integral to scholarly adventures of researching and living.
In my scholarly and creative journeys with Pauline, I have learned to live with more courage, more conviction, more constancy. I have been a language teacher all my adult life. And for most of my adult life I have also been a poet. I claim that I live in language, and that language lives in me. I am awash in language, espoused and exposed in language. While others are busy running the country, and selling real estate, and diagnosing illness, and constructing