Welcome back! As you know, I started Interminable Rambling way back in August 2015. That means that this year will mark the fourth anniversary of this site. I started this site over at Blogspot where I wrote 81 posts before migrating over to WordPress. Since that August 2015, both sites have received 99,269 views. This past year alone, the WordPress site received 40,854 views. When I started this blog, I didn’t really think any further than the next post. I just saw this space as a place for me to write something, anything, every week. I never imagined it would find an audience both inside and outside of the classroom. Thank you for reading!

Last January, I published “What to expect in 2018!” Looking back at that post, I realize that I did not meet every expectation that I laid out in that post. Due to how I write for the blog, I do not necessarily know what I will write about until about one or two weeks before publishing a post. Posts arise from classroom discussions, conferences, news, and things I am currently reading. As such, plans change and the posts that I may expect to write never materialize.

For example, in the 2018 post, I mentioned that I would construct a syllabus on African American literature and war. That post never arose. However, I did publish a “Comics and Race” syllabus, which I am still tweaking, an “Introduction to Modernism” syllabus that I am implementing here in Norway, and a “Frank Yerby” syllabus. I still want to construct an African American literature and war syllabus; hopefully that will occur this year. In the meantime, expect some more syllabi on this site. I already have one syllabus entitled “African American Literature and the American West” in the queue for the first part of 2019. What other types of syllabi would you like to see on Interminable Rambling? Let me know in the comments below.

In regard to the books I wanted to read and write about, I actually only wrote about one, Kristen Imani Kasai’s The House of Erzulie. While I did read Hilary Jordan’s Mudbound, I never got around to reading
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing and Wiley Cash’s The Last Ballad. I am hoping to read each of those books this year. I did write about other books such as Thomas Mullen’s Darktown, Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith’s The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born, and Ethiop’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery.”

This year, I am planning to have posts on more books, some that I am teaching and some that I am just reading. One upcoming post focuses on Lillian E. Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944). Along with Smith’s novel, I am thinking about posts on Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville, and more. At this moment, I am not totally sure what books I’ll read this year, so be on the lookout in the coming months for, hopefully, so unexpected posts.

Over the past few years, I have really started getting into comics and sequential art. Last year saw posts on Kevin Sacco’s Josephine, Nate Powell’s work, EC Comics, Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga, and much more. For 2019, you can expect more of the same. I plan to have more posts on Black Panther since that is a project I am currently working on. As well, I am looking to have posts on some of Milestone Comics’ runs, specifically Hardware and Icon. I’m sure there will be more, but again, I do not want to promise anything and then not deliver. So, let’s all agree to be surprised when then posts arrive.

Being a Fulbright Scholar in Norway for the year, I have been able to travel and experience things that I never could’ve imagined even two years ago. In 2018, I wrote about some of the sites around Bergen, the ASANOR confernece in Kristiansand, my thoughts on the landscape here and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and about one of my lectures in Poland. Along with all of this, I wrote about my lectures in my American Literature survey course.

There will be more posts about my lectures in 2019, specifically ones on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Along with these, I plan to post some thoughts about my trips to Bordeaux, France, and Warsaw, Poland in December. I am not sure what these posts will be, but I plan to do something. During the spring, I will be going to York, England, for two weeks, I will present a lecture in Tours, France, and I will attend two conferences, one in Bergen and one in Odense, Denmark. So, you can look forward to posts about my experiences along the way and the things that I learn.

Along with all of this, I am working on multiple projects, and I am looking forward to sharing more information about those in the upcoming year. At this time, all I can say is that one is looking at Christopher Priest’s Black Panther and the other is looking at literature and Loving v. Virginia. These are both topics that I have been looking out over the past couple of years, so it was inevitable that I would turn my work on them into larger projects. By the end of the year, I am hoping to be able to you more. Until then, some of the things I am thinking about may pop up on the blog, so be on the lookout.

A lot happened in 2018, and a lot is in store for 2019. What kind of posts would you like to see this upcoming year? Let me know in the comments below, and make sure to follow me on Twitter at @silaslapham.

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