Amy Weldon
English Department Head
Biography
Education:Â Ph.D, M.A., English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; B.A., English and Journalism, Auburn University
An Alabama native, Professor Amy Weldon teaches creative writing, British Romanticism, Paideia, study-abroad, and more at Luther College, where she codirects the Luther College Writers Festival. Sheâs the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World (2018), The Writerâs Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (2018), Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (2019), and Advanced Fiction Writing: A Writerâs Guide and Anthology (2023), featuring Luther studentsâ short stories and their thoughts on the process, alongside such writers as Angela Carter, Tommy Orange, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and James Joyce and career and publishing advice. Her novel Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein will be published in March 2025, and her sixth book, A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire, is forthcoming in 2027.
Dr. Weldon is a passionate teacher whoâs inspired by writing, reading, and traveling with students. Since 2013, sheâs led âIn Frankensteinâs Footsteps: The Keats-Shelley Circle in London, Geneva, and Italy,â and in Spring 2019, she directed the London portion of the Associated Colleges of the Midwestâs (ACMâs) semester-long âLondon and Florence: Arts in Contextâ program. Following an unexpected COVID reboot to an on-campus format in January 2022, her course âEnglish Monsters: From Frankenstein to Big Brotherâ took students from London to York, Haworth, and Whitby (UK) in January 2023.
Dr. Weldonâs fiction, creative nonfiction, reviews, and scholarly and pedagogical essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Vala: The Journal of the Blake Society, Orion, The Common, About Place, Keats-Shelley Journal, Midwestern Gothic, The Hopper, Bloom, The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of the Short Story in English, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Carolina Quarterly, Thumbnail, and Inch. Her work can also be found in edited collections including Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-first Century Approaches, Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice, Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America , William Faulkner: Critical Perspectives, The Best Travel Writing 2012, and Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing, Vol. 2. She has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a participant in the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference.
Beyond the page and the classroom, Dr. Weldon can usually be found gardening, cooking, or enjoying a good film.
âI describe my own goals with two interrelated Teaching Verbs: destabilize and rebuild. They arenât what I do to studentsâthey are what I help students do with their own assumptions, ideas, and skills.â
âAmy Weldon
ENG 485 AÂ Faulkner
William Faulkner (1897-1962, winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature) claimed that “in the South, the past in never goneâit’s not even past.” Neither is Faulkner himself, considering the long shadow he still casts over American (especially Southern) literature. Beginning with two of his major novels, THE SOUND AND THE FURY and ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, we’ll investigate Faulkner’s work, legacy, and influence, exploring such questions as these: What makes this writer so influential? What does “influence” mean, anyway? What are the origins, obstacles, and purposes of literary style? How and why do writers respond to one another’s work, to place, to history, to a common literary heritage, to gaps between their chosen medium (written words) and what they attempt to render through that medium? What happens to familiar Faulknerian themes like race, class, the nature of consciousness, the nature of time, changing social mores, history, and memory in different hands? Additional authors will include Walker Percy, Jayne Anne Phillips, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy.
ENG 312 A Creative Writing: Poet & Fiction II
An advanced-level course in the writing of poems and stories for students dedicated to making imaginative, emotional, and technical discoveries in the practice of their craft. Readings in contemporary poetry and fiction, as well as in-class exercises and student workshops.
ENG 239 AÂ In Frankenstein’s Footstep
Mary Shelley composed her famous novel Frankenstein (1816) amid a whirlwind of personal turmoil, important friendships, and significant travel. This course will retrace the path of her journeys from childhood to Frankenstein, visiting sites associated with her and her circle – including John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron – in London, Switzerland, and Italy, as we investigate the relationships between an author’s historical and imaginative realities.
- Ph.D., English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005
Dissertation: âReasonable Bodies: Enlightened Dissent and the Feminine in Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Mary Hays.â - M.A., English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999
- B.A., English and Journalism, Auburn University, 1996
Review-Essays
For Bloom, where I am a staff writer:
Cross-published at The Millions:
âPrivate Lives, Artful Truths: Joan Chaseâs Midwestern Eden.â
âGrowing Into Compassion: On Anna Sewell and Black Beauty.â
âSybille Bedford: Resilience and Grace.â
âCollateral Gifts: The Poetry and Journey of Spencer Reece.â
âAbigail Thomas: Accidentally Deliberate.â
âDiana Athill: The Sufficient Self.â
For Los Angeles Review of Books:
âThe Weird Sisters.â [Print Edition.]
âBelle Dame Sans Merci: On Angela Carter.â [Online Edition].
Creative Nonfiction
In edited collections:
âA Miniature Handbook for New Women Activists.â Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on
Fracking in America (Ice Cube Press, 2015.)
âThe Fruits of Memory.â Southern Cultures
Reprinted in Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing, ed. John
Egerton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
âTraveling to Mary.â The Best Travel Writing, Vol 9, ed. Tim Cahill. San Francisco: Solas
Press, 2012: 156-175.
In journals:
âThe Spinning Self: Pottery and the Rest of My Life.â Bloom.
âSpiral.â A River & Sound Review (http://www.riverandsoundreview.org).
âThe Odd Girls: Flannery OâConnor and Me.â Shenandoah.
âNotes on a Flood.â Inspire(d) Magazine.
âDreaming of Eudora.â The South Carolina Review.
Short Fiction
âWrestling the Angel.â Inch (Spring 2015).
âMisfit.â Thumbnail Magazine.
âBurning Lou.â Fiction Southeast (http://fictionsoutheast.com).
âFairhope.â The Carolina Quarterly.
âMansions.â O. Henry Festival Stories 2005.
âExplosions.â North Carolina Literary Review.
âTraveling Grace.â Yemassee.
âWonders.â StoryQuarterly.
âPraying for Ruth.â The Carolina Quarterly.
Scholarly and Pedagogical Essays
âHurling Yourself Against the Beautiful: Faulkner and Creativity.â In William Faulkner:
Critical Insights, ed. Kathryn S. Artuso (Salem Press, 2013).
Review of Daisy Hayâs Young Romantics (Keats-Shelley Journal, 2011.)
âLarry Brown,â âSamuel Minturn Peck,â and âHollis Summers.â Invited entries in updated
edition of Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary, eds. Joseph Flora and
Amber Vogel. Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
ââThe Common Gifts of Heavenâ: Animals and Moral Education in Anna Letitia Barbauldâs
âThe Mouseâs Petitionâ and âThe Caterpillar.ââ Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic
Text 8 (June 2002). Online. Internet. <http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles
cc08_n02.html>. 26 paragraphs. Journal title changed in 2005 to Romantic
Textualities: Literature and Print Culture 1780-1840; article available at
http://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/cc08_n02/.
ââWhen Fantasy Meant Survivalâ: Writing, Class, and the Oral Tradition in the
Autobiographies of Rick Bragg and Harry Crews.â The Mississippi Quarterly LIII:1
(Winter 1999-2000): 89-110.
Other Writing
Regular postings at Luther College âIdeas and Creationsâ Faculty Blog
Writing Sample
My short-short story âFairhope,â in The Carolina Quarterly, Spring 2006
Selected Professional Activities
Bread Loaf/Orion Environmental Writers Conference
Bread Loaf Writers Conference
Tin House Summer Writers Workshop
Sewanee Writers Conference (Tennessee Williams Scholar)
Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference
Auburn University Writersâ Conference (as a faculty member)
Selected Campus Projects/Governance Work
Founder and co-organizer, annual Luther College Faculty Research Symposium
Faculty sponsor, Sigma Tau Delta (English honor society)
Chair, Humanities and Fine Arts Division (2014-2017)
Chair, Faculty Organization Committee (2015-2016)
Member, Faculty Organization Committee (2014-2017)
âFairhopeâ in The Carolina Quarterly, Spring 2006
The walls crack and in the attic light feet skitter, but still I wait and listen for the voice this house has yet to yield. On the second floor of three, around one up-curve of the spiral stairâthe only one in Alabama like it, built by slaves, so says my plaqueâare still my husbandâs books, his shirts folded flat as shrouds, his ordination in a wooden frame, and, alone in a drawer, his glass-vialed splinter of the Cross. He carried it through all the wars. The boys reached from their cots to clutch it as he leaned in close to listen and whisper, with them, prayers. I told him heâd been cheated, but he wouldnât listen. There were always wars and always soldiers dying. Always voices calling him away. Youâll see me soon, he told me. Who knows me anymore except this house, and what lives here with me? Its name is Fairhope, says the plaque. Nobody speaks its name, or mine, here anymore. Not even he.
Iâm still here, without him, straight west from Selma, where the highway dissolves into dreaming cotton towns and hills that roll as gently as the narrow chests of graves. Log trucks roar along the blacktop at the bottom of the hill. There was a battle here late in the war. By that time, the men were out of bullets and snuck out of the woods at night to strangle sentries. The gray cloth had run out, too, and their wives made uniforms from the rags of their own skirts, stained brown with leaves. The blood is brown now, on the floorboards of the houseâs foyer, where the other women nursed them, where my husband fell. It never washes out. All of us, we wait on men. They twist and moan, they pray and bleed and die. They curse and call to one another and they look at us with bewildered open eyes. Outside, the horses scream. Our husbandsâ bodies are no longer ours.
And when they leave, we learn to get along. Pick sheepâs sorrel for soup. Club rabbits. Last week I found a rattlesnake in the yard. Big female one. You know her by the smell: thick, intimate as blood. I killed her with the bushaxe under the porch. The tree frogs thrummed even louder that night, because I saved them. You canât save them all, the generals told him. But unless ye be saved, ye do not enter. How long must a snake soul wander, filling out its punishment? How long a soldierâs? Or a priestâs? On your belly shall ye crawl. Eat the dust of the earth. Lie here, ye snakes, ye ghosts, in the long shadow of my house, and cool yourselves. Bruise my ankle, bruise my heel. I canât control your lives here now.
I dream at night of falling, like he did. The soldierâs voices called and called him till he struggled out of bed and fell. I dream Iâm standing on the third floor of this house, outside the attic, and I plummet through the spirals of thin air down to the boards. Past the beams exposed like bones where plaster flakes away, past cracks like veins. I stand upon this height and swoon. Iâll lie where he did, where the dying men clawed grooves into the wood, where the prayers twined up into the air, where the other women cried. The blood below me marks the place. Their voices beat the air around my ears, but still I wait for his. How long, O Lord, how long?
I wait. I wait. Wise virgin with the lamp, in readiness. The Lady with the Lamp, Crimean, at Antietam, Ypres, and Waterloo. In Korea and Da Nang and in the field below this house. He always told me to bury him there, with the men. His wheelchair leans against the attic wall next to whatâs left of other lives, great trunks and yellowed books swollen with the thickness off the air, plantation ledgers bound in faded green. Handprints sweated onto the cover, still. His hands I clutched. They slipped from me. Thereâs Matthew Arnold, Dante. Armies on a darkling plain. Swept by pity and confusion. Tennyson abandoned next to Dickens. Come into the garden, Maud. The black bat, night, has flown. Bats tuck into the eaves each morning now and whirl against the sky like cindered paper from a flame. Burning. I should burn it all.
Their blood still soaks the floor. His chest was flat as theirs against the covers, his eyes the same cracked blue. Go away, old woman. I donât know you. I hired a colored boy to carry him up and down the stairs and call him sergeant once again. My son. My son, he said. Are you in pain? Maybe he got lost. Confused. Maybe he tripped and fell upon his legs that got him just so far, upon the bones hollowed by the years of praying in wars, and wars, and wars. His body just unbalanced him, into the air.
Iâm an educated woman. I can live here by myself. Why donât you write a local history, he said. Some verse. This house is full of stories. He put a big desk on the second floor for me. Sometimes I sit there still. I write my name in script across the page, my grandmotherâs name, Fidelis, nothing else. Itâs Latin. No one can pronounce it. It will confuse the soldiers calling to my husband, and to me. They arenât the classics-tutored plantersâ sons but poor boys, possum-hunters, from the woods. Dulce et decorum est. They plead with me for letters they canât read. They beg me, now, to come, like him, to comfort them, but I donât listen. I run from them, up and down the back stairs, in and out the burned wing and the whole one and through the butlerâs pantry and the kitchen. Dashing, darting like a girl. I bang the fly-clogged screen to frighten them. Iâll run until I hear that voice. For which I wait.
I ring the old iron bell on its fencepost in the yard and eventually somebody splashes up the driveway, all mud this rainy spring. Past my mailbox with my houseâs name and date, the sign they gave me when this house was recognized. Miss Fiddy, how you been, Miss Fiddy? Hummingbirds flirt in the hibiscus. In the field below the house, grass blows. The long hair of graves. Of battle. Thought Iâd see about you. They say sometimes they knew my husband at Fort Benning or Fort Bragg. Iâve no idea who they are. Iâm fine, I tell them. Pray for me when you think of it. West Alabama is no kind of place. Nobody came to stop his fall.
On the porch, I sit. The soldiers donât come here, nor does my husband, never past the bloodstains in the hall. Over me the ceiling curves, the timbers soaked and bent by hand for just that line, as graceful as a waist awaits a young manâs arm. The ironwork was forged in Selma and crumbles now to orange powder in my hands. Broken curlicues rust in the grass. Fifty slaves, five years it took to build this house. The plaque they gave me doesnât mention that. Built 1854, it says. It says there was a battle with no name, down in the field. It doesnât name the women stepping over bodies in the halls, the sodden mulch of arms and legs beside the door, or the man just like my husband gripping dying hands until he cries. Dear God, Dear God. You have to write things down to know them: without its label, his splinter of the Cross could just have come from under someoneâs fingernail. The boys still long for it. They whisper to me, let me hold it, maâam, please bring it over here. Tell my mama where I died? This house wonât live past me. Iâll burn it down, and with it everything he left.
This house was built to gather, to direct. In thunderstorms, I open doors and windows on the first floor, then I scurry, girl-quick, faster than the boys can call, up to the attic and I open windows there. At the bottom of the stairs I stand and feel the draft whirl over me and up the stairs like smoke. The voices fly up, helpless. As they pass, they lift my hair a little at the ends, like lightning. The whole house shudders. It would burn at once, he said, if lightning struck. The rain sighs. Fill me, say the ditches and the empty barrels in the yard. Wash me, cry the trees, their silver-bellied leaves upturned like hands. This day shall ye be whiter than snow. This day, youâll be with me in Paradise. Someday, heâll call. Iâll go.
In the double parlor, pocket doors flung wide, I walk. Marble mantelpieces chill my hands. I can sleep anywhere. No one room on these three floors is mine. In the walls, the fissures bloom and branch, like trees, the voices rustle and insist. I am Fidelis. I can wait.