Amy E. Weldon
Writer. Teacher. Seeker.
Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, is Professor and Department Head of English and Dennis M. Jones Chair in the Humanities at Luther College and codirector of the biennial Luther College Writers Festival. She is the author of Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (Sea Crow Press, 2025), Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (Bowen Press Books, 2019), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), and The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save The World (Cascade Books, 2018). Her next book, A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire, is scheduled for publication by Bloomsbury Academic in 2027.
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My purpose as a teacher is to build students’ capacities for life in our challenging, still-beautiful world, so they can power themselves into the future with knowledge, curiosity, and wonder.
The Cheapskate Intellectual
A journey through matters of spirit, sustainability, and self-reliance
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A parking ticket from William Blake.
For the Blake-Shelley chapter draft in progress, which also includes Derek Jarman. On a hot July day just after my visit to Blake’s cottage at Felpham, the spirits of three related artists – Blake, Shelley, and Jarman – strike me, Milton-in-the-tarsus style, right outside the St Pancras tube as I’m hustling to the British Library. […]
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Blake’s snakes.
It’s interesting to see the places where an artist’s imagination might fall a little short. As an Alabama kid, I can’t help noticing that for William Blake, one of those places is snakes, in realistic rather than visionary form. Even in London (as I am now), I carry my ingrained habit of scanning the ground […]
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Andy Burnham, English major!
Best political news of the year: Andy Burnham, next-UK-Prime-Minister-presumptive, was an English major! As described by his former Cambridge professor, John Mullan (author of the excellent book The Artful Dickens), Burnham was a voracious and curious reader – and a fan of Philip Larkin. And, as seen in the viral “eyelash” moment, he’s still got […]
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