Chapter 1: The Course

Last summer, as I was self-auditing my degree credits, I realized that I needed two extra classes. This meant that I would have to take summer classes and that is where the UA at Oxford program entered the picture. While in Oxford I will be taking two classes: The Arts of Oxford and Placing Jane Austen. The Arts of Oxford class will count as a University Honors credit and Placing Jane Austen will count as an English credit for my Creative Writing minor.

The Arts of Oxford, like its main campus counter-part The Arts of Tuscaloosa, consists of a series of group and individual outings to experience the city of Oxford. For the class I will be going to 22 sites or events in Oxford.

After every event, I must submit a response expressing my impressions of what I saw, heard, smelled, thought, and felt. Usually, this response will consist of a creative 150 word paragraph, but a response may also be a poem, drawing, or series of photographs.

The second class is Placing Jane Austen, in which I will be studying four novels by one of my favorite authors: Northanger Abby, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. We will also be visiting Chawton to see the Jane Austen House Museum and Bath to take a Jane Austen City Tour.

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

~ Pride and Prejudice, ch 60, Jane Austen

course - noun - a direction or intended path, education imparted in a series of lessons or meetings

Prologue

Give a child a book of faraway places and foreign lands. Let the words creep into their head and imprint themselves onto their soul. Give them the travel bug.

I admit, I’ve been bitten. I’ve seen the coast, the city, the country, the delta, the mountains and the monuments and the people that fill them. I’ve only read of a land across the Atlantic and am compelled to discover it for myself.

That is why I sit here writing. 8 1/2 weeks till I board a flight for England. To stand in England, the home of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Prachett, and Gaiman. To see the moorland, the castles, the rocks, the museums, and the architecture hundreds of years older than anything I’ve ever seen.

As a part of the Alabama at Oxford program, I’ll be studying at Oxford University at Worcester College for four weeks. Studying the literature of Jane Austen and the exploring the city of Oxford. Embarking on excursions to Bath, London, Canterbury, Dover, and Edinburgh. Living and learning not only in the classroom, but from the English people.

I’m ready, as Mark Twain once said, to “...throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in [my] sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”