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Dedicated to professional and occasionally personal works.
Dr. Holland-Toll's web-site
illustrates her professional life. On this web-site, the interested
reader will find her teaching and research philosophies, her Curriculum
Vitae, and articles and chapters from her book, as well as the
opinions of some of her students, who are, after all, those who observe
her teaching on an on-going basis and those whose voices should be
privileged.
On the other hand, Dr.
Holland-Toll is also Linda J, a human being with a life outside of
teaching and books. While
she does
spend a great deal of time with students both in and out of the
classroom, she is both a teacher and a person. Somehow she manages time for gardening and
cooking and the man in her life. Her life may be somewhat frayed and unraveling at the edges, but she does indeed have a LIFE!
Writing about herself, her
least favorite activity, she says, "I presently teach American Literature and Genre Studies, among
other courses, at Mount Olive College, located in Mount Olive, North
Carolina."
She holds household in an
Arts-and-Crafts-style bungalow built in 1921 in the Historic District of
Goldsboro, North Carolina with Sasquatch, Lady J, Fianna Bainsidhe and
Sugar, the
“black and tans”: her vicious, carnivorous, trouble-making, law-breaking, four dog
pack and an ever fluctuating number of outdoor, semi-feral cats. The
semi-feral comes into play whenever it is not time to eat; at feeding
time she has between twelve and fifteen
devoted feline companions. Her house is on a tree-lined street in a
small city,
which she
would note, is a typical setting for the better horror fiction. There are enough dilapidated
houses, in the best Southern tradition (think 'A Rose for Emily') to provide haunted house
settings!
Since she is an old house junkie,
hopelessly addicted to spacious rooms, actual dining rooms, wide front
porches, heart pine floors, high ceilings, mouldings, chair-rails,
fireplaces and the like, and since the houses she likes most are often victims of
neglect, it is no surprise that her house is a perpetual work in progress. Her latest indoor project involves
restoring the wood floors, which some ignoramus covered in carpeting and
paint. Her latest outdoor projects have included adding a waterfall to the pond
in the backyard, scrounging old bricks for a patio, and replacing her
front porch. Her latest calamity involves a blue heron eating all her
goldfish!
She grew up in Chicago, in a multi-ethnic,
multi-cultural working class neighborhood on the now notorious South
Side. It was rather a polyglot society, both culturally and linguistically:
she
literally grew up in a cultural stew: an Irish Catholic amidst Scots,
French, German, Polish, Czech, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Japanese, Swedish and Norwegian. Growing up,
she acquired
a small word hoard from each language. One of her hobbies is ethnic cooking, a passion
she acquired
learning to
make strudel from her friend=s
Czech grandmother and French Canadien tourtiére from her Quebeçois grandmother. Later, after
she
graduated from Southern Illinois University with a B.S. in English Education,
she married,
taught as a substitute teacher, worked in garden shops and book stores, and had two children, Erica-Lynne and Michael.
She fell
into a job running
a Communication Skills Center at Western Nevada Community College, and as often happens, way led on to way, and
she received
my Ph.D. in English Literature in 2000. As she often tells her students, pursuing a doctorate
in English was about the last thing she had ever planned, but she finally figured out what it was she wanted to be when she grew up.
NEW!!! Cherchez les Femmes: Someone’s in the Kitchen With Charlotte: Classic Detective Fiction, Victorian Womanhood, and the Private Sphere in Anne Perry's Charlotte Pitt Series
oxymoron@nc.rr.com
lholland-toll@moc.edu
