Teacher Feature: Jim McConville

I came to PWN after attending a few teacher workshops and writing conferences at your location in Red Bank. (I’m an English teacher in Shrewsbury.) I spoke with Colleen and Jen and said that I would love to get more involved and teach a class at PWN if there was ever an opening, and a few months later they came to me with this awesome idea.

Something about a different sense of possibilities, maybe. There is something so freeing about suspending belief and just going in the direction that an author or your imagination leads you. From the moment I read The Hobbit in middle school, I knew that I had always wanted to live in The Shire, where everything is green and seemingly uncomplicated. Day-to-day can be quite dull and bleak and limited at times. It’s lovely to venture somewhere else.

In the previous question, I said that I would love to live in The Shire, so I’ll pick a different one for this question. This isn’t as much of a fantasy world, but I have always loved the way that John Steinbeck describes the Salinas Valley in California. The setting becomes a character in all of his novels that I have read, and I just love the sense of community that he describes. There’s something incredibly romantic about that type of land–rivers and valleys and green as far as the eye can see. Whether it’s the Shire or the Salinas Valley or somewhere else, it would have to be somewhere not overly developed with plenty of space to walk and think and soak in all the beautiful earth.