About

Hello! Welcome to Shasta’s Fog, a blog about books, culture, and traveling.

Where I am: I currently teach high school English in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to a constituency of students from a highly complex, singular ethnic/religious/socioeconomic background, 20% of which go on to college. (Okay, so it’s a little Mennonite school.)

What I do: I write hopefully (that is, I write with hope) about things I love: Mennonite culture, the university, and traveling. (And sometimes I use poetry to do so.)

This is a makeshift delivery room for the “ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,” a brain which has been raised in the Anabaptist tradition of the Christian faith and has been educated in the liberal arts at Hutchinson Community College in Hutchinson, Kansas and The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Calling Ohio, Kansas, Indiana, and Pennsylvania my “homes,” I’ve learned that it’s a delicate dance being rooted in conservative communities while canvassing the modern, secular university.

Things you should know about Shasta’s Fog:

1. I love books, and sometimes I feature random reviews from my reading list. Once, one of my “book” posts was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal.

2. I kind of have a thing for Europe (specifically Germany) (because my parents fell in love there?), and I was born in London.*

3. When I write about singleness or marriage, my blog goes viral. I can’t seem to help this.

4. *London, Ohio, but you don’t know that. Giggle.

5. We at Shasta’s Fog lean heavily on sarcasm and irony, even in topics relating to spirituality (gasp!). I would like now to reflect on this truth, worded so carefully by Charlotte Brontë: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.” Thank you for understanding.

6. I love studying foreign cultures (especially my own?), so I absolutely love interacting with people from different countries and cultural contexts.

What a pleasure for you to stop by!

Here at Shasta’s Fog, you’ll read about me finding my place, much like C. S. Lewis’s beloved character from The Horse and His Boy, who, in a desert, upon a lonely mountain, experiences communion with the King of Kings. Like Shasta, I, too, am far from home. Life is a mountain, and God is a lion who guides me and terrifies me. Some mornings, the fog lifts, and I see how I’ve come to a mountain that is not darkness, gloom, and storm, but it is Mount Zion, with thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly… it is the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven (Hebrews 12).

To God be the glory.