Paula Cameron:  

A few people have asked me to tell my story. Although I've danced around it, I guess it's time to share. However, I think I'll be like Scheherazade, the brilliant princess in the book One Hundred and One Arabian Nights, who beguiles her husband by telling him the beginning of a story each night, but never finishes it until the next night so that he can't kill her in the morning, as he did with his previous wives. Smart woman, our Scheherazade. <><><><><><><><> In 1964, I graduated from high school, with no vision of my future except for a cloudy idea that I wanted to be independent. <><><><><><><><><> Well,that was a long night; but I'm still here. Back to our story that is already in progress. I went to an airline school in Minneapolis in Sept. '64. It was that or the Air Force, the only choices my parents gave me. In Nov. '65, I got a job at Eastern Airlines in Manhattan, lived in a 5th floor walk-up studio apartment in the West Village, and got to know artists, writers, and musicians. Those were the days. People called me a hippy; I thought I was a bohemian. I wrote poetry and traveled on my airline passes. It was a good life, but I wanted something more for myself--and what I wanted wasn't tangible. Jump to 1969--went to Arizona in January, began classes at ASU in the Fall. Earned a BA in English. I had a career in the travel industry until 1988 when I became a T.A. in the ASU English dept. I had found that intangible thing I wanted--teaching. Earned an MFA in the creative writing program at ASU in 1991. I've written five scripts, but none have been produced. Hollywood is a tough town to navigate, and I did try. In 1993 I was accepted at Drew University in Madison, NJ, so I moved back East -- driving in snow was and is still scary. I earned my PhD in Modern History and Literature in 2002, focusing on the British Imperial presence in South Africa through the literature of H. Rider Haggard. I was an adjunct at three colleges to cobble together a living in teaching. I was finally offered a full time position at SUNY Sullivan in 2005 where I still teach in the Liberal Arts and Humanities Division. Last Fall I earned tenure and a promotion from Assistant to Associate Professor. Life has been a roller coaster, but what ...Expand for more