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I wrote the following about 10 or 11 years ago. Some of it still applies, but some doesn't. I'll try to update it one of these days. --- Matt (2018)

Blessed w/wonderful parents, relatives, & friends, good job, good place to live. Grateful.

Originally from southern IL (specifically Chester, a small town SE of St. Louis). Attended Centre College in KY. Wrote for a regional newspaper, taught music part-time at a parochial high school.

Began grad. study at UNC in musicology; transferred to folklore after completing the M.A. Will have a second M.A. in folklore when I finish a thesis on the only Finnish-Am. Apostolic Lutheran Church in NC.

Thankful to be a public folklorist & part-time teacher in southern MO and to have lived & worked in southern WV before returning to mid-America.

Influenced (for good or ill) by engagement w/Lutheranism & especially the traditional Lutheran conception of grace. Considering becoming a Lutheran pastor later in life, even. However, my relationship with my faith tradition (in both its philosophical & its cultural dimensions) is complicated, and I’ve not yet found a congregation with which I fully identify. This reflects a lamentable lack of adaptability on my part, and I pray that it will be forgiven & amended.

Also influenced, like many folklorists, by engagement w/both traditional rural American culture & traditional liberal arts education. However, the versions of both to which I gravitate are somewhat more conservative (or less modern/less postmodern) than those to which most folklorists in my age group (whom I respect greatly) gravitate. If I were to be accused of being somewhat anachronistic (re: folklore or many other things), I’d have to plead guilty. (See "Miniver Cheevy.")

Being a folklorist is also an attempt to reconcile a cultural orientation & “skill set” that aren’t entirely compatible. Ideally, I’d have taken up farming or a related profession, but I have embarrassingly little talent for such; to whatever extent I have skills, they’re in research, writing, music, etc. Being a folklorist affords opportunities to remedy my deficiencies and, in the meantime, to experience much of the culture with which I identify in a semi-vicarious way (which is both good and bad).

As for politics: like many rural mid-Americans, I'm essentially a traditional populist. So, Meacham, does that mean that you're liberal or conservative? What it means is that my ideal political economy more nearly resembles the Jeffersonian model than the Hamiltonian model, but, if you insist: socially "conservative" (sort of -- not exactly), economically "progressive" (sort of). I reluctantly support Obama.

Social & economic justice, especially as they pertain to the rural Midwest & South, are important to me, though I often fail to act accordingly.

Music is important to me; I have a love/hate relationship with it.

Sense of humor: MUCH squirrellier than the preceding might suggest. See photo.

Again, merely a representative sampling:

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
--- Jesus of Nazareth, as quoted in Matthew 5:5

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors
As I foretold you were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind."
--- Prospero in Shakespeare, *The Tempest*, Act IV, Scene 1

...But until then...

"So much depends upon a red wheel barrow
Glazed with rain water
Beside the white chickens."
--- William Carlos Williams, "Home"

"Farm families and people who have grown up in rural areas seem caught on the horns of a dilemma: the old way was materially impoverished but far richer socially than the present. Must one quality be lost in order to have the other?"
--- Jane Adams, *The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990*

"Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking..."
--- Edward Arlington Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy"

"Industrialism cannot play the role of Maecenas, because its complete ascendancy will mean that there will be no arts left to foster; or, if they exist at all, they will flourish only in a diseased and disordered condition, and the industrial Maecenas will find himself in the embarrassing position of having to patronize an art that secretly hates him and calls him bad names."
--- Donald Davidson, "A Mirror for Artists"

"The modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher."
--- John Ruskin: “The Savageness of Gothic Architecture” in *Stones of Venice*

"Salus populi suprema lex esto." ("The welfare of the people is to be the supreme law.")
--- Official motto of the Great State of Missouri, from Cicero, *De Legibus*

"Give unto Thy servants that peace which the world cannot give."
--- The Collect for Peace (included in various liturgies)