James Walmsley didn't look like a teacher when he came my house to interview me for Omaha Magazine. He looked young and intense, his dress style too casual to belong to a professor.
But when I read his article, "Marilyn Coffey: Not behaving like she should," I learned something about myself, about my writing, that I hadn't understood.
James wrote that I was known for my "ability to reconcile casual, everyday language with contextually strange words."
That jerked me. I knew that I'd developed a style that rested on casual language, and I knew I made frequent flurries into my thesaurus to find just the right word for what I wanted to say. But I'd never before thought of these words as "contextually strange."
What an illuminating concept!
Thanks, Prof.
To read what else James Walmsley wrote, go to
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