Me, Myself, and Too Many Books

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    I am Callum John McLeod Carr, I go by Callum (and my pronouns are he/him/his). I was born on January 1, 2001 in Oxford, England. Like I mentioned in my Flipgrid Introduction, I have also lived in Upstate New York, Beijing, China, and Mexico City, Mexico. I moved around a lot because of my dad’s job (he worked for a French rail company as a Project Manager, so whenever the project he was assigned finished we had to relocate), but when we acquired our Green Cards—which made us Permanent U.S. Resident—he took a job down here in SC so we moved again. This past June marked the longest I have ever lived in one place—six years! And I am an English major, with a minor in Creative Writing. 

    One of my favorite things to do is read. I started reading voraciously in 4th grade with the Harry Potter series. There wasn’t really another book series that captured my attention like Harry Potter until I was in 7th grade. In my English class we were doing a dystopian unit and one of the books we could choose was The Hunger Games, and I immediately fell in love. Then I moved on to the Divergent series and the rest is history. Most of the time I read fantasy or science fiction books, but I also like contemporaries and memoirs. And, yes, I am the one who has read 132 books in the past twelve months.

    

    My three dogs are also incredibly important to me. Miley is an eleven-year-old Golden Retriever. We got her when we lived in China and she is widely considered to be my dog. She sleeps in my room, she listens to me more than she does anyone else, and she is pretty much my best friend. Ella is a two-year old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and we got her in the spring of 2018. Earlier this year we got our third dog, another Cavalier like Ella, and his name is Maxon. Ella is by far the most well behaved of the three, while Maxon loves nothing more than to throw pillows off of sofas and tear blankets off our beds.

 




    Another passion of mine, which segues into my job/work, is writing. I started writing short stories when I was in 4th grade and haven’t stopped since. I’ve won some awards, including the Scholastic Silver and Gold Key Awards, and have been published by both Emrys Journal, based out of Greenville, and Upstate’s literary journal writersInc. In my Freshman year of high school, I also started writing novel-length projects. At the moment I spend about 15 hours a week working on my current book (which is YA) and its roughly 100,00 words. And this year I have been made the Editor-in-Chief of writersInc. which I’m really excited about.

  

    Like I said, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Divergent were all important books to me when I was in elementary and middle school. Since then I have read a lot more and some of my favorites are The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee, Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, Crown of Feathers by Nicki Pau Preto, Becoming by Michelle Obama, and the Witchlands series by Susan Dennard. 

 

    As you can probably guess, reading/books is a huge part of my life, both personally and academically. Most of my reading I do to escape. I love finding a really good book and diving into a world so different from our own. I am also a somewhat active member in the book community. My Instagram account, which is pretty much the only social media platform I use on a regular basis, is pretty much devoted to what I’m reading (https://www.instagram.com/callumjmcarr/).

 

    Academically, I haven’t encountered YA books being taught in many other classes. 

However, in the Fall semester of 2019 one of my classes revolved around a semester-long research project, and I focused on why less children are not actively reading outside of the classroom for their own enjoyment. Professor Thomas was actually my adviser for this project, and in the spring of this year she was also my mentor as I worked on revising the paper to submit it for the Upstate Research Symposium. I’m excited that I will be able to share my research with people at the Symposium next month (over a virtual setting).

 

    I’m excited to be in a class that is focusing on YA books and I cannot wait to hear what you all think about the books we are reading this semester!

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