Hey there! You’ve come to the right place to rest a while. Here you may seek shelter from all your opened tabs and the unfinished tasks they imply.
While you make yourself comfortable, it’s simple courtesy that I offer you a digest of who I am and what this blog is about. I’m August Zhou, and I’m an English teacher by training and a novelist by compulsion. I did my undergrad at Columbia U, majoring in the Classics (but Greek is all Greek to me because I only did Latin), and my teacher education in Secondary English at Vandy. English has been, since pre-adolescence, the predominant language of my umwelt. My parents, however, have affinities with two other languages: Mandarin and Japanese. They grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution before they left for Japan where my Dad would complete his doctorate.
The stories of their upbringing impressed on me a lesson which would lead me, ultimately, to pursue a career in education: Knowledge, at its most innocent, is always on the brink of extinction. Knowledge may be power, but power also has the capacity to scrub knowledge down to reflect its own monochrome image.
The name of this blog speaks to my personal wish of allowing knowledge, as I know it, to retain its innocence. Revolta is my portmanteau of revolt and volta (a term of art used to describe the turn in thought at the end of a sonnet, as in one by Shakespeare). My revolt in literacy is a humble one: here you’ll find writings that, at bottom, turn back from established forms of discourse and conventional wisdoms to the writer in his personality and life experience, however limited either may be. I make no pretense at expressing anyone but myself. (That sort of pretense is what writing a novel is for.)
And the topics that my musings traverse? Education, Writing, and Literature, generally speaking. Consider these rough-hewn essays of mine vignettes pressed by noetic candor and immediacy. If my writings are too Montaignesque in tone, let me try my best to assure you and myself that they, at least, won’t be Montaignesque in length.
Musings of an Educator, Writer, & Lifelong Learner 