I am a creative soul whose happy place is working on a creative project. The types of projects I enjoy are diverse and include cooking and baking (two related, yet very different endeavors), crocheting (knitting has taken a bit of a backseat to crocheting at the moment), making collages (especially as I explore using digital tools like Procreate to create them on the iPad), and conlanging.
My love for conlanging began before I understood what language entailed, so my first attempt at creating a conlang was not a language at all but a coded version of English. I was ten years old and knew enough about language that I had an awareness of sound patterns and word-formation processes like affixation and compounding, so my attempts had some consistencies you’d expect to find in a language, but the word forms and grammatical constructions were entirely based on English.
I abandoned that early conlang project when I learned that my friends were not interested in learning and sharing a secret language. It was many years later that I returned to conlanging.
In 2008, I was writing my dissertation for my PhD in Linguistics and sorely needed a creative outlet to remind myself of the joy I have for language. I had an idea for a young adult novel that would require a language no one had heard of, so I split my creative time between writing the novel and constructing the language. The half I enjoyed most was creating the language.
I haven’t stopped creating languages since then.
I am also a teaching soul. I enjoy taking in a lot of information, then organizing and rearranging it to make it approachable and digestible for others. I love putting together presentations that involve hands-on application. My teaching style is workshop- and activity-oriented, where my goal is to bring difficult concepts to life in activities of interrelated, manageable chunks.
For 13 years, I taught linguistics at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. By the end of my time teaching there, I was a Full Professor of Linguistics. The parts of that career I most enjoyed were the moments I spent in the classroom or in meetings with students, supporting them as they began their own journeys in exploring language. My favorite class to teach was one I developed: an Invented Languages course to teach students how to create their own languages. As much as I enjoyed those moments of working with students, I became weighted down by the administrative duties and other non-teaching requirements of being a professor (there are far too many of those for teachers who enjoy the actual teaching part of the job).
In 2022, I transitioned from that career to a career as a professional conlanger. Now I work with my husband and conlang partner, David J. Peterson, on a variety of projects. A sampling of our work includes languages that appear in movies and TV shows, such as Pixar’s Elemental, Legendary’s Dune: Part Two, Netflix’s Shadow & Bone, Peacock’s The Vampire Academy, and Freeform’s Motherland: Fort Salem. Other projects include collaborations with musicians, artists, and video game developers. David and I also co-host a weekly livestream on YouTube called LangTime Studio, where we create languages and livestream the process. It’s unedited and raw footage of what it’s like to start with a blank page and build a language from scratch.
As a professional conlanger, I welcome opportunities to work with students, such as leading workshops at universities (and hopefully someday teaching a conlang course again as an adjunct faculty member!). I also create my own opportunities to continue my love of teaching. In 2023, I wrote Conlang-Venture, which presents some basic beginning steps of conlanging in the style of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. I debuted that work at Kopikon, a conlang conference David and I put together that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2023.
Conlang Year is my teaching project for 2024, where I will provide a single prompt for a step to be taken toward creating a language every day. Conlanging can be overwhelming for even the most experienced conlangers—especially in the beginning stages of a new project when you have so many ideas swirling around in your mind, creating a flurry of possibilities. This series breaks the process down into daily decisions for a yearlong experience of creating a language. One year, one conlang. Join me in making 2024 a conlang year!