Melissa Donegan earned a degree in English from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Literature from the University of Iowa. She has been teaching at Santa Clara since 2010. Her Critical Thinking and Writing classes investigate themes of home, stuff, and sustainability with an emphasis on epistolary texts. She also teaches “Writing Well(ness): Narratives of Illness, Loss, and Recovery,” an Advanced Writing course. She enjoys hiking in the foothills of South San Jose, where she relishes seeing bobcats, coyotes, quails, Cooper’s hawks, and rattlesnakes, who remind her to slow down and pay attention.