I’m Michael Pettinger, and I’m a little love-sick with language.

Maybe it started as a baby, when my mom read to my brothers while nursing me. That was her explanation. For my part, I think it was when I was a little boy hearing my grandparents speak to each other in their mysterious Sicilian dialect — uninterrupted streams of sound full of passion and joy flowing effortlessly from their lips. Then there was my beloved speech therapist, Mrs. Keapock, who worked so hard to get rid of my lisp and ended up teaching me to listen carefully to the sounds and the words people were using around me.

Whatever it was, I fell in love. And I’ve never gotten over it. It’s the reason I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. It’s why I’ve taught courses in Italian language, literature, and religious studies. It’s the joy I take writing about sexuality, Catholicism, television, and the beverage industry. And it has me editing and proofreading everything from public facing annual reports to theological monographs to historical novels about floating down the Republican River in Nebraska.

The thread that holds those things together is the love of language and its ability to express things that might otherwise get lost or go unsaid. I love to share that passion and help others say what they find difficult in language that is clear, moving, and persuasive.