Zoe Kempf-Harris
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zozietropes.bsky.social
Zoe Kempf-Harris
@zozietropes.bsky.social
English PhD Candidate • Tethered Modernist, Transatlantic Nerd • Independent writer without a plan • Improviser with too many plans • DM with Schrödinger's plan
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Finally letting more than Orlando quotes speak for me...

I'm an English PhD candidate finishing my dissertation on uneven material developments in modernist novels (hence the love for Orlando), interrogating how Victorian objects and structures linger amid modernist epiphanies. Returns! Tethering!
I want my WIPs to hear "clean cup, clean cup, move down, move down" and each shift one form over from where I'm writing it. Poems are now one-act plays. My dnd campaign is more my dissertation than my dissertation. Something in all this is secretly a tv show, but it's wearing a novel's hat...
October 26, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Anyone else out here making up their own sub-rules for English? Not universal hard lines… just a handful of your own writing/texting conventions for that extra precise shade of language. First up—

“Okay” should be used casually, like “au revoir,” while “ok” is reserved for “adieu” occasions.
October 18, 2025 at 1:17 AM
We need a recognizable symbol in charades for “I’ve given up trying to act out the plot…. but we have a personal connection to this film in our real lives that I must exploit, because it’s the only possible way for you to get this.”
September 16, 2025 at 3:42 PM
The Mrs. Dalloway walk, except it's driving through California to every location Ally Beardsley claims the Dimension 20 cast filmed in at "3am in a warehouse"
May 7, 2025 at 6:25 PM
For every week I'm not actively in an improv class, I grow ever closer to teaching my own literature classes as Harolds
March 22, 2025 at 8:30 PM
“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"

Takeaway: Henry James would have loved improv
January 12, 2025 at 11:44 AM
Studying a rapport between the material and the virtual and knowing how, in the ways they remain tethered, they stand in mutual assurance, in defiance of oblivion...

.... somehow makes it worse when streaming services decide to pull entire series from their catalogue, leaving no material anchor.
January 12, 2025 at 12:39 AM
Currently wondering what in my DnD campaign belongs behind the “playwall”… which persuasion attempts merit actual dice-rolling when my PCs keep making fitting (read: funny) points?
December 29, 2024 at 9:21 PM
Finally letting more than Orlando quotes speak for me...

I'm an English PhD candidate finishing my dissertation on uneven material developments in modernist novels (hence the love for Orlando), interrogating how Victorian objects and structures linger amid modernist epiphanies. Returns! Tethering!
November 25, 2024 at 7:21 PM
"'It is the goose!' Orlando cried. 'The wild goose...' And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight ..." Monday, the first of January, Two thousand and Twenty Four—when Virginia Woolf's Orlando entered the public domain.

Happy Public Domain Day!
January 1, 2024 at 8:36 PM