voluntaryexile11

I'm Ashley, eternal student and voluntary exile from the land across the pond. At 15 I was a naive Anglophile and an American tea-drinking anomaly devouring books on Henry VIII and his offspring. At 20 I spent my junior year of Uni at Oxford University and decided that rain-washed cobblestones and summers sponsored by Pimm's was just for me. I bought an umbrella and made the move a little more permanent. Now I'm working toward a PhD on James Joyce and, in my spare time, under the condition of separation, I'm thinking more than ever of what it means to be American and how that shapes my voluntary exile.