I am finishing a book called Boxing and Masculinity: A Beginner's Guide. "No other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing," Joyce Carol Oates writes in On Boxing. When I'm not writing, I'm working out with my boxing coach. It would be nice to reply to Oates by saying that, for the boxer, no experience is so intensely personal as writing. But it's not true. Boxing is even more personal than writing, and a lot more intense. A writer says "I hit on an idea," or "I was struck by the fact," but it's a lot more satisfying to land a punch and a lot more real to catch one. Much of what I write about concerns the early Middle Ages. Like many readers, I am always looking for ways to connect past and present. My 2014 book, Food, Eating, and Identity, focuses on words and objects that worked together to make up England's food culture in the early medieval period. I explore what we can learn from ordinary food objects and common words--not just the feasts others write about, but such things as fragments of pottery and ironwork. I also talk about the role of not eating (fasting) in helping the Anglo-Saxons demonstrate their social standing. We are what we eat but we are also what we don't eat. My 2012 book, Anglo-Saxon Keywords, analyzes 75 words that were important in England between 600 and 1100 and that are also important today: alcohol, behavior, food, gender, labor, magic, masculinity, sex, and tradition, among many others. Each word is the focus of a short essay comparing the meaning and use of the word then to the way it is used today. The model for this project is Raymond Williams' classic study, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev. ed. 1983). In 2014 I also published Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century, an essay collection co-edited with H.D. Chickering and R.F. Yeager.