In a residential neighborhood of Irvine, California, two streets intersect: California and Joyce. That Joyce's name appears on a street sign in the University Hills faculty housing area of UC Irvine is only partly an accident, as many streets refer to famous writers and intellectuals. “California Joyce” is a fitting, even “overdetermined” title for my essay in a volume celebrating the influence Margot Norris has had in shaping the direction of Joyce Studies. Most importantly, she and I were faculty colleagues at UC Irvine, where she spent the bulk of her academic career. By the time I was recruited to UC Irvine as Dean of Humanities in 1998, Margot was already a friend from Joyce symposia, where she had delivered stunning plenary talks and was always a star at symposium Finnegans Wake charades. In fact, it was through my attendance at the 1993 Joyce conference “California Joyce,” hosted by Margot along with Vincent Cheng and Kimberly Devlin, that the seeds of my interest in moving to UC Irvine and California were sown. The conference held at UC Irvine introduced Joyceans from all over to the powerful crop of academics who taught Joyce at neighboring southern California universities. The focus of the conference was Joyce and film—very California—and it was that taste of southern California Joyce and Joyceans, as well as a coffee shared with other conference-goers on the sunny campus patio, that beckoned five years later when I was offered the position of dean at Irvine. I have written elsewhere of the difficulty of that decision to uproot our family, during which I identified with Eveline in Dubliners, as she decided whether to leave her home to go with a sailor named Frank, and it was Margot whom I called to discuss the wisdom of the move. She herself had moved from Michigan to Irvine years before, recruited in a similarly strategic way, in her case, during the winter months in a cold climate (I was moving from Salt Lake City). In our discussion, though, we focused on the intellectual climate at Irvine, including the robust Joycean community, and she enthusiastically encouraged me to come. My family and I moved to Irvine and remained there for nine years, at which point I left to become president of Sarah Lawrence College.