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The Department of English Bulletin describes the vast accomplishments of our nationally-recognized faculty, programs, and students. The Bulletin (For a downloadable pdf version, click here) Whatever is felt upon the page without being FACULTY RECOGNITION The feature article J.D. Dolan wrote for Details magazine about the IPT (International Pool Tournament) fiasco is now online: Shanda Blue Easterday is featured as March Artist of the Month at the Open Door Gallery in Sturgis. Her photos and broadsides of her poems are displayed in the front window of the gallery as well as inside the gallery. Shanda’s photos and poetry will be featured in the Sturgis Art Bounce on April 20. She will be the program leader at the Trinity Lutheran Women’s Retreat at Camp Lutherwald on April 21. Steve Feffer saw three plays of his presented this spring semester at the Whole Art. His play Rock Hall, first presented last spring as a “car play,” was presented in the “Legally Parked” version onstage as part of the Late Night Series. His play Ain’t Got No Home, a new play based on Chicago’s legendary Chess Records, had a staged reading as part of the Third Coast Plays-in-Process Series. Steve’s play Lucky Punk also premiered in March as part of the Whole Art Late Night Series. His play The Wizards Of Quiz had a revival production this spring at Yeshiva College. His one act play In Ruth Reichl’s Restaurant Review will appear later this spring in The Art Of The One-Act, edited by Arnie Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy. Steve will also present this spring on a panel about ensemble theatre with his wife Laura at the Michigan Council of Teachers of English. Janet Heller was elected President of the Michigan College English Association in November of 2006. Her fiction picture book for kids, How the Moon Regained Her Shape, won a Book Sense Pick in the spring of 2006, and it was also selected for Children’s Choices of 2007 by the Children’s Book Council. It will be out in paperback by March 28, 2007. Janet has spoken about her book at the Detroit Jewish Book Fair on November 5, 2006; at Alger Middle School in Grand Rapids on November 13; at St. Augustine’s Elementary School in Kalamazoo on Feb. 28; at Woods Lake Elementary School in Kalamazoo on March 1 as part of Literacy Night; at the Starfish Headstart in Inkster on March 2; and at Westwood Middle School in Grand Rapids on March 5 for the “Write. Create. You.”—A Creative Writing Project of WGVU Public Television & Radio and The LOOP Workshops. On October 4, 2006, Janet discussed “Using Literature to Combat Bullying” at the Portage District Library. Also on this panel about Children’s Literature were WMU professors Beth Amidon, Miriam Bat-Ami, and Judi Rypma. On October 20, Janet spoke about “Using Stories and Nonfiction for Kids to Combat Bullying” at the Michigan College English Association Conference at Michigan State University. MFA alum David Schaafsma, now a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has invited Katherine Joslin to speak to his class on March 13th. The class is currently reading Katherine’s book, Jane Addams, A Writer’s Life as part of the study of the Chicago settlement founder and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Also, this month, Philological Quarterly and Edinburgh University Press have asked Katherine to review manuscripts for them. Cynthia Klekar is the 2007/2008 recipient of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Richard H. Popkin Research Travel Fellowship. She also received a travel grant from the Diether H. Haenicke Institute for Global Education. In February, Cynthia presented a paper entitled “Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in Congreve’s The Way of the World” at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies conference. At this same conference, Cynthia represented, along with Tony Ellis, Comparative Drama on a Scholarly Publishing Roundtable discussion. She presented a paper entitled “‘A table plentiful spread’: The Gift of Work in the Poetry of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier” at the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference. In April Cynthia will travel to Dunedin, New Zealand, to attend the David Nichols Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, where she will present a paper and attend a teaching seminar. Bill Olsen’s fourth book, Avenue Of Vanishing, will be released by Triquarterly/ Northwestern this April. In conjunction with its release, he will be a featured reader, along with Maurice Manning, at the Academy of American Poets Poetry Month Reading in NYC on April 26. He also has poems soon to appear in The Little Review, West Branch, Zone Three, and Tiferet; and an essay, “One John Ashbery,” that will appear in Essays from the Vermont Post Graduate Workshop (Cambridge); another, “Breaking With Strategy,” will appear in Zone Three. Judith Rypma’s chapbook, Worshipping at Lenin’s Mausoleum, was a finalist in the Spire Press Chapbook award series. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pearl, The Pinch, The Alembic, Chaffin Journal, New York Quarterly, River Oak, Atlanta Review, Hurricane Review, Concho River Review, and Pinyon. Her four-act play, Vasilissa, Baba Yaga, and the Golden Thread, was performed twice at the Russian Festival in Fetzer this fall. She also lectured on “Baba Yaga: Goddess, Wise Crone, or Wicked Witch.” Also in the fall, she participated in a Children’s Literature Panel at Portage Library, lecturing on “Expanding Poetic Horizon: ‘Smart’ Poems for Young Readers.” Eve Salisbury has been invited to present two lectures at the University of Rochester. The first, “Getting Bohemian: Chaucer’s Legend of the ‘Good’ for Women,” was on the 21st of March, the second, on Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, will take place on the 29th. An essay “Promiscuous Contexts: Gower’s Wife, Prostitution, and the Confessio Amantis” is forthcoming in the fall of 2007, and the publication of “Violence and the Sacrificial Poet” is expected in the spring. Meanwhile, Eve’s book project continues to take shape, though the title has changed along with the approach. Chaucer’s Family Ethics is now known as The Child in Chaucer. Eric Schleder has finally found a non-contracting position with Perrigo Company in Allegan. He is a Validation Specialist with them. “Basically, I develop documentation and test equipment and processes to ensure we meet FDA regulations and our products are safe, effective, and clean as can be. It’s certainly not the most glamorous work, but it pays well. And validation is one of the few growing industries these days. I’m still hoping to pursue my Ph.D. someday and become a full-time professor, but in the meantime I’m playing the game doing ok.” Gwen Tarbox will be racking up the frequent flyer miles this spring. In March, she’ll give a paper on Louisa May Alcott at the Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media in Chicago; then, a few days later, she and former WMU graduate alum Gabrielle Halko (now a professor at West Chester University) are presenting a paper on Louise Erdrich’s children’s fiction at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in Boston. In May, Gwen will travel to New Orleans to give a paper entitled “JK Rowling’s Narrative Turn: Harry Potter and the War on Terror” at the US Harry Potter conference; and in June, she, Gabrielle Halko, and current graduate student Jeanne LaHaie will present papers that concern the portrayal of Japanese internment in children’s literature for a panel at the Children’s Literature Association Conference in Newport News, VA. Grace Tiffany presented a paper on Shakespeare and the French at the February GEMCS conference in Chicago, which she attended along with several other colleagues from the WMU English Department. She was a panelist at Kalamazoo College’s “Reading Together” event in February (discussing Mark Haddon’s The Mysterious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), and will be part of a similar panel at Western in March. On April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday) she’ll be the visiting writer at Western Illinois University’s annual literary festivity, and in May she will give a talk on The Merchant of Venice for the Jewish Historical Society in Washington, D.C., as part of Washington’s year-long Shakespeare celebration. Karen Vocke has completed a book on migrant education to be published by Heinemann in July 2007. Entitled Where Do I Go From Here? Meeting the Unique Educational Needs of Migrant Students, the work will provide educators and professionals who work with migrant farm workers the resources needed to support these students. Vocke’s research is based on collaborations with schools in Michigan and California. Joyce Walker has been appointed Director of the Dissertation Writing Residency program at the University of Illinois for the summer of 2007. The program, funded by a national grant, offers complete summer fellowships to ten to twelve graduate students, who are in the final stages of their dissertation projects. These students then have the opportunity to investigate the meaning-making structures they use to present their research, to work one-on-one with writing specialists, and to make significant progress on their dissertation projects. Arnie Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy wrote Rumpelstiltskin: The True Story (in which Rumpelstiltskin is not the villain!) for All Ears Theatre. Slated for recording at 6 p.m. on Saturday April 21 before a live audience at Kalamazoo’s First Baptist Church, this will be Arnie and Debby’s ninth half-hour radio drama for All Ears. It will be broadcast on WMUK-FM at 1 p.m. on Saturday, September 29. Arnie and Debby’s But If It Rage, a one-act staged this winter as part of Car Plays: Legally Parked in The Whole Art Theatre’s inaugural Late Night Series, will be filmed in Los Angeles by IntroSpec Pictures under the direction of Greg Siers. The long-awaited publication of Arnie and Debby’s The Art Of The One-Act will be marked by a reading—with books on sale—at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 11, featuring four of the playwrights included in the anthology: Constance Alexander, Last Call; Troy Tradup, We All Give Thanks; and alums Carey Daniels, Hands for Toast, and Bethany Gauthier, The Nancy. New Issues Managing Editor Marianne Swierenga notes that advance demand has led the press’s distributor to request more than ten times the usual number of prerelease copies. Two of Arnie’s poems, “Spectators As We Are” and “Sonnet for Carol,” will appear in The Weathervane: An Online Journal of Great Lakes Writing. And Arnie and Debby’s long one-act, The Banana War, will be staged at 11 p.m. on April 13, 14, 20, and 21 as part of Whole Art’s Late-Night Series at 246 N. Kalamazoo Mall. In late-breaking news, Beth Amidon informs us that Sue Warner is in Frankenmuth as this is being written (on March 28), accepting an award from the Michigan Library Association: Susan Warner has been named the winner of the Michigan Library Association’s 2007 Children’s Services Division Award of Merit. The award recognizes a Michigan librarian’s outstanding contributions to library services for children. We celebrate Susan’s leadership as a manager, program developer, collaborator, educator and mentor in the field. Congratulations, Susan! Nicolas Witschi has published Alonzo “Old Block” Delano, a monograph about an influential nineteenth-century California writer who was widely known in his day for his 1849 overland diary and for poignant and satirical sketches about the Gold Rush. Part biography and part criticism, this book introduces readers to the wide range of Delano’s writings, many of which have not been seen since their first publication in the 1850s and 1860s. Written for both a general and a scholarly audience, this publication is part of Boise State University’s Western Writers Series (http://westernwriters.boisestate.edu). In May 2006 Nic presented a paper entitled “When You Call Me That, Smile: Deadwood, Deadwood, and the Wild West Autobiography” at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco; and in October 2006, Nic presented his paper “‘I do not like SERVICEThe English Department Presidential Innovation Grant proceeds on many fronts. Virtual worlds have been designed and used for teaching by Jon Adams, Todd Kuchta, Cynthia Klekar, Casey McKittrick, Linda Dick, Joe Haughey, Gwen Tarbox, and Allen Webb. Others are in the works. Casey McKittrick, Todd Bannon, Linda Dick, Joe Haughey and Allen Webb will be attending the SITE conference in San Antonio in March to present on their work. Todd Kuchta will be soon presenting the virtual world he created on Mrs. Dalloway at a Virginia Woolf conference in Ohio. Several other conference presentations are proposed. An article about the project appeared in a recent issue of The Journal of Media Literacy, as well as in the Kalamazoo Gazette. Seven university staff members received the semi-annual Make a Difference awards this semester and two of them went to English: congratulations to Becky Beech and Bethlynn Sanders. Thanks to the English Education Committee chaired by Karen Vocke for its nominations. A reception open to the university community will be held April 24th from two to four in the President’s Dining Room. Judith Rypma has been asked to serve on the search committee for a new Dean of the Lee Honors College. She is also currently the Senate Executive Board’s liaison to the Professional Concerns Committee (overseeing GAPDAC and the Office of Student Conduct). This fall she once again directed the academic portion of the Russian Festival at Fetzer, and managed to bring in as a guest speaker renowned amber expert Dr. Patty Rice. Karen Vocke’s ENGL 3770 students shared their research projects with a larger university audience on November 2nd and 7th at the Language and Culture Research Fair in Wood Hall. Elizabeth Amidon, Margaret Dupuis, Jaimy Gordon, Ilana Nash, Gwen Raaberg, and William Zinkus represented the English Department at the Medallion Competition’s Faculty Showcase on Saturday, January 27th. More than 500 prospective students came in three waves to participate in this competition featuring both an academic and a group problem solving component. STUDENT RECOGNITION AND NEWSCongratulations to English students Jen Dempsey, Jason Hescock, Bill Bradley, Caitlin McAndrew, Beth Broadhurst, Julie Roos, Michael Schofield, Scott Williams, Molly Harvey, and Dan Kenzie, who will represent the WMU chapter of Sigma Tau Delta at this year’s national convention in Pittsburgh later this spring. Convention organizers report that they received approximately 550 submissions and that the competition was formidable. All of the WMU students who submitted papers this year have been accepted, and they are presenting in nearly every category, scholarly and creative: American, British, and world literature, film and media studies, linguistics, and original poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. It is truly an outstanding achievement for these students and an honor to our department and the chapter. Last year, English faculty held our first bake sale and raised over $500 to help send two students to the 2006 convention in Portland, Oregon, a memorable experience for the students and quite a feather in the cap of our program and university in only the first year of our chapter’s existence. And on Thursday, February 8, we raised over $630 at our second annual faculty bake sale to benefit Sigma Tau Delta, which will help send these ten outstanding, deserving students to Pittsburgh. Several present and former students with English Department connections presented at the National Peer Tutoring in Writing Conference held in Ann Arbor November 10-12. In total, three alums, two graduate students, and two undergraduates of ours offered original presentations at this highly competitive conference (approximately 1 in 3 proposals get accepted). They included: Elena Adkins, current MA student; Jo Doran, MFA 2005 and current PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue University; The following students were nominated by the Creative Writing faculty for this year’s AWP Intro Awards: Research Day, a celebration of student and faculty research and creative activities, will take place at the Fetzer Center on April 20 from 9-3 PM, and will feature presentations by both nominated students, as well as outstanding faculty. Presenting from English will be Adam Clay with his collection of poems: "The Wash"; and Catherine Elizabeth Hart with her project: "From English to Anglo-Indian: Tracing the Shift in the Representation of the Colonizer in the Discourse of the British Raj." Arnie Johnston passes along the news that The Graduate Student Research and Travel Grants selected Adam Clay’s proposal for support from the Graduate Student Travel Fund. And the College of Arts and Sciences awarded 2006/2007 Undergraduate Career Development Awards for this semester to the following English students to advance and develop their career preparation while at WMU: William Bradley, Beth Broadhurst, Jennifer Dempsey, Jason Hescock, Daniel Kenzie, Scott Williams, and Caitlin McAndrew. Congratulations! Elena Adkins—English Education MA student, Graduate TA, and Writing Center Consultant—tied with one other individual for the East Central Writing Centers Association’s 2007 Outstanding Tutor of the Year. The ECWCA is the professional affiliate for writing centers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, and Northern Congratulations to Randy DeVita, whose Spring 2006 West Branch story “Riding the Doghouse” was selected by Stephen King for Best American Short Stories 2007. Kevin Drzakowski’s play, You Might Mean Something, kicked off Theatre Kalamazoo’s Reader’s Theatre Series on January 25th at Whole Art’s Epic Theatre. This reading of his play adapted from the lyrics of “They Might Be Giants” was the beginning of a new collaboration between WMU’s English Department and Theatre Kalamazoo. Kevin also appeared in The Nerd at the Civic that month. Congratulations to Katherine Ha, graduate student in the MAET program, who has been selected to participate in the 2007 Memorial Library Summer Seminar at Columbia University. The focus for the seminar is reading, writing, and teaching the Holocaust. Kathy teaches English at Portage Community High School and is a Third Coast Writing Project teacher consultant. She will join other National Writing Project site leaders from other campuses for the two-week program in New York City. The Teaching the Holocaust award will cover all her expenses and provide a stipend for her participation. When she returns, Kathy will share what she has learned with her PCHS students and also lead TCWP professional development workshops for teachers in southwest Michigan school districts. Elizabeth Kerlikowske is serving as the judge for the Abbie M. Copps writing contest at Olivet College. She has just been appointed to be a reader for the ETS AP exams in June. Two of her poems will be appearing in The Weathervane: An Online Journal of Great Lakes Culture. And Nancy Eimers passes along the information that Elizabeth’s poetry collection Dominant Hand will be published by Mayapple Press. Elizabeth Knapp has poems in upcoming issues of Barrow Street and RHINO. A play of Michael S. Monje, graduate student in playwriting, has a reading March 29th in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse on the campus of Kalamazoo College. This staged reading is part of Theatre Kalamazoo! and will be directed by Steve Feffer. The cast of Stealing Virtue from the Pornographer’s Daughter will feature both Kalamazoo College students and members of the K faculty (including Ed Menta and Jon Reeves). Ph.D. (Literature) candidate Nathanael O’Reilly successfully defended his dissertation prospectus and achieved A.B.D. status in early February. Nat recently published a review of A.L. McCann’s novel Subtopia in the December 2006 issue of Antipodes and will present a paper in March entitled “The Seduction of Radicalism and Terrorism in A.L. McCann’s Subtopia” at the American Association of Australian Literary Studies Annual Conference at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He also recently wrote an article on the late best-selling Australian author Morris West for The Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Additionally, Nat is now a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Antipodes. Byoung Park’s paper, “Korean Activism, Buddhism, and Cosmopolitanism in Ko Un’s Poetry,” will be published in summer 2007 in The Korea Policy Review, a graduate student-run journal at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The paper is a revised version of a presentation he gave at the MidWest Conference on Asian Affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in October, 2006. Adeena Reitberger has a short story in an upcoming issue of Nimrod. Vincent Reusch’s short story, “Ride the Comet,” appeared in the Fall & Winter 2006 issue of Alaska Quarterly. He also won first place in the 2006 Roanoke Review short fiction contest. Ron Riekki’s play 2 Mics was performed at Whole Art Theatre as part of The Car Plays. IntroSpec Pics in L.A. has expressed interest in shooting The Car Plays (scripts by Arnie Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy, Steve Feffer, Greg Siers, and Ron) as an independent movie, and filming is scheduled to start in March with Arnie Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy’s script But If It Rage. Ron’s play “War” is scheduled to have a reading at The Whole Art Theatre in the March/April time frame. Pulitzer Prize nominee Lee Blessing recommended “War” for the Humana Festival after Ron studied with him at the Sewanee Writers Conference this summer. Readings of “War” and his full-length play “STAND-UP” were presented at Central Michigan University with Best Actor Jeff Award nominee Jason Powers. Ron got dropped from Turner Talent Network, but luckily was picked up by Kramer Entertainment. He toured with the 2007 National We Can Make You Laugh Comedy Tour as a writer/performer doing several shows in PA, NJ, NY, MA, CT, and ME. Some of his favorite shows were at Neumann College and Seton Hill University. New Ohio Review accepted “Cousin J,” an excerpt from Ron’s novel U.P. Ron has been co-writing a non-fiction book on hip-hop with Jus’ Rhyme of egotrip’s “The (White) Rapper Show” on VH1. Michelle Ringle-Barrett’s daughter Evelyn Hazel Barrett was born on December 28th. She was five pounds fourteen ounces, nineteen and a half inches, born at 7:20 a.m. YEAH! And Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil’s daughter Marcelle Hope Voskuil was born on Thursday, February 22 at 5 a.m., “after a very short and easy labor (3 hours! Can you believe it?!). Everyone—Marcie, Nola (big sister), and Gretchen—is doing fine, with the exception of Karsten, who promptly got the flu the minute we returned from the hospital. :) But all is well, and we are so blessed to have a healthy and happy baby in our house. Valerie Waldrop, MFA nonfiction student, now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. She is writing radio pieces for Alaska Public Radio (www.aprn.org) and is working on finishing her manuscript. Her story “Il Pasto Che Parla” appears in the anthology, Our Roots Are Deep With Passion (Other Press, October 2006). She and her husband are expecting their second child in April. Amanda Warren has poems forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Greensboro Review, and Tampa Review. On Sunday afternoon, February 25th, our chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society, inducted its Spring 2007 class on the tenth floor of Sprau Tower. We had fourteen wonderful students inducted, along with the chapter’s first three honorary faculty inductees: our own Jon Adams, Meg Dupuis, and Mike LoPresto. The 2007 Spring Inductees are: Vanessa Brower, Susan Dow, Jake Frye, Kimi Heilman, Kyle Krol, Natia Mattison, Chris Moore, Kevin Moore, Kyle Priddy, Brandon Reaser, Jessica Rouse, Chris Sell, Theresa Thomas, and Lacey Wylie. The WMU chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has selected the following English majors to be invited to membership this April: Christopher M. Coeur, Jason P. Hescock, Andrea M. Mowat, Sarah M. Yost, Emeka A. Charles, Jacob M. Schauer, Lauren B. Szostak, Rebecca E. Tregerman, Dana L. Schaefer, Nicole E. Prichard, Caitlin E. McAndrew, Christopher D. Carter, Carly E. Haufe, Langdon T. Tower, Hailey N. Wojcik, Nick C. Swartz, and Colleen M. Kubacki. NEWS FROM FORMER COLLEAGUESC. J. Gianakaris has a performance review of the National Theatre’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s Royal Hunt Of The Sun (London: Olivier Theatre, April 2006) in Theatre Journal, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 2006), 692-94. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley wrote this poem on the first anniversary of Herbert Scott’s death: FOR HERB SCOTT, ONE YEAR LATER I want to remember you just the way you were, The poem I’m writing for you will be choppy I’d be there, sometimes, standing suddenly, always, redo the faces of women who scared the stories I’d be there beside you, and say, “yes, Herb, Scared again of losing you, of losing your twist and turn The big sun, coming through your office window, One day, you wanted to know why these women Patricia is a 2002 graduate from WMU with a Ph.D in English and Creative Writing (Poetry). She is the author of three books of poetry, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues, 1998), Becoming Ebony (SIU Press, 2003 and a 2002 Crab Orchard Award Series book), and The River is Rising (forthcoming from Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, PA in Jan. 2008). She teaches Creative Writing and English at Penn State University’s Altoona campus in Altoona, Pennsylvania where she lives with her family. NEWS FROM FORMER STUDENTSJames Armstrong, MFA alumnus, caught the attention of Garrison Keillor’s radio show at the beginning of December: his poem “Prayer” from Blue Lash (Milkweed Editions) was selected for “The Writers Almanac.” Usually, poets are selected for several days. Cullen Bailey Burns read from a new manuscript of poems at the Portage Public Library on March 7th; some of these poems have appeared in Rattle, The Denver Quarterly, Court Green, and Rhino. She currently teaches English and creative writing at Century College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the author of Paper Boat (2003). Deborah Darling won the Kalamazoo Gazette short fiction contest. She is not currently a WMU student but hopes to be able to continue soon when family responsibilities Glenn Deutsch has agreed to a second year as visiting assistant professor of English at Kalamazoo College. He will be teaching literature and creative writing. He also recently had a poem accepted by Controlled Burn. Playwriting alum Ryan Dolley reports, “I work as the Literary Assistant, helping to select and prepare the plays for the 2007 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. During the Summer conferences, I will be working with playwrights to help ensure that they have the tools required to take their scripts to the next level. Additionally, I am organizing this year’s Young Playwrights Festival, a program for middle and high school students which stages selected works using methods from the professional summer conferences. I work alongside fellow Bronco Martin Kettling.” Now a doctoral student in the Spanish Dept, Hedy Habra recently received a Fellowship for Dissertation Completion and is writing her doctoral thesis on the narrative of Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the foremost Latin American contemporary writers. Vargas Llosa is one of the leading exponents of the Latin American “Boom” alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar. His work has been translated in 32 languages. An award-winning essayist, novelist and playwright, Vargas Llosa’s novels cover a wide range of genres, from historical and political narratives to novels with lyrical or humorous overtones. He is a recipient of the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. Habra has developed a great interest in Vargas Llosa’s œuvre and has published several refereed articles on some of his novels. On Oct. 19, she was granted an interview from Vargas Llosa in Georgetown where he was teaching as a Visiting Professor. She was able to discuss several points relevant to her thesis and address specific questions that he graciously answered in detail. This meeting was stimulating and useful for a better understanding of his work. For her doctoral dissertation, Habra has chosen a combined critical approach, which consists of the linking of the function of the visual to the concept of “small worlds,” which stem from characters’ fantasies. Vargas Llosa transforms his characters into producers of short films, which multiplies the levels of interpretations and sheds light on the fictional plot, inducing readers’ involvement in the interpretation and recreation of the text. She feels that meeting Mario Vargas Llosa was instrumental in improving the depth and quality of her research and insights on his complex narrative. Habra has recently attended a series of lectures in Lansing, this past February in the context of the LeFrak Forum, during which Vargas Llosa discussed the relationship between Fiction and History in his three socio-political novels “ Conversation in The Cathedral,” “The War of the End of the World,” and “The Feast of the Goat,” which focus respectively on Perú, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. In addition to the stimulating Q&A sessions, she reports that she was very fortunate to participate in a couple of lunches with Vargas Llosa. Connections, a series of short one-act plays by creative writing alum David James, had its premiere production March 29-30 in The Smith Theatre on the Orchard Ridge Campus of Oakland Community College, where David is a faculty member in English. MFA alum Peter Markus will be Wayne State University’s Writer-in-Residence this spring. He has had a number of books published, including Good, Brother, The Moon is a Lighthouse, The Singing Fish and Still Lives with Whiskey Bottle. “Basically I’ll be conducting a ten-session workshop that has as its primary focus writing about place --- specifically Detroit and/or its neighboring landscapes. As a writer I’m all about tapping into that place, those places, those landscapes and languagescapes that are in some way synonymous for the writer writing about them. I am mostly drawn to short fiction, both as a reader and a writer, though I did just receive the good news that a novel of mine, Bob, or Man on Boat, has just been picked up for publication in the fall of 2008.” He still lives in Trenton with his wife of thirteen years and their two children. Nancy Eimers passes along the following good news about Amy McInnis, former MFA student: her poetry collection Cut River has won the 2006 Holland Prize and will be published in March 2007 by Logan House Press. News from Robin Runyan: “It’s cold out here in Iowa City. Very, very cold. I have a proper 9-5 job now. I’ve never had a 9-5 job and honestly, it’s a little strange. But the people I work with are very nice and the company I work for is fairly successful and my job title even says ‘writer’ (proposal writer, to be exact)…” It has been a few years since Matt Simpson Siegel graduated from WMU and he is helping develop a new venue in Grand Rapids. The Black Hills Theatre is opening February 2007 and they will be producing original, one-act plays to be performed on a double bill with Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story for six performances. MFA alum Russell Thorburn has a book of poetry coming out in April from Marick Press called Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged. COMPARATIVE DRAMA Comparative Drama has made enormous strides in the past year, the first full year with associate editors Anthony Ellis and Cynthia Klekar. We have published four issues (two regular, one double) with two more set to come out this spring, one of which is a special issue---Popular Entertainment and American Theater prior to 1900---guest edited by Nicolas Witschi. The completion of seven issues this year brings the journal back in line with the original publishing schedule set over forty years ago! Also notable is our new membership in Project Muse, the online database that will make the journal accessible to individual scholars and research libraries beyond those already on our subscriber list. Upcoming and in progress are two more special issues, one on liturgical drama in memory of our late WMU colleague Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, and the other guest edited by Robert Markley on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama. We are very excited about the future of the journal as we develop new avenues of interest, including the possibility of instating an ongoing editorial internship. This past fall, Cynthia Klekar worked with undergraduate student Rose Walker, who plans to pursue a career in scholarly publishing. In these ways, Comparative Drama continues its commitment to a global academic community, the university, the department, and graduate and undergraduate student interests. Third Coast Writing Project 2007 Summer Programs Invite a k-12 teacher to apply for one of the TCWP summer programs this year, or apply to participate yourself! Most programs, except for the Camp for Young Writers, are held on campus in Schneider Hall.
Check with Becky to get individual flyers for any or all programs. Flyers and application materials can also be downloaded at the TCWP website – http://www.writingproject.org@wmich.edu Ask Ellen Brinkley, Jonathan Bush, Patti Bills, Beth Amidon, Allen Webb, Karen Vocke, Scott Peterson, or Pam Buchanan to tell you more about TCWP! New Issues participated in the bookfair at the AWP Conference in Atlanta where there were table signings by poets Joan Houlihan, Alexander Long, and Wayne Miller. New Issues will also have an exhibitor’s table at the Ann Arbor Book Festival on Saturday, May 19, along with Third Coast literary journal. In March, New Issues Poetry & Prose will release three new poetry titles: Standing in Line for the Beast by Jason Bredle, winner of the 2006 New Issues Poetry Prize; A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow by Noah Eli Gordon, winner of the 2006 Green Rose Prize; and The Body is No Third Coast Magazine The new Third Coast editors for the 2008 issues are as follows: Mark your calendars Gwen Frostic Reading Series, Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. in The Little Theater: Joanna Scott (fiction): January 24 The English Department’s Scholarly Speakers Series, 7:30 p.m. on the 10th floor of Sprau: Dr. Sara S. Poor (Princeton University) and Dr. Jana K. Schulman (Western Michigan University): “Caught Between Worlds: Situating Women in and Redefining Traditional Epic,” Thursday, January 25th (our Keynote Speakers) Dr. Allen Frantzen (Loyola University): “The Problem of Performance in Old English Literature: Drama and the Anglo-Saxons,” Thursday, February 15th Dr. James Gee (The University of Wisconsin): “Video Games and the Art of Learning,” Thursday, March 15th Dr. Peter Manning (Stony Brook University): “‘In a dream you are never eighty’: The Problem of Late Wordsworth,” Tuesday, April 3rd; followed by an informal discussion at 11:00 a.m., April 4th. Fall Department Meeting Schedule January 26, 10:00 a.m. Departmental Events Career Day, Friday, March 16th, 10:00 – 2:00, 2208 Dunbar |