English at the Citrus Bowl!

When Golden Gopher football players take the field against Missouri in the Citrus Bowl, three English majors will be among them, reveling in Minnesota's first New Year's Day bowl game in 50 years. Junior defensive back Eric Murray is a starter who made the coaches' All-Big Ten Second Team. Sophomore wide receiver Drew Wolitarsky played in seven games this fall. Offensive linebacker Luke McAvoy (right) this year won the Gophers' Tony Dungy Character and Community Service Award and was Academic All-Big Ten. In the midst of finals week, we grabbed McAvoy, a senior, for a quick download on the life of a football-playing English major. Read on.

New English Alumnae/i Magazine

The largest literary conference in North America lands in the Twin Cities April 8-11, and our Creative Writing Program faculty and alums are all over it. English Chair Ellen Messer-Davidow recommends Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century--and a thriller or two. Plus an annotated list of the latest fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from professors, alums, and students, and information about our unique collaboration with Penumbra Theatre in February. Read the winter 2014 e-Quarterly!

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Mark Mishek

"There continues to be a large segment of the population that believes overcoming addiction is a matter of willpower," says Mark Mishek (summa cum laude BA 1974; JD with honors 1977), CEO and President of the recently merged Hazelden and Betty Ford Foundations. The former, which he's led since 2008, has of course been a pioneer for 65 years in defining addiction not as a crime or character flaw but as a disease. Changing minds is still difficult. "The thing that's helped right now in a sad sort of way," Mishek notes, "is that with the opioid crises affecting young males more than any other population, more parents are realizing that it's not a matter of willpower, it's not a matter of more education, more self-knowledge, and so on. While that stuff's important, it can't get you well in and of itself." How did Mishek come to lead the nation's largest nonprofit addiction treatment provider? Two words: liberal arts. Read more.

Brownell Defense

PhD candidate Eric Brownell will defend his dissertation "Gothic Heroines and Cultural Trauma in 20th Century Literature and Film," as directed by Dr. Lois Cucullu, at 1 pm Friday December 5 in 207A. All are welcome for the public portion of the defense.

New Books by English Professors

Since September, three English professors have published new works. Professor Paula Rabinowitz's American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press) has drawn praise for its passion and acuity. She was invited to write about her favorite post-war pulps in The Wall Street Journal. Fresh from his third appearance in the annual Best American Poetry anthology, Professor Ray Gonzalez published the "vibrant" (according to Booklist) Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press), his 13th poetry collection. Finally, Professor Nabil Matar published his authoritative compendium of research on British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (The Atlantic World, Brill). Congratulations to all!

5 X Friday: PhD Alumna Mary Petrie

You may have read Mary Petrie's story in The Star Tribune this summer, or on the Today Parents site. Not long after her oldest child, Stryker, graduated high school last spring, he presented Petrie (PhD 2000) with a wrapped gift. Inside was a book proof of a novel Petrie had written more than a decade ago--a novel a New York agency had shopped unsuccessfully, and Petrie had put aside. Her son had proofed, formatted, and readied the book for self-publishing--to thank the Inver Hills CC professor for raising him and to, as Petrie has said, take "your mother's dreams off the shelf." A story that good needs a follow-up, and we did. Read more.

John Berryman Conference

On the 100th anniversary of his birth, we celebrate influential poet and longtime U professor John Berryman with a free, public conference October 24-26 at Andersen Library. Publisher FSG has just released new versions of Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and The Dream Songs, along with a New & Selected--and series editor Daniel Swift will give the conference keynote, along with poets April Bernard, Henri Cole, and Michael Hofmann, who introduced the three reprints. Here are 10 reasons to join us for a weekend delving into the words and worlds of the Pulitzer Prize winner.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Kim Todd

Her work has been called "spellbinding" (by The New Yorker) and "beautifully written" (by Outside magazine). A big welcome to Kim Todd, a new creative nonfiction addition to the Creative Writing Program faculty roster. Todd has written one book about that vagabond Sparrow, another about a female naturalist who, in 1699, voyaged from Amsterdam to South America to study insect metamorphosis (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis), and her self-explanatory first, Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America. It's no surprise she holds masters in both environmental studies and creative writing (from the University of Montana). What led her there? Read on.

5 X Friday: Professor Julie Schumacher

Intent on figuring out how to construct solid plots, Professor Julie Schumacher wrote her first book for younger readers in 2004, a decade before young adult fiction became so popular it spawned an abstinence movement. Schumacher's third such effort, The Book of One Hundred Truths (2006), won a Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction. This summer she shows off her plot chops with the adult comic novel Dear Committee Members, a book consisting only of fictional letters of recommendation--from a single imagined Creative Writing professor--that nevertheless contains classic (and compelling) exposition, conflict, climax, and denouement. Indeed, as an admiring Slate review points out, what finally happens in the tale "turn[s] the book's theme upside down," revealing the moral weight beneath the undeniably funny characterizations. For Schumacher's favorite novel-in-letters and other revelations, read on.

5 X Friday: MFA Alum Josh Ostergaard

When the New York Times Book Review's thoughtful piece on his book debut described him as "the young author," 37-year-old alumnus Josh Ostergaard (MFA 2011) wasn't about to complain. Just the fact that the august Manhattan newspaper would cover his baseball essay, The Devil's Snake Curve, was thrilling. Especially given that it's a book in which Ostergaard denounces the wealthy, self-confident, and mighty New York Yankees to further, as the reviewer recognized, a larger critique of American hegemony across the globe. The "young" descriptor probably was used to distinguish him from previous baseball writers such as George Will, Ostergaard points out: "Even though I love the game, I'm less reverent." Read on.

5 X Friday: English major Marina Kuperman

As a freshman, Marina Kuperman didn't know that experiential learning in college boosts graduates' job prospects. Nevertheless, she chose an English class featuring community volunteer opportunities--and quickly discovered that she loved helping others develop literacy. Convinced now of both her major and her vocation, she applied as a sophomore to become a peer counselor for English majors, a job in which she excelled through her junior year and will continue this fall. Meanwhile, she enrolled in further experiential learning courses, while completing an independent research project on local education practices. An American Literature survey course left Kuperman a fan of Emerson, and these words of his seem appropriate here: "Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." Why is literacy so important for Kuperman? Read on.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Mary Nyquist

For BA alumna Mary Nyquist, entry level lecture classes at the U were large, yes, but also liberating: This small town native experienced anonymity as a refreshing freedom. But she wasn't anonymous for long. Encouraged by her professors, Nyquist went on to graduate school and ultimately became a literature professor at the University of Toronto. There she made a name for herself as a fearless scholar of Milton. These days she thinking and publishing about tyranny through the lens of literature and philosophy, among other interdisciplinary explorations. Read more.

English in The Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Department of English's opportunities to provide hands-on work experience are noted in an article by BA alum Scott Carlson in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Want a College Experience That Matters? Get to Work." Ellen Messer-Davidow, chair of the department, also talks about future plans to expand internships and other ways students can gain workplace experience. Carlson, who wrote articles for The Minnesota Daily as a student, notes that his work experience complemented his literature studies and vice versa--his subsequent career in journalism "wouldn't have been as rich without the literature degree."

Summer e-Quarterly Out Now

Our professors don't just go home and read after class: As our profile details, one competes in high-level competitive ice dancing; another spins African music as a radio deejay. But, yes, they also read: Professor John Watkins describes his latest perusals, including Solzhenitsyn and other Russian novelists. Plus a boatload of great summer books from faculty and alums. Check out the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

5 X Friday: Professor John Watkins

Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English John Watkins first studied at England's Oxford University when he was a young man out of Arkansas by way of Indiana University. A Marshall Scholarship recipient, he was tasked to do exactly what he loved: "read like crazy," think, and write. Watkins has been back to Oxford many times since, as an Elizabethan scholar, but is looking forward to three months there this coming academic year, his longest visit in more than 15 years. He's been invited to be a senior research visitor at Oxford's Keble College--one of three honors he won this spring, along with Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. With his parents passed, he says, he doesn't go back to Arkansas; in many ways, Oxford has become his place of origin: "It does feel a lot like home." Read more.

1. You've been working on a book on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking. What are your goals for your 2014-15 sabbatical year?
I would like to get this manuscript finished. I think everyone going into a sabbatical says that. Where it is now, I've gotten the chapters drafted, but they're very drafty chapters. One of the things that happens when you're writing a book is that by the time you finish drafting those last chapters the first ones don't necessarily fit the book very well anymore--because your central conception of the project has changed. So this is my chance to sit down, start reading--feeling desperately ill and hating everything--and writing a clean manuscript.
[In Oxford] I have all the resources of the Bodleian Library, which is like the Library of Congress: It's a copyright library; they have an incredible manuscript collection. It is one of the best places on the planet to work. The other thing of course is you become part of the senior community there. You're having all your meals in college, which allows lots of fruitful conversation and lots of interdisciplinary exchange. I know people throughout the university--both in English and in history. Keble has a pretty strong Elizabethan faculty now, so it's a good place to end up if you're doing 16th, 17th century, including good diplomatic historians, good social historians, a wonderful literary scholar, Diana Purkiss.
2. Can you give an example of something you discovered while writing this book that you'll need to add to the first chapters?
I realized that there was a Virgilian thread that runs throughout this. At the end of the Aeneid, there is one of the great literary interdynastic marriages of all time. Aeneas the Trojan relocates his people to Italy; he's told by the gods that he will marry the princess of the local tribe; war breaks out, because of course someone else is interested in her; but at the end of the day peace is made, he does marry her. And the fusion of the native Latins with the interloping Trojans creates the basis of the Roman Empire, the Roman people. That myth comes up a lot in tributes to various marriages throughout the European centuries, so I'm going to bring that Virgilian subtext out more. It's fun, because this book circles back and answers questions that I dealt with 20 years ago writing my first book [The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic].
3. What do you appreciate most about Oxford?
Music, music, music. I have a real passion for early British music, modern British music: It's a great place to hear everything. It's the kind of place you can go and have an incredible conversation about Nicholas Maw or Michael Tippett; people know what you're talking about.
I love working in the Bodleian. I swear I write better there. It's a gorgeous 17th-century building with massive windows. Yes, it can get cold in the winter, but you wear gloves. I have some amazingly happy memories of reading [John] Donne's sermons, setting sunlight filtering through the glass at the Bodleian--it was the perfect place to be reading Donne since he's so death-obsessed. I think that was the best educational experience I ever had.
Another thing that I really love about Oxford is that it is walkable. Oxford is a city, but the university is the heart of the historical core, and that's manageable by foot. A lot of faculty either live in college or very close, and that allows conversation to happen. If you're going to a concert, it's a five- or ten-minute walk. I cannot wait to be back to that. You can walk to country villages by foot, with wonderful little pubs and things. If you get on the train, you can be in deep, deep, deep English countryside in no time.
This essay that I'm writing now, it began with a long walk there with a friend who's a Russian historian, and a conversation we had on why so many diplomats end up becoming creative writers--what is the link there? I'm getting an essay out of it; I'll probably end up getting a book out of it.
4. More, please, on that essay?
One of the things that can be often fun about a sabbatical year is you have a little bit of time not to deal with your central project but to think about something else that will sort of keep you going for the future. Increasingly, I'm thinking about international law. There's a standard problem in international law. It's the most basic problem you can have: Does it exist? Putin moves troops past the Eastern border, and Obama screams, "You've violated international law." But what is international law exactly? It's not produced by a legislature. It's not like there's international policing authority that can really do anything. There is the international court, but that's brand new, and it's not at all clear what its jurisdictions are.
What that sounds like to me is that the project of international law is finally a project of the imagination. The second you're saying, "Does it really exist?" you are saying, "Or is it a dream?" The argument I think I want to make is that we will be making better and stronger international law if we realize that its imaginative quality is indeed the best thing it's got going--the fact that it isn't tainted by a political process that creates it (in the way that national legal codes are), that it can actually be a place for free legal speculation.
This is why [16th-century poet] Philip Sidney is becoming important. Sidney's whole defense of poetry is: Poets are being attacked by the Puritans because they are indulging in make believe, writing things that are not true; Sidney's point is that, yes, what we write is not true, but: the historian can give you a brazen world, we can give you a golden one. In the process of imagining golden worlds, with better people in them than you will find in day-to-day experience, we can inspire everyone to be better. One of Sidney's associates was an Italian living in England named Alberico Gentili, who wrote one of the first treatises of international law. He dedicated it to Sidney. Sidney had certainly done diplomatic work. And his Arcadia, this enormous prose romance, is talking a lot about how states relate to each other, and how they relate to each other on a legal basis. So I think this is a good place to start teasing out what the role of the imagination is in the ordering of world systems. It's certainly something to keep me out of trouble.
5. What could get you into trouble in Oxford?
The only drawback is English food. I'm eating in college. Every morning will begin with the three most frightening words in the English language: "full English breakfast." The dangerous thing for me is that I actually like that kind of stuff. But you just cannot do it for three months--the way I did it for two years [while a student at Oxford]. I'm still running 5K a day to make up for what I did to my body when I was 22. Everything has a cream sauce. And the vegetables: If there's a vitamin left, you boil it some more.
It is getting harder, it is getting much harder, to find good country pub food. You know, the classic meat pie with the cold water suet crust. I actually tracked one down last summer by taking a train to Banbury, getting off, and walking five miles into the country. I got the Platonic form of meat pie. But it took work.

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Tom Rademacher

Minnesota Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher teaches high school English at the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resources (FAIR) School in downtown Minneapolis. "[H]e teaches us that our thoughts matter," wrote a student who nominated him, "and that we are capable of anything we want to do with our lives." Rachemacher wins a $6,000 prize and will serve as a teacher ambassador in the state for the next year. On his home page on the FAIR website, he notes, "I know I'm doing my job right when a student says I don't act like a teacher." So what's his classroom like? "On bad days, it's a mess," he admits. "On good days, it's a mess with great questions. I have a rule that I will not try to teach my students anything they could look up on the internet, which means we're often pushing each other towards pretty challenging work and conversations." Read more.

5 X Friday: PhD Candidate Laura Bozeman

PhD candidate--and Army Lieutenant Colonel--Laura Bozeman knew from age nine that she would serve in the military. It helped that she grew up in Colorado Springs, home of the Air Force Academy, and that her dad was career Army before his retirement when Bozeman was two. But, she muses, "I think I was most influenced by the change in law to allow women to attend the military academies. I followed the debate on whether or not women could 'handle' the academies with interest." She was admitted to both West Point and Annapolis but decided to take a four-year Army ROTC scholarship offer to attend Texas Christian University. Many ROTC students of the time ended up serving in the Army Reserve or National Guard, but the Gulf War had happened by the time Bozeman graduated in 1992, and she was commissioned to active duty. Since then, she's served in Germany, South Korea, Alaska, and Afghanistan, among others--and, yes, at West Point, where she taught English for three years after receiving her MA from English at Minnesota in '01. She's returning to West Point to teach after successfully defending her doctoral dissertation this spring. Read more.

1. Your dissertation topic is "The Genteel Frontier: Westward Expansion of Womanly Refinement." Can you briefly describe your focus? How did you become interested in this subject?
I am analyzing the ways [19th century writers] Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, Margaret Fuller, and Eliza Steele depicted themselves as conforming to established standards of gentility and domesticity (during the years they lived in the Upper Midwest as settlers or the weeks they traveled to the Upper Midwest as tourists), as well as what possible connections exist between their depictions of themselves and what critical things they have to say about the culture of what was then the frontier of the United States.
I have lived all over the world, and I have enjoyed reading classic works of travel literature about the places I've been stationed. I first became interested in travel writing as a research topic when I was working on my MA. I greatly enjoyed the courses I took with Donald Ross, Jr., who is now my adviser. His work establishing the journal Studies in Travel Writing is particularly inspiring to me. I prepared an annotated bibliography on 19th Century Women's Travel Writing in Sub-Sahara Africa as part of my MA coursework. Donald encouraged me to apply for my minor field of study [Composition/Literacy/Rhetoric] and to apply for the PhD program. I appreciate his support and encouragement in my academic endeavors.
2. When you joined the Army were you thinking you would want to earn a PhD in English?
I first considered the goal of a PhD in English when I was an undergraduate at Texas Christian University, but I didn't think I could accomplish it while serving in the Army. I planned to serve four to six years on active duty and to pursue my PhD after. Then I found out that I was not eligible for the GI Bill because I was a four-year Army ROTC scholarship recipient. However, I also learned that the Army had various programs (called advanced civil schooling) where I could earn an MA while on active duty. I was especially interested in teaching English at West Point.
3. What drew you to English at the University of Minnesota?
I was impressed by the department's reputation and its talented faculty. Most of the professors whose classes I took from 1999 to 2001 have since retired, but the faculty members who have arrived since I was last here are equally impressive. I was also drawn to the Twin Cities. It is a great place to live while attending graduate school. I especially love that so many theater productions are staged in the Twin Cities each year, as well as the easy access I have to varied outdoor pursuits, including river kayaking and cross country skiing. I didn't want to attend graduate school right by a military base--I wanted exposure to different ideas and political philosophies. The Twin Cities is far more liberal, politically, than most US Army communities. That is a welcome change, for me. My husband [retired from the Army] and I joined a few "Meet-Ups," including Simply Epicurious, where we dine at various restaurants around the Twin Cities. I really enjoy meeting new people. It's a good thing I'm rather extroverted, since I move every two or three years!
4. What have been your Army roles since you finished basic training? What were your duties in Afghanistan?
I've served as a Human Resources officer for most of my career. My primary specialties are enlisted personnel accessions, operational planning, congressional correspondence, military awards and decorations, and personnel actions. I've been a speechwriter for a three-star general. I also have experience with military protocol, including executive engagements and services (general officer's personal staff).
While deployed in Kabul [July 2011-June 2012], I was assigned to NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, and I advised the Afghan National Army's Inspector General on his core staff functions (inspections, investigations, assistance visits, intelligence oversight, and teaching and training). The general I worked with had been the Inspector General for several years and was highly experienced. My role was to facilitate his staff's continued progress toward independent mission accomplishment. I let the general know that I had every confidence in his abilities and those of his staff officers and that I wanted them to impress me. Given the latitude to exercise initiative, they produced exceptional results, including a quarterly inspector general conference that they planned, coordinated, and executed with minimal input from their international advisers. Toward the end of my year in Afghanistan, NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan awarded the Inspector General a new capabilities milestone rating--the first time the Inspector General attained an improvement in this rating in four years. This achievement really had little to do with me besides my providing the support and motivation. As an added part of my responsibilities, I was also the Officer in Charge for the other inspector general advisors at NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. These personnel advised the Ministry of Defense Inspector General, the National Military Hospital Inspector General, and their staff chiefs. After redeploying, I was reassigned to Minnesota to complete my PhD studies.
5. What was it like to go from the intense situation in Kabul back to studying English literature here in Minnesota?
The challenge I initially found was putting Afghanistan behind me mentally. At first, I was checking the news each day for information on what was happening in Kabul, and I was in regular contact with the people I served with over there, who had also redeployed home. It was hard on all of us to go from working together seven days a week to dispersing back to our respective duty assignments. By the end of my first semester back in Minnesota, I felt like I was back home mentally, too. I do find I have less patience for complaints about "first world problems" since returning from the combat zone. We have so many opportunities as Americans, and we have such a high quality of life, we often take these things for granted. Just being able to drink water from the tap is something a great many people in the world don't enjoy. My teaching philosophy has become far more pragmatic, too. I've served with some of my former [West Point] students in Korea, Hawaii, and Afghanistan, and I want to prepare my next group of students to excel in complex operational environments.

Creative Writing Program Spring Newsletter

New faculty member Kim Todd is interviewed in the 2014 spring Creative Writing Program newsletter, along with Q & A with award-winning alums Ethan Rutherford and Amanda Coplin. Plus news about publications and awards from faculty, students, and alumnae/i!

Alum Is Minnesota Teacher of the Year

Tom Rademacher (BA 2004; CEHD M.Ed. 2007) was named Minnesota Teacher of the Year on May 4, 2014. Rademacher teaches high school English at the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resources (FAIR) School in downtown Minneapolis. The student who nominated him wrote: "[H]e teaches us that our thoughts matter, and that we are capable of anything we want to do with our lives." Rademacher wins a $6,000 prize and serves as a teacher ambassador in the state for the next year. In an interview with the Star Tribune, Rademacher said, "[T]he ideas behind the literature we read help kids figure out what you are going to do in the world and how to address things that are right and wrong."

Geoff Sirc Honored at CCCC

Professor Geoff Sirc was honored March 22 at the 65th Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis with a six-speaker tribute panel entitled "Never Mind Geoffrey Sirc." The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition. Panelist Victor J. Vitanza, Professor of English at Clemson University, noted: "Sirc is the most dangerous man in writing instruction." The panel, which included Sirc as respondent, inspired a flurry of tweets, compiled here. Congratulations!

Michael Hancher Wins Service Award

Professor Michael Hancher is a winner of the 2014 President's Award for Outstanding Service, becoming "a member of an elite group of faculty and staff of the University community" who have provided exceptional service to the University well beyond the regular duties of a faculty or staff member. Since joining the Department of English in 1972, he has served as Director of English Graduate Studies, CLA Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, Chair of English, and most recently Vice Chair of the Faculty Consultative Committee of the Faculty Senate, which serves as the consulting body to President Eric Kaler and as the executive committee of the Faculty Senate. The award will be conferred at a Board of Regents meeting on Thursday, May 8, 3:30 pm, at 600 McNamara Center. Congratulations!

John Watkins Awarded Guggenheim

Congratulations to Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English John Watkins, who has been named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. The Guggenheim Foundation supports projects by humanities scholars, creative writers, artists, and scientists: This year, 178 fellows were chosen out of almost 3,000 applicants. Watkins was also recently awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a Keble College at Oxford fellowship. Watkins will be completing a book project on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 17th century. More about Professor Watkins here. Associate Professor of English Peter Campion received the fellowship in 2011.

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Erik Storlie

Erik Storlie (BA 1962; MA English 1962, Berkeley 1965; PhD American Studies, University of Minnesota 1976) says he was born too late to be a Beat and too early to be a hippie, but he hit the 20th century exactly right to hang with Dylan, drink with poet (and Minnesota English professor) James Wright, drop acid with Timothy Leary, help bring Zen Buddhism from Berkeley to Minnesota, and join Robert Bly in the early days of the Men's Movement. Luckily for the rest of us, he's chronicled his journey through all these adventures in a new memoir, Go Deep & Take Plenty of Root: A Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing Up, Growing Tender. An affable 73-year-old, Storlie sat down for an interview in Lind Hall, nearby where he teaches at the University's Center for Spirituality and Healing. Read more.

5th Annual English Undergrad Conference

On Thursday and Friday, April 3 and 4, the Department of English is pleased to present the fifth iteration of a conference celebrating our undergraduates' creative and critical work. This year, there will be papers on everything from Shakespeare to the video game Mass Effect, along with poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Actor and BA alumna Naomi Ko, who has a featured role in the new independent film Dear White People, will speak at the top of a panel on fiction, identity, and desire Thursday evening at 7 pm. A panel of alumni discusses employment and the road out from English on Friday morning at 8:50 am. Plus much more! Free and open to University students, faculty, and friends.

5 X Friday: PhD Candidate Anne Marie Spidahl

Very few debut novels are reviewed in the august New York Times Book Review: as of December, PhD candidate Anne Marie Spidahl's Nothing stands among them--surveyed favorably by polarizing novelist Tao Lin, no less. Under the name Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon, Spidahl published her first novel with the small press Two Dollar Radio in November. She started Nothing while an MFA student in creative writing at the University of Montana six years ago and won a MacDowell Colony Fellowship to continue work on it. With influences as disparate as Lou Reed's songs and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book follows two young people stumbling around Missoula in a haze of alcohol, pills, and wildfire smoke, seeking at once annihilation and some recognition of their painful emptiness. Spidahl is now studying 20th- and 21st-century novels and theory. Read more.

1. The Missoula Nothing portrays is not most people's idea of Montana. You've written: "The dream of salvation in the West is real even if the West is not." Could you expand on that?
I'm slightly obsessed with Missoula's sinister underbelly. The day I arrived I saw my first dead body: A biker had just been hit by a mini-van-driving-dad, and he lay dead in the road, his leathers all twisted around his bald head, the dad and kids staring, nauseated with fear. Maybe it's partly because Missoula is based on transience: students, tourists, hobos, bikers, rivers. But I love Missoula, and Montana in general. For my husband (Ben) and me, it really is "the last best place." In Montana there's still an exit from the infinite self-referential loop: People still are overcome, people still escape, people still get lost or wild. But saying that partly contradicts what I meant by "The dream of the West was real even if the West was not." With that line I was thinking about how we all keep living lives we hate (or only tolerate) because there's an Out-There where things are different. Heaven, Florida, the Wild-Wild West, whatever--believing means we can delay forever our own real being. To me that's a problem. But at the same time, it shows we keep holding on to something more than this, or maybe, holding on to something more in this.
2. More than one review of the book has asserted that the characters are not likeable. What's your response?
I dislike the characters of Nothing just as much as the next guy. They are cliquey poseurs and haters; they manipulate each other and themselves for twisted self-interest. I started Nothing thinking: This world is hurtling toward catastrophe, but we're all keeping on as if it isn't. How can we stand it? I suppose it's because we all have fantasies that keep life sensible and justify each of our particular little lives but are completely insufficient for dealing with the age of the hand-held device, the war on terror, global economic crises, climate change. So even if I dislike Ruth, James, and Bridget, I partly identify with them since I am insufficient and struggling in this world too, and sometimes that means I do the things I hate about them too.
3. Tao Lin's comment in The New York Times about your characters was you didn't "seem interested in totally maintaining the illusion that Ruth and James are people." True?
Tao Lin was right: I didn't aim for the reader to forget that Ruth and James are characters that I made up. I might've made my disbelief in them more explicit, but I am afflicted with excessive subtlety. What I was thinking, basically, is that Ruth and James are working with what they get given--language, trendy colors, certain ideas of what's possible to do in life, etc. Some of what they're given controls and limits them, so they can't break out of those pesky insufficient fantasies. In early drafts I was trying for a conspiracy--a system of interests far beyond what the characters can understand that reveals itself only fleetingly. I think its remnants serve to undermine their authenticity. (But somewhere in there I did think of them as people too, since I believe in people: in hatred, love, lust, suicide.) This relates to your next question. . . .
4. Ruth and James' constant feeling that they are being watched is so fascinating--because, given NSA cel phone tracking and youth marketing, they are. They're also part of generation raised to display themselves via social media: you're not real if you're not seen. So it's a desperate paranoia (please let someone be watching) at the same time it's a justified paranoia (the real watchers are taking notes to better manipulate them via products and propaganda). In representing 21st-century "disaffected youth" did you see it differing in severity or kind from its antecedents?
As exemplified by NSA surveillance, I think we're living in a moment of particularly unsettling fleeting glimpses of the system of interests far beyond what we can understand. I think you suggested better than I can the conflicted nature of technology and surveillance today, and how the very definition of humanity is tied up in it. So, yes, I do think our moment is unique in its redefinition of the human, and in the level of development and expansion of capitalism. I think that the characters in Nothing worry about these things too, and their worry cripples them, brings them to nothing, which may be the only place from which they can start again.
5. What made you want to earn a PhD? What drew you to English at Minnesota?
I chose to pursue my PhD because I want to spend my life reading and writing books and because I love college students, but also because I was a pregnant waitress and I needed a real job; I needed to show my daughter what's possible, especially for women. I chose to pursue my PhD to read philosophy and literature systematically and with guidance, to think about how literature works, and to try and understand its relationship to society.... I couldn't understand the world around me and wanted to step back and think about it. And last but not least, I chose to pursue my PhD because I wanted to "do the right thing" and make my parents and my grandparents proud, of course! Once I made this decision I was only interested in studying at Minnesota. The faculty is excellent, as are my classmates. I went to Macalester for college and am happy to be back. I love Minneapolis.
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Spring e-Quarterly Out Now

What is our new Assistant Professor Amit Yahav reading (besides the 18th century)? What new books are out from faculty, students, and alums? How is English participating in Northrop Auditorium's Grand Reopening? Find out in the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Amit Yahav

Assistant Professor Amit Yahav joined the English faculty this spring semester, after teaching at the University of Haifa and Johns Hopkins. A scholar of 18th-century literature, she graduated from Tel-Aviv University and earned her PhD in English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. When she's not immersed in the 18th century, she can be found reading picture books to "very short people with an even shorter attention span"--and also checking out contemporary fiction (she recommends Chinghiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years). Read more to find out about her current research and what she misses about her hometown, Tel Aviv.


1. Could you briefly describe your current research focus?
I'm writing a book on duration in 18th-century novels and culture. The 18th century is well known for having developed abstract, disciplinary, mechanical, quantitative time--the paradigm of time is money, punctuality, order; or the notion that time is not much more than its conventional, abstract, notations. And yet the 18th century is also the age of sensibility, a culture that highlights sensing, feeling, subjectivity. I'm interested in the temporal conceptions developed by writers of sensibility to explain durations that are intensely personal, or that seem to us to have special qualities that clocks and calendars cannot get at. Philosophers of the 20th century have called such durations qualitative or experiential. My research has led me to think that 18th-century novelists and philosophers do a great job of defining such qualitative time, and of thinking up ways for representing it--how it can be abstracted into writing and print while maintaining its experiential quality. Moreover, 18th-century writers of sensibility explore qualitative time in ways that not only anticipate 20th-century accounts, but also significantly differ from these more recent discussions.
 
2. What led you to this research topic? Was there a certain class, workshop, conference, or mentor?
I had a good friend who insisted that he has his own time, which is different from my time. I didn't believe him. I thought that clocks and schedules were the only meaningful way of thinking about duration. We argued about it for years until he convinced me, and then "my time" became a fascinating intellectual problem. What can a duration be if it cannot be measured chronometrically? How can we talk about it, share it, coordinate it? At this point I started seeing non-chronometric time and special qualitative durations everywhere in the books I was reading for work. The most evocative scenes in Defoe's Moll Flanders involve difficulties of coordinating desires in time; Richardson calls his signature novelistic technique "writing to the moment" (rather than to the minute, hour, or second), Tristram Shandy notoriously cannot match the schedules of representation with the durations of experience, Ann Radcliffe arrests her plots to a standstill thus dilating the duration of our reading with lengthy accounts of the aesthetic pleasures of her heroines, etc.
 
3. What is your favorite work to teach?
My all-time favorite is Robinson Crusoe. I haven't yet met the student--or for that matter any reader--who didn't connect to this novel in some way. You can do with it what Crusoe does with his bible--randomly open the book and tease out meaningfulness from any passage. It is not simply that Crusoe yields itself to many different approaches--liberal, Marxist, psychological, post-colonial, formalist, linguistic. The novel, in and of itself, theorizes to some extent all these perspectives, so that you can learn from it key principles without prior knowledge of the theories. You need not have read Marx to notice how Defoe values production and use; you need not have read Locke to understand what is at stake for Defoe in individualism and rationality; or Freud to see how he explores analysis as the salutary path from despondency to well-being, or Coetzee to notice both the appeal and the implausibility of the imperialist masculine prototype. So it's fun to teach because students can do a lot with it on their own, as well as relatively easily learn to see dimensions beyond their immediate interests and existing knowledge.
 
4. Where did you grow up? Is there anything--food, geography, feeling--you miss?
I grew up in Israel, in the Tel Aviv area. Since arriving in Minneapolis I miss the outdoors--walking or biking everywhere, picnicking or reading in the park or on the beach, sitting outside in cafes. I'm told that Minneapolis is a great place to do all these things once the snow melts. We're eagerly awaiting spring....
 
5. What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at Minnesota?
The intellectual community. There are many colleagues in the department and in the college whose work I admire, PhD students who study the 18th century, reading groups in my period and in theory, programs and institutes that support research and scholarly exchange. I'm sure these opportunities will significantly impact my research.

Prospective Student Visit

The Department of English welcomes admitted prospective graduate students March 13-14. Events scheduled include a reading by MFA alum authors, a discussion with current PhD students,class visits, and dinner with graduate students and faculty. We look forward to meeting you!

Tim Brennan Named CLA Russell Chair

Professor Timothy Brennan was named the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities for the College of Liberal Arts for a three-year period, 2014-17. The Russell Chair is intended to promote outstanding teaching and scholarship in the humanities and involves an annual allocation of $25,000 in support. Brennan publishes Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies with Stanford University Press in March. He has also been awarded Sabbatical Leave with Supplement for the calendar year 2015. Congratulations!

English@Minnesota at AWP

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs holds its annual conference starting Thursday, February 27, in Seattle. Because the schedule is an eye-drying monument of panel and reading information, we made it easy with a quick compendium of what 16 faculty and alums are doing at the festival (which draws 10,000 some attendees). From Professor Peter Campion weighing in on John Berryman to BA alumna Cheryl Strayed addressing the rise of Rumpus.com, there's a plethora of "must see." (Plus, at the conference's book fair, student Carrie Lorig will be unveiling her new chapbook with Forklift, OH, and alumnus Josh Ostergaard his nonfiction debut with Coffee House Press.) Read on.

Thursday, February 27
R123. Teaching Brief, Sudden, Flash, and Very Short Prose
With MFA alumnus Steve Pacheco
(Raul Moreno, Meagan Cass, Damian Dressick, Sara Henning, Pacheco) With The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction now a familiar text among college-level instructors and an international anthology of very short fiction due out from Norton, questions about best approaches to attempting brief prose abound. If this can be a good way to teach writing, as anthologist Robert Shapard suggests, how do students negotiate the new horizons of genre and form? Five instructors offer lessons from workshops, grading, new media, doctoral research, and more. 9-10:15 am, Room LL4, Western New England MFA Annex, Lower Level
R126. What Was Is: The Use of Present Tense in Creative Nonfiction
With MFA alumna Kate Hopper
(Hopper, Hope Edelman, Bonnie Rough, Marybeth Holleman, Ryan Van Meter) This panel of memoirists and essayists will consider what happens when we write about past events in the present tense. When does present tense provide needed immediacy, and when does it limit an author's ability to write to the true story? We will explore the benefits, challenges, and drawbacks of using present tense as we craft our lives on the page, and we will discuss how tense affects other craft issues, such as voice, reflection, and structure. 9-10:15 am, Room 202, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 2
R170. All This and More: What Form of Creative Nonfiction is the Essay/Review?
With MA alum Mary Rockcastle
(Rockcastle, Stan Sanvel Rubin, David Ingle, Jocelyn Bartkevicius) In an essay published in the Manilla Review, Jennifer B. McDonald, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, wrote, "A good review introduces a book and attempts a rigorous appraisal, while demonstrating fairness, intelligence, clarity, discernment, and style." A good essay review does all of this and more. In addition to reviewing the books (usually two or more), the essay review serves as a springboard for the author to explore ideas and probe aspects of his/her own life. The panelists, all of them editors and/or writers of the essay review--for Water~Stone Review, The Georgia Review, and Fourth Genre--will focus on what the essay review is and isn't, what it offers the reader as well as the author of the book being reviewed, and how it contributes not only to the literary magazine but to the writer (and field) of creative nonfiction. Noon-1:15 pm, Room 607, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
R189. Not What I Was Looking For, But What I Found: Deploying Research in Creative Writing
With MFA alumnae Edward McPherson and Ethan Rutherford
(McPherson, Rutherford, Sandra Lim, Amy Leach, Jim Shepard) How can research enrich creative writing? Many writers collect information as a way to engage their inner lives, educate themselves about the world, look out as a means of looking in, animate the historical and political--and then deploy those findings in their work, often to strange, wonderful, and unexpected effect. This cross-genre panel composed of writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry will discuss the strategies, pleasures, and potential pitfalls of digging for facts to use in your art. Noon-1:15 pm, Room 305, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
R196. Why Can't We Be Friends?: Book Arts in the Digital Age
With MFA alumna Meryl DePasquale
(DePasquale, Anna Lena Phillips, MC Hyland, Drew Burk, Guy Pettit) Alongside the rise of online publishing is a renaissance in the traditional art of the book. Handmade chapbooks, broadsides, artist books, and other literary objects are often viewed in opposition to computers and the Internet; but in fact, the digital world and the book arts cooperate in unexpected ways. Our discussion will address practical strategies to open book arts to a wider audience online and examine what the fine arts gallery has to add to conversations in contemporary publishing. 1:30-2:45 pm, Room 3A, Washington State Convention Center, Level 3
R210. Henry at 100: A Centenary Tribute to John Berryman
With Creative Writing Program Professor Peter Campion and BA alumnus David Wojahn
(Wojahn, Campion, Kathleen Graber, J. Allyn Rosser, Kevin Young) This panel celebrates the lasting legacy of one of the latter 20th Century's most original figures, John Berryman, whose epic poem, "The Dream Songs," occupies a unique place in American literature. Yet Berryman remains a controversial figure, and our panel will commemorate his accomplishment while at the same time confronting the more fraught elements of his writing, among them matters of gender, race, and the limitations of the confessional mode. 1:30-2:45 pm, Room 615/616/617, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
R249. The Kenyon Review 75th Anniversary Reading
With Creative Writing Program Professor Charles Baxter
(David Lynn, Kimiko Hahn, Baxter, Jaquira Diaz) A reading from writers featured in the Winter 2014 issue of The Kenyon Review, our 75th anniversary issue. The Winter 2014 issue marks our ongoing commitment to publish the very best writing from established and emerging writers. Founded in 1939 at Kenyon College and first edited by poet-critic John Crowe Ransom, The Kenyon Review continues in its 75th year to celebrate writing that maps the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional tides of our contemporary culture. 3-4:15 pm, Room 304, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
R263. How to Write About a Murderer
With MFA alumna Arlene Kim
(Madge McKeithen, Jessica Handler, Kim, Kate Sweeney, Nick Twemlow) Can a writer adopt an alternate persona or innovative style to explore disturbing subjects? How does altered identity or medium affect a writer's process and a reader's experience? Five writers who work in prose, poetry, film, audio, and visual art discuss examples of their adopted personae and structural choices and give examples of ways these applications break boundaries and add perspective in articulating story. Participants discuss one another's work and choices that have inspired theirs. 4:30-5:45 pm, Room 604, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
R280A. Is It Really That Difficult? The Problem with "Difficult" Poetry
With MFA alumna Lightsey Darst
(Chris Fischbach, Darst, Amanda Nadelberg, Raymond McDaniel, Ange Mlinko) Many small presses publish poetry that is described as "experimental" and very often "difficult." What do these monikers mean, and how are they both limiting and freeing? This panel will explore poetry's links to these terms with Coffee House Press poets. Each poet seeks to connect with readers in diverse ways, and each is known for the experimentation and complexity of his or her work. 4:30-5:45 pm, Room 304, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
Friday, February 28
F258. What I Wish I'd Known Before I Started Writing for Kids and Young Adults
With BA alumna Sheila O'Connor
(Heather Bouwman, Kirstin Cronn-Mills, O'Connor, Shelley Tougas, Rebecca Fjelland Davis) This panel features middle-grade and young adult novelists who--before starting to write kidlit--also held other roles as poets, professors, journalists, and/or authors of literary novels. In this moderated discussion, they'll answer questions about the surprises they faced when they began writing for children and young adults: craft issues, audience questions, marketing dilemmas, and unexpected wrinkles in professional relationships. 3-4:15 pm, Room 618/619/620, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
F264. Crossing the Veil: Engaging the Editor Who Rejects your Work
With MFA alumna Jennine Capó Crucet
(Marianne Kunkel, Capó Crucet, Tim Johnston, Stacey Waite) The editor may always be right but, more importantly, he or she always has the final say. Two poets and two prose writers open up about personalized rejection notes--glimpses into literary journals' behind-the-scenes discussions--and instances in which editors wrestled with publishing their somewhat risky work. This panel will showcase accomplished authors speaking frankly about respectfully talking back to editors and will promote a submission culture of professionalism, transparency, and candor. 3-4:15 pm, Room 302, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
Saturday, March 1
S153. Queer Translation
With BA alumnus Johannes Goransson
(Joyelle McSweeney, Goransson, Don Mee Choi, Lucas DeLima, Jeffrey Angles) As translators, artists, scholars, and performers, we'll consider how 'queer translation' might host a queer interaction or strange meeting; how it might undermine nationalist demarcations of the body, including binaries separating male and female, able and disabled, human and inhuman, whole and partial bodies; the force of translation as a 'political uncanny'; and whether translation itself might figure a queer or middle body, an activist body, a political resource. 10:30-11:45 am, Room 612, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
S165. Writing, Rumpus, and Community
With BA alumna Cheryl Strayed
(Brian Spears, Strayed, Stephen Elliott, Roxane Gay, Isaac Fitzgerald) Since going live in 2009, the Rumpus has been a place for unknown writers to find an audience and for established writers to find new ones. It redefined the advice column and has become one of the foremost publishers of personal narratives and book reviews online. This panel will discuss the Rumpus' first five years and its plans for the future. 10:30-11:45 am, Room 305, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
S189. The Latino Short Story: Continuity, Innovation, and the Voices of Story Writing
With MFA alumna Jennine Capó Crucet
(Fred Arroyo, Lorraine Lopez, Benjamin Alíre Sáenz, Capó Crucet, Daniel Chacón) The short story is a vital American literary form. Through its continuity and innovation, the short story hears and reflects the individual and collective voices of culture and history. This panel of Latin@ short story writers, who have recently published collections, will consider the problems and possibilities--aesthetically, traditionally, ideologically, and culturally--of publishing short story collections, while also exploring the tensions and joys of publishing with smaller presses. Noon-1:15 pm, Room LL5, Western New England MFA Annex, Lower Level
S223. It's About Time: A Tribute to Philip Levine
With BA alumnus David Wojahn
(Consuelo Marshall, Wojahn, Kathy Fagan, B. H. Boston, Tomas Morin) Philip Levine is one of America's most revered and influential poets. Often referred to as a voice for the voiceless, Levine's work is also known for its emotional intensity tempered with the control and concentration of a master. Five poet/teachers discuss Levine's impact on the literary world and beyond and will read their favorite Levine poems. 1:30-2:45 pm, Room 302, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
S243. A Reading from Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century
With PhD alumna Marilyn Nelson
(Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Marilyn Nelson, Herman Beavers, Dana Gioia, Robin Becker) Come celebrate this anthology offering a hundred examples of the sestina's versatility from poets of the Sixties to the present. Experience through this form and the editors' cogent commentary our fascination with Americana, and with politics, sex, love, hate, art, nature, memory, contemplation, and death. What shape does obsession take when run through the sestina's rigorous pattern? Contributing poets will read from the anthology and engage in discussion with the audience. 3-4:15 pm, Room 609, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

5 X Friday: MFA Candidate Scott F. Parker

Third-year Creative Writing Program nonfiction student Scott F. Parker this year won the Monkey Puzzle Press' prose chapbook contest with a slim collection entitled in here--authored, provocatively, by The Synthesis. The book itself declares that its inventive texts may be read as poetry, philosophy, or fiction but seek to be memoir. Chapters include "all criticism is autobiographical," which mashes together quotes from Parker's widely published book reviews, and "unanswered questions?" which features nearly four pages of them (favorite: "Why not . . . accept that it's time that uses you?"). As Patricia Weaver Francisco notes on the back cover, this is an intimate little book that despite (because of) its challenging form effectively communicates aspects of the writer's personality and interests as much if not more than a standard "I was born in XX and did XX" narrative. Parker has also published a runner's memoir (Running After Prefontaine), two musings on musical icons (Revisited: Notes on Bob Dylan and ME | EM: One Listener's Confession), and an edited volume of writings on coffee (Coffee - Philosophy for Everyone: Grounds for Debate). Read more.

1. What was your impetus for writing in here?
It started as a rebuttal to the idea that memoir must be the work of an "I" reckoning with the past. I wanted to experiment with writing against genre as a way of questioning the status of that "I" and other assumptions of the form but do so while still writing memoir.
2. When you write at the beginning, "There is memoir. There is not-memoir," how are you defining the latter? It's interesting that even seemingly "not-memoir" writing is quite revealing.
The first thing to say is that the form of the Reader's Note is borrowed from the tetralemma of Buddhist logic that you find in [second century Indian philosopher] Nagarjuna. Any proposition (here, "There is memoir") suggests three more cases: the negation ("There is not-memoir"); the affirmation of the proposition and the negation ("There is memoir and not-memoir"); and the negation of the proposition and negation ("There is neither memoir nor not-memoir"). As soon as you try to write memoir you become attuned to all the ways not-memoir encroaches on the simple reflective "I." The subjectivity of memory is the most obvious example here, but there are others, too, including the logic a text develops (whether narrative or something else) that inevitably shapes the material; any representation of experience is selective and limited--the interesting question for any given work of memoir is how. Typically memoirs begin on the solidest ground they can find and then try to find an artful way of handling the not-memoir they encounter. This book tries to work from the other direction and play around in the space of not-memoir first and end up as memoir only after, insofar as the proposition and its negation are inseparable.
When I write, for example, from the POV of someone who isn't me, it's always the narrative "I" imagining that POV, so even though the form isn't typical of memoir the result is the same. And it would have been so had I interviewed people instead of inventing their testimonies; still I would have selected, edited, framed, etc., and the same question would have been begged: What is the objective self? The book tries to dramatize the possibility that there isn't one even as the urge for one remains (or at least recurs intermittently). But the tension, I hope, isn't academic. As your question points out, it is an intimate and vulnerable-making work; at the same time, it's a somewhat aggressive one. The narrative presence of The Synthesis is relentless and doesn't leave a ton of space for the reader, even as the status of the writer-reader relationship is one of the book's primary concerns.
3. How did you come up with the form of in here? What if any role did your colleagues in the Creative Writing Program play?
One of the things I enjoy is things that are other things. Philosophy as literature, literature as philosophy, questions as answers, basketball as fountain, so the formal play is motivated in part by that. Can I write a list that is not just a list? Facts that are more than facts? Questions that . . . ? The final piece, "Me Too," is an older work. I wrote it when the wound of David Foster Wallace's suicide was still fresh in me, and part of the piece is a struggle to think about what kind of writer I want to be, what my relationship to literature is/will be, following the loss of one of my guiding lights. The rest I wrote about two years ago. There was no plan starting out, but pretty quickly I recognized that the anti-form approach was freeing me up to think about some of my interests in a way I couldn't have if I'd gone straight at them. Every time I finished one of the pieces I wanted to start another. Before long, I had a bunch and showed them to Victoria [Scher], Bridget [Mendel], and Flor [Lauria], who appear in the text reading and commenting on the text. Two or three other Creative Writing people appear in scene and/or in disguise.
4. Would you describe how your next publication, an edited volume of interviews with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey, came about?
Doing research for an essay I was working on about Kesey, I was looking for old interviews of his. This meant spending lots of time in the Anderson and Wilson Libraries going through archives and spinning through rolls of microfiche. This kind of research was new to me, and I enjoyed feeling scholarly, but I got to wondering why the interviews weren't already collected. I knew the University Press of Mississippi does their Literary Conversations series, so I wrote to them about doing a Kesey volume and they were pretty into it from the get-go.
5. What's next? Are the questions/conundrums you're confronting with in here changing how you write/structure the next memoir project?
I just edited a collection of essays about Eminem that should be out this fall. That was a fun project. I got to work with MFA alumnus Aaron Apps and two of my favorite rappers, Talib Kweli and Guante. It might be a stretch to connect that project to in here except that the complicated ways in which Eminem employs persona almost certainly influenced the formation of The Synthesis. But as for another memoir project, I'm working on something that's sort of an outgrowth of in here. It's too soon to know exactly what it is, but I'm having fun with it. Though in here has kind of a serious feel to it, the main thing I'm taking from it is a sense of playfulness, a reminder of how much fun it can be to play with words.
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5 X Friday: BA Alum Nadia Hasan

Nadia B. Hasan (BA 2002; JD 2006) braved her father's disappointment when she chose to major in English; he preferred pre-med or engineering. But her degree prepared her for the reading and analytic rigor of the University of Minnesota Law School and nine years thus far of law practice, first with Johnson & Condon, then Hinshaw & Culbertson, and since last summer in the Minneapolis office of Cozen O'Connor. These days, she notes with amusement, her dad claims he was the one who suggested English. Read more.

Faculty Receive Awards

Assistant professor Elaine Auyoung, who joined the department this past fall, has been named a Institute of Advanced Study fall 2014 Residential Fellow. Fellows work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas at the IAS offices. Auyoung's project is entitled "Missing Fiction: The Feeling of Realism." . . . Five English professors have received Imagine Fund Annual Faculty Awards, which support innovative research in the arts, design, and humanities. The professors and their projects are as follows: Dan Philippon, "Ideal Meals: Ecology, Morality, and Pleasure in the Sustainable Food Movement"; Paula Rabinowitz, "Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald"; Jani Scandura, "Proximity: A Case Study"; Katherine Scheil, "The Shakespeare Circle and Anne Hathaway Shakespeare"; and John Wright, "The Worlds of James McCune Smith: Science, Race Elevation, and the Brotherhood of Chess." Congratulations to all!

5 X Friday: BA Alumna Naomi Ko

How many first-time screen actors get to go to Sundance Film Festival with one of the buzziest films in competition? Naomi Ko (BA 2011) was busy January in Park City, Utah, with press interviews, brunches, luncheons, and parties around the acclaimed feature Dear White People (which was filmed on the U campus). Since graduating, Ko has acted and written for such local theaters as Mixed Blood, Theatre in the Round, Mu Performing Arts, and Bedlam. Last August, Ko heard from a theater producer she'd worked with, Jamil Jude, about movie auditions taking place the next day. Ko went, and she was the only cast member to win a principal role without an agent. The film follows four African American students at an East Coast private college. According to its director, Justin Simien, the film is "about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be." Though the Asian American experience has been well-represented in theater, says Ko, there's as yet no Asian American film equivalent to DWP. "I'm working on one," she promises. Read more.

Katherine Scheil Named Scholar of College

English professor Katherine Scheil has been named 2014 CLA Scholar of the College, an annual award celebrating outstanding achievement by faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes professors who have taken intellectual risks and whose work has had a significant impact on their field; Scholars of the College receive a stipend totaling $10,000 per year for three years to support their research or creative work. Scheil's most recent publication is She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America. She is working on a book about Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway. Congratulations!

5 X Friday: BA Alum Shae Moloney

When Shae Moloney (BA) graduated in 2012, she was aiming for a career as an editor and writer, but she hadn't explored where she might find such work. Within three months she had secured a job that included editing and writing. The field was unexpected: human resources. She admits to nervously anticipating beastly labor-management brawls. But these days you can find her waxing cheerfully (and knowledgeably) about Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) policy, surrounded by snarling and growling beasts of the actual, not figurative sort. Read more.