5 X Friday: Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether

Twenty years ago, Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether wrote and shepherded the proposal for the MFA in Creative Writing through various levels of University approval so the Program could begin granting the degree in 1996. What about the MFA Program is she most proud of? "The accomplishments of our graduates," she answers quickly. "The proof is in the pudding." The growing number of alumnae/i publications parallels the feverish output of Creative Writing Program faculty: This spring, Professor Sprengnether publishes (and reads from--see listing below) both a memoir, Great River Road (New Rivers), and a prose poetry collection, Near Solstice (Holy Cow!). What does this all have to do with lab research on memory? Read on.

5 X Friday: English Major Mason Nunemaker

Senior English major Mason Nunemaker is a poetry editor for our annual undergraduate literary arts journal Ivory Tower, created by students in a two-semester English magazine production class. According to Nunemaker, this year's content has just been finalized (from over 600 student submissions!). "I'm very excited to see how the pieces all converse with each other," he reports, "especially across the different genres of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art." A poet himself, Nunemaker won a poetry award from the University's Steven J. Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies awards program, and he's also an officer for USlam, the U's spoken word poetry team. How does he see printed and performance poetry differing? Read on.

5 X Friday: Associate Professor Dan Philippon

In the last three years, Associate Professor Dan Philippon has researched and taught in Germany, Italy, and France, buoyed by a Fulbright and a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. The travel has widened his thinking about food writing and the sustainable food movement, subject of his current research. "Although my specialty will always be American environmental literature, I can't think in isolation anymore," reports Professor Philippon, who serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. "Now, when I think of American writers, it is always in a global context. And when I think of global processes, like climate change, I think of their effects on particular places and particular people--like the Italian rice grower I met, whose paddies depend on meltwater from the Alps." How does that book-in-progress involve Alice Waters, Wendell Berry . . . and a certain Italian rice grower? Read on.

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.

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: 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.

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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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.