Professional Skills Workshops

The Department of English Graduate Studies is presenting two professional skills brownbag workshops this spring. The April 18 topic will be publishing: how to send an article to a journal, how to pick a journal, how to decipher a reader's report, how long to wait for a response, how to turn a dissertation into a book. On May 7, the workshop will address fellowships and grants--both internal fellowships (like the DDF) and external fellowships--providing information about how to write a winning proposal, where to find fellowships, etc. Both noon in 207A. Soda and coffee provided.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Tina Karelson

The path from English into a career in advertising is one an increasing number of English majors make. It makes sense: As ad campaign creator Tina Karelson (MA '95, English; BA '85, English and journalism) notes, a copywriter or creative director has to think analytically about creative work, and write well--which pretty much defines the primary skills learned in English. Karelson is President of Creative (what Don Draper does) at Risdall Advertising Agency in New Brighton, Minnesota's seventh oldest advertising agency and, according to a 2013 Business Journal ranking, its seventh largest. This spring Karelson was honored as a CLA Alumna of Notable Achievement. Learn what she thinks of Mad Men. . . .

5 X Friday: BA Alum May Lee-Yang

When May Lee-Yang (BA 2006) signed up for a class on Asian American drama from Professor Josephine Lee, "I didn't think of myself as a theater person," she says. Two years ago, she received a prestigious Bush Leadership Fellowship to begin planning the creation of a theater focusing on Hmong American stories. In between, she's written plays and performance art pieces produced at Mu Performing Arts, Intermedia Arts, and the Fringe Festival and was a two-time winner of the Playwright Center Many Voices Fellowship. She still thinks of herself as a "memoirist who makes a living doing theater." In the meantime, she's writing another play. What about? Read on. . . .

Pistelli Defense

On Friday, May 3, Doctoral candidate John Pistelli will defend his dissertation "Modernism's Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925," as directed by Dr. Lois Cucullu. All are welcome for the public portion of the defense from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm in Lind Hall 207A.

5 X Friday: English Major Matthew McGuire

Matthew McGuire is a senior English and Philosophy double major who will publish a short story in the new issue of Ivory Tower, celebrated with a launch party Wednesday, April 24, from 7-10 pm in the Whole Music Club. The U's undergraduate literary and art magazine, Ivory Tower is edited and produced by students in a year-long English class. McGuire was a fiction editor for Ivory Tower last year, and his story "Silence Is Sexy" was accepted through this year's blind submission process. How does he begin writing something? "I get most of my story ideas from conversations with friends or bits of speech I overhear in public," he reveals. "Most pieces start with a voice, and then I try to experiment until I find something that works." Interview by Natalia Petkovich, originally for the Ivory Tower website. More...



1. Who are your favorite authors?
David Foster Wallace was my first exposure to difficult literature, and he remains my favorite. Ben Marcus, David Markson, Jena Osman, and Zachary Schomburg top my contemporary list. As far as the canon goes, I like William Gaddis, Ralph Ellison, Emily Bronté, Thomas Hardy, and Samuel Beckett. I think no one comes close to Kafka and the way his stories work. There's a British author, Stephen Gilbert, who wrote a brilliant book called The Ratman Notebooks.
2. Name a fictional character who you despise.
Walter Berglund from Freedom gets under my skin. He represents a lot of what I don't like in fiction: obvious social criticism, lack of genuine human relationships, misogyny masquerading as feminism.
3. "Silence is Sexy" has a unique style--it's all dialogue. What inspired you to write this story?
It came from a friend's complaint about his relationship. He claimed to have trouble sleeping next to another person because of the extra body heat. My goal with the story was to completely eliminate anything that could indicate character, gender, names, age, etc. What was surprising to me was when I showed the piece to some trusted readers, everyone agreed on the genders of the speakers.
4. You were a fiction editor for the 2012 edition of Ivory Tower. What did you learn by being in that class?
Working on Ivory Tower taught me a lot, mainly that I don't have what it takes to be an editor. It was extremely difficult for me to reject pieces without having the necessary space and time to explain why the pieces didn't work or fit with a certain theme. Thankfully, the other members of the staff helped me make the tough decisions.
5. You're stuck on a desert island. You get three books, two movies, and one iPod that can play only one song. What do you bring?
Books: a collection of Kafka stories, a condensed OED, and Infinite Jest. Movies: Melancholia and Salò. Song: "Nobody's Wounded" by Deine Lakaien or "Love Less" by New Order.

Job Placement Meeting

The final academic job placement meeting will be on Thursday, May 2, from 2-3:30 pm in Lind Hall 207A. At the meeting Professor Josephine Lee will talk about the general principles of applying for academic jobs in English. If you are planning to go on market this coming year, please plan on attending. Graduate students at all stages of degree progress are welcome.

5 X Friday: MFA Candidate Elisabeth Workman

For the second year in a row, writers in our graduate programs are publishing books while still students here, which is fairly amazing. Next week, in a 3 pm reading April 15, we celebrate three MFA candidates with books out or forthcoming: third-year Aaron Apps, who published Compos(t) Mentis (BlazeVOX) last fall; second-year Carrie Lorig, who will publish the chapbook nods. with Magic Helicopter Press in May and the chapbook prizePosession with Housefire Books this summer; and second-year Elisabeth Workman. Workman will publish her debut collection ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND, in 2014 with Bloof Books. What is she feeling about that? "Ecstatic relief. (I've been holding it for so long and now can finally let it go.) And the ecstasy is that it's been embraced/accepted by my first choice for a home for the manuscript--the superlative Bloof Books." Workman, a native of suburban Philadelphia, has already authored several chapbooks. MFA candidate Nicky Tiso asks Workman the requisite five questions.

1. Did you submit any other places besides Bloof? What advice have you for people looking to get published?
Thanks to grant funding, I was able to submit to more than several book contests, which made me feel slightly dubious. The manuscript was short-listed with several presses, which was reassuring, I suppose, but I would encourage people to pursue the presses that are feeding their hunger. What are the books that land their tentacles all over and through you and won't let go? Which books make you a crazy writing zombie? Who publishes them? For me, that was Bloof.
2. Did those previous grants/fellowships help enable you to write this book?
YES. Funding from the Jerome Foundation allowed me to pursue a mentorship with Sharon Mesmer and travel to NYC to meet her and do a reading at Zinc Bar with the women of Flarf; support from the Minnesota State Arts Board afforded me the means to isolate and hide out in a cabin for two weeks when I was 30 weeks pregnant and finish poems for the manuscript; and the McKnight Fellowship meant I could finalize the manuscript, send it out, work on new projects, and not have to return to work full-time after I had my baby.
3. You've published a chapbook, MEGAPRAIRIELAND. Is ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND conceived of as a sequel?
It's an expansion of it, an ultra-izing of the mega-ness, with more spectacle and parades and rabid revisionist histories.
4. Were your chapbooks self-published or did you have a publisher for them?
Grey Book Press published MEGAPRAIRIELAND; it was selected through their first open reading period/chapbook "contest," judged by Sandra Simonds and GBP editor Scott Sweeney. My other three chapbooks were published through the Dusie Kollektiv at the invitation of Susana Gardner, which proved to be, not only an exciting alternative to rote publishing patriarchies, but more--an exciting and generative international poetry community.
5. Books that have really influenced your writing?
E: There are so many. For this project, in particular:
*Disobedience, by Alice Notley
*The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Kevin Davies
*Warsaw Bikini, Sandra Simonds
*Deed, Rod Smith
*The Romance of Happy Workers, Anne Boyer
*I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism), Bruce Andrews
*the work, in general, of Sharon Mesmer and Nada Gordon and Elizabeth Bachinsky and K. Silem Mohammad and Christian Bök
*and lodged willy-nilly in my psyche, Titus Andronicus; Helen Adam; Keats; the Wife of Bath (she was gap-toothed, too); Tristan Tzara; and not least Lewis Carroll
More questions and a sample poem.
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