Mark West

Puppeteer, Dr. Mark West, with “Big Mouth” the alligator

Spanning the Generations — This past Saturday, I performed a puppet show for the children’s part of our Center City Literary Festival.  As I assembled the stage, took my marionettes out of their box, and tried to remember the show’s dialogue, I realized that 40 years had elapsed since I launched my puppetry career.

I was in my early 20s at the time and living in Madison, Wisconsin.  Like Geppetto from Pinocchio, I took an interest in carving marionettes from wood.  After designing and carving a half dozen marionettes, I decided to try my hand at performing.  I built a stage, making sure that it wasn’t too big to fit in my decrepit VW Beetle.  I then wrote a show called “The Kangaroo’s Tail,” the very same show that I performed at the Center City Literary Festival, and I started doing shows at libraries, schools, day care centers, and birthday parties.  I eventually wrote several more shows and began doing some television work.  Now I am in my early 60s, and my son is currently the same age that I was when I made my living as a puppeteer.

During my performance on Saturday, I felt as if I were traveling back in time.  I not only reconnected with a part of my personal history, but I also reconnected with the ancient art of puppetry.  I am pretty sure that I am the only member of the English Department with puppetry connections, but I am certainly not the only one whose work involves the spanning of generations.  Our linguists span countless generations when they teach students about the origins and evolution of language.  Our faculty teach courses on the history of the book and the changing nature of communication technologies.  Our literature faculty members cover the history of literary traditions and the development of genres.  Our creative writing faculty members help students make creative use of their memories of past events.  In many ways, this type of time travel is how culture is created and perpetuated.

At the end of my performance on Saturday, I brought out my alligator marionette whose name is Big Mouth.  I asked the children if they wanted Big Mouth to bite their fingers, and they all said yes.  As Big Mouth interacted with each child in the audience (and some parents, too), I had a sense that the children were connecting in a tangible way with a character, with a story, and with a cultural tradition that spans many generations.  It seemed like magic to me.​

Kudos — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.  Here is the latest news:

Beth Gargano recently gave the following two presentations  at the Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in Baltimore:  “The Commonplace Book in the Wilderness: Embedded Narrative in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley” and “The Male Gaze in the Girls’ Garden: Interrogating Masculinity in Bronte’s The Professor.”

Eileen Jakaway, one of our honors students, received a Ertegun Scholarship to study at Oxford University.  Please click on the following link for more information:
https://exchange.uncc.edu/scholar-to-conduct-humanities-research-with-rare-ertegun-scholarship/

Quirky Quiz Question — Does anybody know who wrote Pinocchio?

Last week’s answer: Adam Savage

In teaching her graduate class on the history of modern science writing, Heather Vorhies drew inspiration from an experiment televised on a program called MythBusters.  One of the original hosts of this program was Jamie Hyneman.  Does anybody know the name of the other original host?

This spirit of engagement is reflected in many of the activities that the members of our department regularly perform, including volunteering.  Angie, for example, volunteered during UNC Charlotte’s Week of Volunteering. She assisted Second Harvest Food Bank putting together backpacks of food for Charlotte area schools. The backpacks are provided to children in need for the weekends. There are also countless examples of how our faculty members engage their students in the learning process.  For example, Heather Vorhies recently had the students in English 6008: History of Modern Science Writing conduct their own set of Diet Coke and Mentos experiments inspired by the Discovery Channel show MythBusters.  As part of this project, Heather had her students read Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry (1817), and traced the advent of contemporary popular science and its format to Marcet’s work in the early nineteenth century.  Below is a MP4 video of one of the experiments.

In addition to being an excellent teaching assistant, Peter Fields is also a talented athlete.  During his undergraduate days at UNC Charlotte, Peter was a member of one of the university’s athletic teams. What team was he a member of?

Our Students’ Winning Ways — Last Friday was a remarkable day for many of the students associated with the English Department.  Not only were 25 of our students recognized at our annual Student Awards Ceremony, but a number of our students achieved recognition at two other events that also took place on Friday.

Peter Fields

During an awards ceremony sponsored by the Graduate School, Peter Fields received the Graduate School’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for his teaching in the University Writing Program.  Peter is completing his M.A. in English and has taught in the University Writing Program for two years.

The Undergraduate Research Conference also took place on Friday, and nine of our honors students participated in this prestigious event.  Three of these students received awards at the conference.  Rachel West won the departmental award for English and was mentored in her research on Twitter in the recent election by Liz Miller.  Sara Eudy won an Honors College award for her research on black cultural theater performances (and choices to produce or not to produce Shakespeare) and was mentored by Kirk Melnikoff.  Thomas Simonson won the Atkins Library Research award for his research on moving beyond the East/West binary in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red and was mentored by Juan Meneses.  Recognition also goes to Shelby LeClair (mentor Sarah Minslow), Kelly Brabec (who participated as a junior and presented work from Janaka Lewis’s Honors Seminar), Hannah Brown (mentor Lara Vetter), Rozie Khashmanian (mentor Ralf Thiede), Victoria White (mentor Mark West), and Christina Ward (another junior mentored by Heather Vorhies) for representing the department well at the conference.

Kudos — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.  Here is the latest news:

Jessie Cortez, one of our M.A. students, presented a paper titled “If You CAN Stand the Heat: Exploring the Rhetoric of Cookbooks as Women Have Entered the Workforce” at the UNC Greensboro English Graduate Student Association conference in March.

Carissa Wilbanks, one of our honors undergraduates, has accepted an offer with full funding from the Ph.D. in literature program at the University of Arizona.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is information about an upcoming event.

April 25 — Alexis Pauline Gumbs will read new work on Tuesday, April 25 at 12:30 pm in Fretwell 205.  A signing and meet and greet will also be open to the campus community in Fretwell 290B at 1:30pm.

Quirky Quiz Question — In addition to being an excellent teaching assistant, Peter Fields is also a talented athlete.  During his undergraduate days at UNC Charlotte, Peter was a member of one of the university’s athletic teams. What team was he a member of?

Last week’s answer: Wrightsville Beach

Chris Davis’s poem “Shell Island” relates to a beach just east of Wilmington, NC.  Some people think it is named after Orville and Wilbur Wright, but it is not.  What is the name of this beach?

National Poetry Month Meets Earth Day —

April is National Poetry Month, and April 22 is Earth Day. As I see it, these two celebrations not only overlap in terms of time, but they also speak to each other in meaningful ways. Since ancient times poets have been inspired by the natural world. Many of today’s poets also write about nature and the relationship between humans and the natural world. Three such poets are Christopher Davis, Allison Hutchcraft, and Grace Ocasio, all of whom teach poetry in our creative writing program. I contacted Chris, Allison and Grace and asked them to share one of their poems that relates to Earth Day. Here are the poems that they sent to me:

Excerpt from “Shell Island” by Christopher Davis

It’s weathered subject matter, this boutique hotel,
a revamped Holiday Inn at the end of a sand bar

pulled this way and that, eroded by wind, rain,
currents, tides flooding the inland waterway.

To restore expensive real estate, bulldozers
added three thousand more feet of beach

a little to the north, destroying habitats
for plovers, black flyers, sanderlings.

White water fowl wings
skim breaking waves.

“Shell Island” originally appeared in December in 2016.

Two excerpts from “Out the Birds, Out” by Allison Hutchcraft. This poem looks to the ways in which invasive species brought by humans irrevocably changed the ecosystems of the dodo’s home, what is now the country of Mauritius, contributing to the bird’s quick extinction:

Now the hogs keep hogging
all the fruit.
The rats swing
like bats from the trees,
the monkeys

eating everything green.

The poem also addresses the transition between the original environmental conditions before colonialists landed on the island and after:

For years: a coco-tree,
a rotted branch,
a lyre of weeds.
Then those pigs—
voracious,

flattening the grass,
sending their snouts
into daybreak,
your home, uncovered,
nested.

“Out the Birds, Out” originally appeared in the Kenyon Review in 2015.

“Great-Aunt Ruby” by Grace Ocasio

Could it be your rant was not meant for me but for shadows tugging at your sleeves?
Paddy rollers you might have dreamed––your mind consumed by the vision of you
as Negress––petticoated, shifted, and jacketed during slavery?

I always believed your words could overturn injustice like a mother
right siding an upside-down child.

The smile you wore most days was crooked as a broken hook-and-eye door latch,
but I sought you out anyway, implored your hands to tell secrets of your girlhood
in South Carolina.

Did you seek shelter in brooks near your childhood home?
Could brooks offset flickers of white hands dismissing you
when you entered five-and-dimes?

After you departed my home, I kept your wash basin, perhaps to begin an ablution
of our past, a way to untap our trickly connection
until it teemed, fertile as a rain forest.

I wanted to consult you like an older sister, wrap my arms around you,
as though you were a live oak, infuse your sap into my veins.
At times, your glare uprooted my heart, turned its soil to soot.

But then, I discovered your artful tongue’s stories of how you apprenticed
under Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, groomed students to hammer tent poles
in front of courthouses, mechanics’ shops, ice cream parlors.

The day you left my home for the hospital I found the pixie-girl photo of you.
The pixels of your eyes shined tawny-olive as a wood thrush.

Those days you lived with me, I sunk your red clay deep into my nails,
inhaled, never exhaled it, spread your loam all over my skin
like a lotion that never expires.

“Great-Aunt Rudy” originally appeared in Poetry South in 2016.

Kudos — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department. Here is the latest news:

Nadia Clifton, an M.A. candidate with a concentration in literature, has accepted the offer of admission from UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. In August, she will begin an M.S. in Library Science, specializing in Archives and Records Management.

Katie Hogan delivered an invited talk at the annual colloquium for the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program at George Mason University on April 13, 2017. Katie’s talk, “Complicit: On Being a WGSS Director in the Neoliberal University,” resonates with the colloquium’s 2016-17 theme, “State of the University.” A GMU doctoral student conducted an interview with Katie. Also, Katie has just received a courtesy appointment to the graduate faculty at Oregon State University so that she can work with a Ph.D. student at OSU.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is information about upcoming events.

Feb. 21 — The English Department meeting will take place on April 21 from 11:00 to 12:30 in Atkins 125.

Feb. 21 — The English Department’s Student Award Ceremony will take place on April 21 from 12:30 to 2:00 in the Dale Halton Reading Room in the Atkins Library.

Quirky Quiz Question — Chris Davis’s poem “Shell Island” relates to a beach just east of Wilmington, NC. Some people think it is named after Orville and Wilbur Wright, but it is not. What is the name of this beach?

Last week’s answer: Shakespeare

John McNair was one of the first professors in the English Department to deal with science in his teaching and scholarship.  However, his academic specialty was in a completely different area.  Does anybody remember John McNair’s academic specialty?

Sigma Tau Delta News — The 2017 Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society Convention took place in Louisville, Kentucky, from March 29 through April 1under the theme of “Recreation,” and UNC Charlotte students represented the English Department well.  On Thursday, Thomas Simonson, Chelsea Moore, Sara Eudy, Kelly Brabec, and Maria Lignos presented a panel that they proposed on Recreation of African American Female Identities.  On Friday morning, Carissa Wilbanks presented “Queer Utopian Potential in Literary Studies” on a panel called “Making Space for Queer Theory.”  On Saturday morning (bright and early at 8 am), Thomas, Sara, Carissa, and Shelby LeClair presented papers on a roundtable that they proposed called “The Candidacy of Gender: 2016 Presidential Election,” and that afternoon Tayler Green read “Orpheus and Eurydice” on an original fiction panel at the same time that Thomas presented “Trethewey’s Reclaiming & Reimagining of Race” on a “Poets Recreating America” panel.  Rachel West and Hannah Brown also represented our chapter at panels and events, which included author readings and keynotes by Marlon James and others, workshops, and the Sigma Con cosplay and literary trivia night (where our team advanced to the second round but not to the finals).

The National Endowment for the Humanities was signed into law in 1965.  Can you name the president who signed this legislation?

Celebrating Our Part-Time Faculty Members — This weekend I received an email from Paula Martinac informing me that her new novel, The Ada Decades, has just been published Bywater Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  After congratulating her on this significant publication, I asked her for more information about her novel.  She responded by sharing with me what she calls her “elevator speech.”  The Ada Decades, she wrote,”is a historical novel-in-stories that looks at the intersections of race, class, and LGBT experience in the life of one North Carolina woman over seven decades. It takes place mostly in Charlotte.”  She also informed me that there will be a reading and book celebration on Wed., April 26 at 7 p.m. at Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts, 1817 Central Avenue and all are welcome to attend.

The publication of Paula’s novel underscores for me what a talented and dedicated group of part-time faculty members we have in the English Department.  I know that many administrators refer to such part-time faculty members as “adjunct faculty,” but I don’t like or use this term.  My old copy of the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines adjunct as “something joined or added to another but not essentially a part of it.”  As I see it, our part-time faculty members are an essential part of our English Department.  Our part-time faculty members teach core courses in creative writing, technical and professional writing, children’s literature, literature surveys, general education, pedagogy, introductory linguistics, to name just some of the different types of courses that they cover on a regular basis.  Our part-time faculty members regularly publish as is reflected in the publication of Paula’s novel.  Our part-time faculty frequently participate in department events and projects.  Our part-time faculty members might not teach on a full-time basis, but they are hardly adjuncts to the department.

Kudos — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.  Here is the latest news:

Kevin Chauncey, one of our graduate students, presented a paper at the SouthEastern Conference on Linguistics titled “The Effects of Stereotype Threat/Awareness on Accommodation in Turn-Taking Conversations.”

Sarah Minslow facilitated two workshops for North Carolina educators at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching last Saturday. The workshops were on using children’s literature to teach the Holocaust and contemporary conflict.
Ralf Thiede presented a paper at the SouthEastern Conference on Linguistics in Charleston titled “Baby Chomsky vs. Baby Aristotle: The Acquisition of Speech Sounds,” reconciling two opposing theories of language acquisition in cognitive science and linguistics. At the meeting, he assumed the presidency of SECOL for a two-year term.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is information about an upcoming event.

March 21–  The next Personally Speaking Series event will take at 6:30 p.m.Tuesday, Mar. 21, at UNC Charlotte Center City.  Peter Thorsheim will give a presentation based on his book titled Waste into Weapons:  Recycling in Britain During the Second World War (Cambridge University Press).

The event is free, but registration is ​​​requested.  (Register) A reception will follow. Complimentary parking is available at 422 E. 9th St. across Brevard from the Center City building. Information will be emailed about how to obtain a parking pass. This is the final Personally Speaking event of 2016-17​, and t​he books and authors for the 2017-18 season will be announced.

​Personally Speaking is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, J. Murrey Atkins Library and UNC Charlotte Center City. For more information, visit exchange.uncc.edu.

Quirky Quiz Question — Paula Martinac’s new novel is published by Bywater Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  In addition to being the home of Bywater Books, Ann Arbor was home to famous chain of bookstores that once rivaled Barnes and Nobel.  What is the name of this now defunct bookstore chain?

Last week’s answer: And To Think That I saw It On Mulberry Street.

At this year’s Seuss-a-Thon, Anita Moss read Dr. Seuss’s first book for children.  What is the title of this book?

A Community of Scholars — As a member of our English Department, I highly value the many opportunities I have to learn from my colleagues.  I often read scholarship by members of the department, and I always enjoy the discussions that I have with faculty members about their current research projects.  I also enjoy hearing scholarly presentations by members of our department, and I always learn from these presentations.  It is not often that I have the opportunity to hear three such presentations in the span of three days, but that is exactly what happened last week.

My cornucopia of presentations started on February 22 with Alan Rauch’s talk titled “Fantastic Beasts and Why You Find Them.”  Alan tied his talk to the traveling Harry Potter exhibit that the Atkins Library hosted last semester, but he talked about much more than the animals in the Harry Potter stories.  One of his points that stuck with me involved the ways in which we as humans project aspects of ourselves onto animals.

Two days after Alan’s talk, Jen Munroe gave a presentation titled “Shakespeare, Ecofeminism, and the Power of the Not-Yet-Known.”  Among the topics that Jen addressed was the portrayal of non-humans in Shakespeare’s plays.  As I listened to Jen’s talk, I began drawing connections between her talk and Alan’s talk.  I realized that both Jen and Alan had a lot to say about humans’ attitudes toward the natural world.

An hour after Jen’s talk, Maya Socolovsky gave the keynote speech at the 4th Annual Graduate Student Colloquium on Children’s Literature sponsored by the Children’s Literature Graduate Organization.  Titled “Running, Reading and Writing:  Material Literacies in Mexican American Children’s Picture Books,” Maya’s talk focused on a picture book about a girl from one of the indigenous groups in Mexico.  This girl is living in the United States, but she continues to embrace her native culture.  In her talk, Maya explained how this picture book captures the cultural and political tensions in this girl’s life as she faces a system that seeks to control rather than understand.  In some ways, Alan, Jen and Maya all touched on the issue of how many people from dominant cultures seek to control those who are defined as “other.”

The experience of attending these three faculty presentations last week underscored for me that we are much more than a collection of academics housed in the same building.  In a very real way, we share our research, we learn from one another, and we support one another in our research endeavors.  We are truly a community of scholars.

Kudos — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.  Here is the latest news:

Boyd Davis gave a co-authored poster/presentation titled “The Carolinas Conversations Collection: Pragmatic Spaces in Pauses, Prepositions and Reported Speech” at the Corpora for Aging, Language and Research 3, Freie Universität Berlin, 6 March 2017.

Sam Shapiro recently published a book review of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo in the Charlotte Observer.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines— Here is information about an upcoming event.

March 4 — The English Department and Park Road Books are co-sponsoring the annual Seuss-a-Thon on Saturday, March 4, from 11:00 to 3:00 at Park Road Books (4139 Park Road).  This event will involve people reading their favorite Dr. Seuss books aloud to children.

Quirky Quiz Question — In his presentation on “fantastic beasts,” Alan Rauch discussed a “real” fantastic animal that combines the bill of an aquatic bird with the body of a mammal.  As he explained, the first zoologists who examined specimens of this animal initially thought it was a hoax.  What is the name of this animal?

Last week’s answer: Who killed his neighbor’s dog.

In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the central character is investigating a crime.  What is the crime that he is investigating?