Monday Missive

Sustaining a Sense of Community — This past weekend, my wife (Nancy) participated in her 40th class reunion at Davidson College.  The class of 1977 holds a special place in the history of Davidson College, for it was the first class to include a cohort of women students.  As a member of this class, Nancy has long felt a deep-seated bond with the other members of the class of ’77 and especially with the other women who transformed Davidson College into a coeducational institution.

The reunion lasted for three days and concluded with a dinner on Saturday.  I joined Nancy for the dinner, and I watched with a tinge of envy the interactions of this group of former classmates.  They clearly cared for each other. They asked with sincere interest about what everyone had been up to since they last saw each other.  They celebrated as a group the various accomplishments of the members of their class.  As an outsider looking in, I could tell that these people shared a genuine sense of community.

Franconia College From Main Street, Open in 1963

Like Nancy, I graduated from a small college in the mid-1970s.  My alma mater, Franconia College, was one of a handful of experimental colleges from the 1960s and ’70s, but it closed a few years after I graduated.  As a result, there are no regularly scheduled reunions or institutional structures to help former students stay in touch with one another.  As a graduate of Franconia College, I have no sense of belonging to a larger extended community of former classmates.  I thought about such matters during the dinner on Saturday.

Fretwell building, UNC Charlotte

However, before I started feeling too sorry for myself, I realized that I, too, belong to an extended community of colleagues who care for each other, who take a sincere interest in the lives of one another, and who celebrate the successes of everyone in the community.  This community is called the English Department.  Like the members of the Davidson class of 1977, the members of the English Department value and make an effort to sustain the sense of community that binds us together.

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:

Bryn Chancellor’s new novel, Sycamore, was selected for O: The Oprah Magazine’s “20 Books of Summer” at #7; it also was chosen for the June Indie Next List and featured in reading recommendation lists in Glamour, Bustle, and the New York Post. She also published an essay, “How to Write Suspense,” in Publisher’s Weekly.

Boyd Davis recently published a chapter titled “Other Interviewing Techniques in Sociolinguistics” in Mallinson, Childs, van Herk, eds., Data Collection in Sociolinguistics,  2^nd edn. NY: Routledge, 114-117. https://sociolinguisticdatacollection.com/2017/03/03/welcome/

She also delivered a presentation titled “Combining Corpora and Collaboration at Two Ends of the Spectrum: Enhancing Language and Social Interaction for Nonverbal Youth with Special Needs and for Cognitively Impaired Older Persons” as the Faculty Colloquium, Speech Pathology/Special Education, National Kaohsiung Normal University, May 2017.

Paula Eckard recently learned that her latest book, Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature, as been nominated for the 2017 Ragan Old North Award presented by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.

Allison Hutchcraft has been awarded a residency from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, where she will be a resident for the Spring 2018 semester. The Sitka Center, located on the Oregon coast, was founded in 1970 and hosts writers, artists, musicians, and scientists whose work often engages with nature and the environment.

Jen Munroe participated in the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS) Conference at UNCC (June 5-7); at the conference, Jen lead the graduate student symposium, an all-day event on June 5.

Quirky Quiz Question — From its founding in 1837 until the 1970s, Davidson College admitted only male students (with a few unusual exceptions), but the times have changed.  Now Davidson College has its first female president.  Does anybody know that name of the woman who currently serves as the president of Davidson College?

Last week’s answer: Tom Reynolds

The Charlotte Research Scholars Program is sponsored by the UNC Charlotte’s Graduate School.  Does anybody know the name of the current Dean of the Graduate School? 

I am very pleased that the English Department is so well represented in the Charlotte Research Scholars Program.  For more information about this program, please click on the following link: http://graduateschool.uncc.edu/deans-office/partnerships-and-initiatives/charlotte-research-scholars

Quirky Quiz Question — The Charlotte Research Scholars Program is sponsored by the UNC Charlotte’s Graduate School.  Does anybody know the name of the current Dean of the Graduate School?

Last week’s answer: Charleston

Angie’s Aunt Lou grew up in West Virginia, and she will be buried in Montgomery, West Virginia.  One of the major cities in West Virginia has the same name as a major city in South Carolina.  In this tale of two cities, what is the name that these cities have in common?

Award-Winning Educators — Our English Department has a long and distinguished history of preparing future public school teachers and administrators.  Once such former student is Tisha Greene, who received both her BA in English and her MA in English Education from our department.   She is currently the principal of  the Oakhurst STEAM Academy, and she has just received the 2017 Outstanding Administrator Award from the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center.  The news of this award comes just a year after Bobbie Cavnar, another of our former graduate students, was named the North Carolina Teacher of the Year.    For more information about Tisha Greene’s award, please click on the the following link:  http://inside.uncc.edu/news-features/2017-05-17/university-alumna-cms-principal-named-outstanding-administrator

Meghan Barnes, our incoming assistant professor in English Education, has also just received a major award for teaching.  The University of Georgia, where Meghan has just completed her Ph.D., presented her with their 2017 Graduate School Excellence in Teaching Award.  She received the award on April 17, 2017, at their Faculty Recognition Banquet.   I am proud of Meghan for receiving this award, and I am very pleased that she will be joining our English Department in the fall.

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:

Paula Eckard recently presented a paper titled “Thomas Wolfe, Hurricane Katrina, and Lost Children in Southern Literature” at the Thomas Wolfe Conference in Indianapolis.

Sara Eudy, a new student in our MA program, was recently awarded the William C. Johnson Distinguished Scholarship from Sigma Tau Delta. The writing sample she submitted was based on the honors thesis she wrote under Kirk Melnikoff’s direction last semester.

Sarah Minslow recently published a chapter titled “The Diary of a Young Girl and Children’s Literature of Atrocity in Critical Insights:  The Diary of a Young Girl, co-edited by Pnina Rosenberg and Ruth Amir.  Sarah also recently gave an invited lecture titled “The Holocaust and Genocide Today” to the 7th grade at Kannapolis Middle School.

Jen Munroe was an invited participant at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s EMMO (Early Modern Manuscripts Online) conference (May 17-19, 2017) in Washington, DC, where she presented a talk titled, “EMROC (Early Modern Recipes Online Collective): Connecting Research Communities, Connected Classrooms.”  She was also an invited speaker at the UNC Charlotte Faculty Sustainability Workshop last week (May 16) and gave a talk titled “Teaching Sustainability and Humanities.”

Alan Rauch presented a paper titled “Italian Boys:  The Figurinai of Italy and London” at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference held in Florence, Italy.

Quirky Quiz Question — Tisha Greene is the principal of  the Oakhurst STEAM Academy.  What does STEAM stand for in this context?

Last week’s answer: Will Shortz

Margaret Farrer was the first New York Times crossword editor.  Does anybody know the name of the paper’s current crossword editor?

Margaret Farrer

Playing with Words — My wife, Nancy, always starts her day by working the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.  A few days ago, she mentioned to me that President Bill Clinton created that day’s puzzle.  I asked her if there was any particular reason that the New York Times published a puzzle by President Clinton, and she informed me that it was part of the paper’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of featuring crosswords.

Nancy is much better at working crossword puzzles than I am, but I still appreciate the pleasure that comes from playing with words.  Many years ago, I tried my hand at creating my own crossword puzzles.  They all focused on authors.  I even had one of them published in a newspaper called In These Times.  My published puzzle focused on the American writer Theodore Dreiser.   I enjoyed the process of trying to come up with actual words or phrases that interconnected with the other words I wanted to include in the puzzle.  I ended up scanning the dictionary trying to find words that ended with odd combinations of letters.  Why would this be fun?  I don’t know why, but I had fun doing it.

Of course, wordplay involves much more than crossword puzzles.  Two of our colleagues have delved into the ways in which authors and poets engage in word play in their publications.  Ralf Thiede is doing research on how Dr. Seuss’s creation of words reflects a deep understanding of the inner workings of language and the development of children’s language skills.  Sarah Minslow is interested in how Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll used wordplay to make fun of authority figures.

As I see it, taking pleasure in playing with words is one of the ways in which humans celebrate the amazing malleability of language.

Hearing Voices — In our teaching and scholarship, we often refer to a writer’s voice, but in the case of Maya Socolovsky’s Trauma in Literature class (Engl 4050) her students literally experienced the voice of an author.   On the last day of class, Maya Skyped in one of the authors covered in the class during the semester–Himilce Novas, author of Princess Papaya.  She talked with the students for over an hour, asking them questions, encouraging them to speak about their own creative writing process, and answering questions about her novel that they studied. As Maya told me, “It was a great opportunity to have the author’s input on a difficult and understudied novel.”

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:

Jen Munroe recently posted a new blog titled “Depending on the Season” on the Recipes Project website.  Here is the link to her latest blog post: http://recipes.hypotheses.org/9303

Maya Socolovsky presented a paper titled “Resisting the Call to Hate (Again): Borderland Ethics and the Polity of Belonging in 21st Century Chicano Picture Books” at MIT, as part of the 2017 Society for Multi Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) annual conference.

Quirky Quiz Question — Margaret Farrer was the first New York Times crossword editor.  Does anybody know the name of the paper’s current crossword editor?

Last week’s answer: Carlo Collodi

Does anybody know who wrote Pinocchio?

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?