{"id":1108,"date":"2017-06-13T10:10:22","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T14:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=1108"},"modified":"2017-06-13T10:10:22","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T14:10:22","slug":"monday-missive-june-13-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2017\/06\/13\/monday-missive-june-13-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Missive – June 13, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sustaining a Sense of Community<\/strong>\u00a0— This past weekend, my wife (Nancy) participated in her 40th class reunion at Davidson College.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The reunion lasted for three days and concluded with a dinner\u00a0on Saturday.\u00a0 I joined Nancy for the dinner, and I watched with a tinge of envy the interactions of this group of former classmates.\u00a0 They clearly cared for each other. They asked with sincere interest about what everyone had been up to since they last saw each other.\u00a0 They celebrated as a group the various accomplishments of the members of their class.\u00a0 As an outsider looking in, I could tell that these people shared a genuine sense of community.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Franconia College From Main Street, Open in 1963<\/p><\/div>\n

Like Nancy, I graduated from a small college in the mid-1970s.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a result, there are no regularly scheduled reunions or institutional structures to help former students stay in touch with one another.\u00a0 As a graduate of Franconia College, I have no sense of belonging to a larger extended community of former classmates.\u00a0 I thought about such matters during the dinner\u00a0on Saturday.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fretwell building, UNC Charlotte<\/p><\/div>\n

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.\u00a0 This community is called the English Department.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Kudos<\/strong>\u00a0— As you know, I like to use my\u00a0Monday\u00a0Missives\u00a0to share news about recent accomplishments by members of our department.\u00a0 Here is the latest news:<\/p>\n

Bryn Chancellor<\/strong>\u2019s new novel, Sycamore,<\/em>\u00a0was selected for\u00a0O: The Oprah Magazine’s<\/em>\u00a0\u201c20 Books of Summer\u201d at #7; it also was chosen for the June Indie Next List\u00a0and featured in reading recommendation lists in\u00a0Glamour<\/em>,\u00a0Bustle<\/em>, and the\u00a0New York Post.<\/em>\u00a0She also published an essay, \u201cHow to Write Suspense,\u201d in\u00a0Publisher\u2019s Weekly.<\/em><\/p>\n

Boyd Davis<\/strong>\u00a0recently published a chapter titled “Other Interviewing Techniques in Sociolinguistics”\u00a0in Mallinson, Childs, van Herk, eds.,\u00a0Data\u00a0Collection in\u00a0Sociolinguistics,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a02nd<\/sup>\u00a0edn. NY: Routledge, 114-117.\u00a0https:\/\/sociolinguisticdatacollection.com\/2017\/03\/03\/welcome\/<\/a><\/p>\n

She also delivered a presentation\u00a0titled “Combining Corpora and Collaboration at Two Ends of the Spectrum:\u00a0<\/strong>Enhancing Language and Social Interaction for\u00a0Nonverbal Youth with Special Needs and for Cognitively Impaired Older Persons” as the Faculty Colloquium, Speech Pathology\/Special\u00a0Education, National Kaohsiung Normal University, May 2017.<\/p>\n

Paula Eckard<\/strong>\u00a0recently learned that her latest book,\u00a0Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature,\u00a0<\/em>as been nominated for the 2017 Ragan Old North Award presented by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.<\/p>\n

Allison Hutchcraft<\/strong>\u00a0has 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.<\/p>\n

Jen Munroe<\/strong>\u00a0participated 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.<\/p>\n

Quirky Quiz Question<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 From its founding in 1837 until the 1970s, Davidson College admitted only male students (with a few unusual exceptions), but the times have changed.\u00a0 Now Davidson College has its first female president.\u00a0 Does anybody know that name of the woman who currently serves as the president of Davidson College?<\/p>\n

Last week’s answer: Tom Reynolds<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Charlotte Research Scholars Program is sponsored by the UNC Charlotte’s Graduate School.\u00a0 Does anybody know the name of the current Dean of the Graduate School?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sustaining a Sense of Community\u00a0— This past weekend, my wife (Nancy) participated in her 40th class reunion at Davidson College.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a member of this class, Nancy has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-missive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1108"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1114,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions\/1114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}