{"id":1302,"date":"2017-11-20T12:52:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T17:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=1302"},"modified":"2017-11-20T12:52:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T17:52:00","slug":"monday-missive-november-20-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2017\/11\/20\/monday-missive-november-20-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Missive – November 20, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Family, Friends, Food, and Film<\/strong>\u00a0—\u00a0<\/em>I associate Thanksgiving with spending time with my family, connecting with friends, preparing and consuming food, and perhaps seeing a film at some point during the long Thanksgiving weekend.\u00a0 All of these associations relate in one way or another to the film\u00a0Pieces of April.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>I didn’t see the film when it first came out in 2003, but my wife and I rented it a few years later when it came out on DVD.\u00a0 It has since become my favorite Thanksgiving film.
\n
\nPieces of April\u00a0<\/em>focuses on a young woman named April Burns (played by Katie Holmes) who lives with her boyfriend in a tiny, dilapidated apartment located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.\u00a0 Although April feels alienated from her family, she wants to reconnect with them.\u00a0 She invites them all over for Thanksgiving dinner even though she is a totally inept cook, and her family members accept the invitation.\u00a0 In many of the scenes, April is desperately trying to prepare the meal, which is made more difficult when her oven breaks down.\u00a0 She copes with this problem with the help of her eccentric neighbors who allow her to use the ovens in their kitchens for the short periods of time when they are not using their ovens.\u00a0 In other scenes, April’s family members are riding together in a cramped car to New York City. Their tensions play out in comical ways as they get closer and closer to April’s apartment.<\/p>\n

What I love the most about this film is its portrayal of a family.\u00a0 In many ways, this family is completely dysfunctional, but they still care about each other on some deep level.\u00a0 They do not communicate well using words.\u00a0 However, they are finally able to connect by using food as a sort of communications medium.\u00a0 Food also provides a tangible way to bring April’s friends and neighbors into the family fold.\u00a0 The film’s culminating dinner brings together quite a wide variety of people, but at least for that one meal, they transcend their differences.\u00a0 Such is the power of food.<\/p>\n

I hope all of you have a great Thanksgiving.<\/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

Meghan Barnes<\/strong>\u00a0recently gave the following three presentations at the NCTE Conference held in St. Louis: “Challenges of Social Justice Pedagogy: \u00a0That Time I Did Exactly What I Tell My\u00a0Students Not to Do,” “Reciprocal Community\u00a0Relationships: \u00a0Challenges of Inviting Community Voices into Teacher Education,” and “Teacher Research as Reclaiming Education: \u00a0A Critical Analysis of Two Inquiry-Based Projects.”<\/p>\n

Bryn Chancellor<\/strong>\u00a0last month was an invited author at Litchfield Books\u2019 A Moveable Feast in Pawleys Island, SC; she also gave readings at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro and McIntyre\u2019s Books in Pittsboro as part of the North Carolina Arts Council fellowship reading series. Her novel\u00a0Sycamore<\/em>\u00a0also was named one of Amazon\u2019s Best Books of 2017 and rights recently were optioned to FilmNation (The Big Sick, Arrival<\/em>) for their new television department.<\/p>\n

Katie Hogan<\/strong>\u00a0presented a paper titled \u201cRural Queer Echohistories as Movement-Building and Freedom-Making\u201d on Saturday, November 18, at the National Women\u2019s Studies Association conference in Baltimore, Maryland.<\/p>\n

Allison Hutchcraft\u00a0<\/strong>gave a reading at Lenoir-Rhyne University as part of their Visiting Writers Series and was part of a panel discussion \u201cNC Writing Today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Janaka Lewis<\/strong>\u00a0presented a paper titled\u00a0“Black Girlhood and the Power of Belonging” at the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora conference in Seville, Spain, on Nov. 10 and a paper titled “Reconstructing Black Girlhood, from Stories to Selves” at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Baltimore last week.<\/p>\n

Consuelo Salas\u00a0<\/strong>recently\u00a0presented a paper titled “Food-Based Pedagogies: Opening the Classroom Space” at NCTE Conference in St. Louis in a session titled “Foodways Literacy and Language Learning.”<\/p>\n

Upcoming Events and Deadlines<\/strong>\u2014 Here is information about an upcoming event:<\/p>\n

Dec. 1<\/span>\u00a0— The English Department holiday party will take place on\u00a0Friday, \u00a0December 1 from 11:30<\/span>\u00a0to\u00a01:30<\/span>\u00a0in the Faculty\/Staff Lounge. \u00a0Please put this special event on your calendar and make sure to sign up on the potluck list located on the desk outside of Monica’s office.<\/p>\n

Quirky Quiz Question<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014Pieces of April\u00a0<\/em>premiered at the\u00a0Sundance\u00a0Film Festival.\u00a0 What is the host state for this annual film festival?<\/p>\n

Last week’s answer: John Benjamins<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict\u00a0is published by an international academic publisher with offices in Amsterdam and Philadelphia.\u00a0 Does anybody know the name of this publisher?<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Family, Friends, Food, and Film\u00a0—\u00a0I associate Thanksgiving with spending time with my family, connecting with friends, preparing and consuming food, and perhaps seeing a film at some point during the long Thanksgiving weekend.\u00a0 All of these associations relate in one way or another to the film\u00a0Pieces of April.\u00a0\u00a0I didn’t see the film when it first […]<\/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-1302","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\/1302","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=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1311,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions\/1311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}