English Department News

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Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature: a Preview

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by Ana Fonseca

 NUCL2This coming Saturday, April 5th, UP’s English Department will host the eleventh annual Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature.

 For the majority of us English majors on campus, NUCL is such an integral part of our department that it’s hard to remember that this undergraduate conference is not only relatively rare, but also a fairly innovative way for us to engage in our field of study.

As an intern this year, not only have I gotten to help shape the conference, but I’ve also been able to step back and appreciate NUCL for the special opportunity that it offers us as students, thinkers, and human beings especially jazzed about a good work of literature.

NUCL accepts submissions of mainly critical essays, but also personal essays and poetry, from students all over the Northwest, and UP professors and interns join up to choose the most compelling pieces. The day of the conference there are three sessions with different cool panels you can choose from (see the program for more information!) in which those chosen present their work. There’s a common thread among the panels, so if you’re particularly interested in issues of gender, there’s a panel for that; if you’re particularly interested in personal essays, there’s a panel for that; if you’re particularly interested in the queer in the pastoral, there’s even a panel for that!

What I think is most special about this conference is that it’s active; after students present their work the rest of the session is all about discussion. The climate NUCL provides is just right—not quite as formal as a classroom setting, yet not quite as informal as chatting with friends over coffee about what you’re reading. It’s an opportunity for the audience to engage panelists, for panelists to engage the audience and each other, and for academic conversations with peers on what’s fresh, exciting, compelling to us about literature. We can share that giddiness that literature makes us feel, as well as the product of our ideas and hard work, with one another.

Especially at a time when there are so many attacks on the value of our work in the humanities, NUCL is really about celebrating and reveling for a day in the work that we do. NUCL’s keynote speaker this year, Janine Utell, associate professor and chair of the English department at Widener University, says she will speak to this issue in her keynote address. “I’m interested in the question of why literary criticism matters, especially in a time when, in the humanities and English particularly, we talk a lot about ‘crisis’: the ‘crisis in the humanities.’ I want my comments to affirm the good work and passion of every person in that audience; I want to give the audience some ideas for how to respond to the question of why literature matters; and I want to articulate for others and for myself what literary criticism is supposed to do. Ultimately, I think it’s a combination of a desire to play and a desire to understand others that draws us to literature, and good criticism is both a space for those desires to come together, and a guide for how to uncover the potential for those impulses in what we read.”

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Dr. Asarnow started NUCL in 2004 because, as he often says in class, “Literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum.” He wanted to give undergraduates a public forum to express and share ideas, and he noticed that there were not many undergraduate conferences on literature around. I actually googled to see how many are out there, and I could only find a handful scattered about the country. Dr. Brassard is co-chairing for the first time and she has been a long-time attendee of NUCL. She recalls that NUCL was one of the reasons she chose to work at UP: “I still remember when I was applying for my position and Dr. Asarnow used NUCL as one of the selling points of having a job here, and how impressed I was. To me it signaled not only that was this a school that cherished teaching over research, and that undergraduate teaching was very much at the forefront of what we do as faculty, but also that we take the work that students do seriously; the fact that we have an entire conference devoted to the thinking, writing, ideas of our students and other students, to me was the most significant aspect.”

Dr. Weiger, who has been co-chairing NUCL for three years, speaks to this focus on undergraduates. “My favorite part is seeing familiar faces back and also seeing the crowd reinvigorated by fresh faces. There’s something really gratifying about seeing the group of participants and seeing familiar faces that are participating year after year, as well as seeing the new crop.”

NUCL5We interns are really eager for the conference because not only have we gotten to read the submissions (they’re great!), but also we’ve gotten to see NUCL in action, and are excited about what it means to us as students. Jillian Stephens, NUCL intern, says it best when she says, “Personally, what I love about NUCL is that as an English student you feel like one of the only few people on the planet that actually cares about this stuff, you feel like everyone else is so much more centered on, you know, business, or other more concrete fields of study, and it’s nice to know that there are other students that are just like us, that are intellectuals as well. I think it’s just really nice to see other people our age participate.” I’m right there with Jillian, NUCL brings you together with a community of people excited to revel in literature, we hope you make it to the celebration.

 

Spring Writing Competitions

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Let these competitions inspire you to write something new, or send off something you’ve already written…and maybe you’ll end up with a [cash] prize for your efforts!

43rd333 2014 Rattle Poetry Prize:

Rattle is a literary magazine that is dedicated to promoting a community of active poets. They publish through several mediums including an in-print magazine and an online blog. This year, they are hosting a poetry competition that includes a $5,000 first place prize and ten $100 finalists. Winners will be selected in a blind review by the editors of Rattle and published in the Winter 2014 issue. One $1,000 Readers’ Choice Award will be awarded to the poet selected by reader vote. This competition is open to writers worldwide although all entries must be submitted in English. No previously submitted works or works accepted for publication will be admitted.

To enter, type or print your name, address, e-mail, phone number, and title(s) onto a coversheet and send it to 12411 Ventura Blvd. Studio City, CA 91604 along with up to four poems and a $20 entry fee in the form of a check or money order made to Rattle. Winners will be announced on September 15, and the Reader’s Choice Award will be announced exactly one month later. For any questions, visit Rattle’s website.

761d599257d14745a45e93d29e39a85bRising Star Creative Writing Competition:

The Nature of Words is hosting the 2014 Rising Star Creative Writing Competition. Rising Star is an annual creative writing competition open to unpublished writers ages 15 and up in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Submissions are accepted in three genres: poetry, nonfiction, and creative nonfiction. Winners will receive a cash prize and have their work published in The Nature of Words’ annual anthology. Additionally, top winners will be recognized at The Nature of Words Literary Arts Festival in Bend, Oregon.

Entries must be received no later than midnight, June 1. All entries must be submitted to the Nature of Words at thenatureofwords.submittable.com/submit; no submissions will be accepted via mail or e-mail. Please call (541) 647-2233 or email programs@thenatureofwords.org if you have any questions.

“A Poet of Passion and Love”: UP alum Lilah Hegnauer returns for Poetry Reading

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Lilah-5-webPoet Lilah Hegnauer will read on campus Monday March 31, in BC 163.  Hegnauer isn’t just any poet, however—she’s a UP alumna whose first book of poetry began as her senior thesis!  This post offers insights about her writing from Hegnauer herself, as well as from her former professor and mentor, our own Dr. Herman Asarnow.

Hegnauer was the 2013-2014 Amy Clampitt Poet in Residence in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her poetry books have won several awards and appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Gastronomica, and Poetry Northwest. Her teaching interests, in addition to creative writing, include 19th and 20th-century American literature, modern and contemporary American poetry, form and theory, poetry in translation, and contemporary American fiction.

Here are some of her own words about her process and projects from Young Writers and the Kenyon Review:

What have you learned about the writing process in the last five years? 

So much. I’ve been living the adjunct dream for the past 4 years which means that I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a zillion different classes at a bunch of different universities (and I have a glove compartment full of parking passes in every shape and hue to prove it) and getting to know lots and lots of students. Every semester, my students teach me so much about the writing process. Mostly, they teach and re-teach me that poetry is a physical, embodied experience (both the reading and the writing). And the writing of poems is just 99% practice — sitting at your desk and doing it.

What are you working on right now and what does it represent in the larger body of your artistic accomplishments?

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I’m currently plugging away on a project where I write just a little something every day. I started this daily writing in January of this year when I was coming to the realization that as a mother, I’d need to be both strict (write every day!) and gentle (it doesn’t have to be good!) with myself. While I’m at the Clampitt house, my project is to keep writing every day, but also to go back into these past 8 months of daily writing and start the process of crafting actual poems.

My second book of poems, Pantry, is about to be published in February after years and years of sending it out and revising and crafting and re-crafting it, so to be untethered from this manuscript is an incredible sense of freedom but also somewhat unsettling… I don’t have to work on that book that I’ve been working on for the past 8 years anymore!

Tell us about a teacher (“teacher” construed broadly!) who has been important to your writing. 

The poet Herman Asarnow at the University of Portland was my first poetry workshop teacher and he’s still my most important teacher. He was the first person to really read poems with me and pull them apart line by line, phrase by phrase. It was revelatory for me in college that a good poem comes at you on one level on the first read and then just keeps unfolding the more you read it.

Of course this idea of the unseen mechanics in a poem might seem so obvious, but it honestly never gets old for me. I still remember reading “To Penshurst” with Herman and he was getting all choked up and I thought “Really? It’s a poem about an estate… in rhymed couplets.” But by the end, I was pretty close to tears myself. And the thing is, Herman can do this with any poem he loves. He was also the first person to point out the rather obvious existence of literary magazines to me and to lend me back issues of the Kenyon Review. 

AsarnoSpeaking of Dr. Asarnow, here are some of his insights into his former student’s development and work:

What was Lilah’s writing like while she was a student? How has it progressed since? 

Well, when I first met Lilah as a student, it was in my Satire class and my Renaissance literature class. She was very serious and quiet. And she wrote excellent essays on the readings (though she found Satire a bit too bitter, I think, for her taste).  She next took the Poetry Workshop where one or two of her poems showed promise, but her poems got more interesting as the semester wore on. Then she took my lyric poetry class (survey of English & American poetry) and studied the poetry very carefully and wrote really perceptive papers. After that, in May and June of her junior year, I was in England and we corresponded a lot about poetry and essays by poets. Then she went to Uganda for the summer, taking voluminous notes on her experiences, and came back to do her senior honors thesis with me, and she wrote many poems per week, each terrific. We spent sometimes 2-3 hours a week discussing them in my office.  They were fabulous—and make up her book Dark Under Kiganda Stars.  So Lilah’s developmental curve as a poet was rapid, remarkably steep, and awe-inspiring, really.

Progressed isn’t the right word to use for a poet’s work. Her poems have changed a lot, become more daring, more willing to risk being hard to understand at first for her readers, as she’s interested, I’d say, in putting into words the feelings and thoughts that are almost impossible to explain in words.  But her poems always have used interesting and vivid concrete imagery, powerful rhythms, and often beautiful sounds to help articulate what she thinks. Now, her poems rely very heavily on unusual metaphors and images that become symbols.

What was she like as a student?

She was full of energy, self-directed, and in love with literature and, especially, poetry.  At first, she was very quiet. But as we worked together longer, she was open and daring and endlessly curious. Also, she was never cowed by things that were difficult. Instead, they made her more interested.

Are there any themes that she approached/explored as a student that appear in her current writing?

Well, I would say that Lilah is a poet of passion and love, above all–love for the world, love for people, love for the artifacts of our cultures, whether here in America, inside one’s home, or in an African village.  Her poems are so filled with the “things” of life–because she passionately is interested in and attached to those things that make us human.

 

 

Who says blogging doesn’t pay? One senior’s NW blog post

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BeckerLeahLeah Becker, a senior English major and vice president of Sigma Tau Delta, the department’s new honor society, has won Honorable Mention for her blog post, “It’s All about the Fog,” in the Sigma Tau Delta blog contest.

This all started when Leah read her email—an STD newsletter telling of a competition hosted by the blog Wordy by Nature calling for pieces about the definition and importance of Western literature.  Deciding to take it in a thoroughly pacific northwestern direction—a region whose literature Leah is reading in part thanks to Professor Larson’s Eng 461 this semester—she wrote a short blog post and also submitted a headshot and original photograph.

The results of the contest were released a few weeks ago and Leah got the third place honorable mention prize.  Says Leah, “It was $30…[but] it’s the first time I’ve been paid for my writing, so $30 is like $1,000 to me!”

Leah’s post is lovely—an evocative portrait of the NW fog and its influence on NW literature.  Have a look at http://www.wordybynature.org/fog/.

Congratulations, Leah!

 

Spain is Not Spain, or How I Stopped Being a Tourist and Starting Becoming a Traveler:

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LathosEnglish major Athena Lathos is studying abroad this semester in Granada, Spain, and shares with us here some of her thoughts about being in a new place.

“Pero yo ya no soy yo
Ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
 
But now I am no longer I,
nor is my house any longer my house.”- Federico García Lorca, “Romance Sonámbulo”

 

           In the Realejo district of Granada, in the Plaza de Santo Domingo, there is a section of graffiti on a low wall that says “Spain is Not Spain.” Each day when I walk to class, I see the words and end up thinking about what they mean. I can never decide whether the phrase is a joke or something intentionally profound.

Maybe the graffiti ultimately means nothing, but after living here for three months, I think that the expression provides an honest way of describing how I’ve come to understand this country and my role in discovering it.

I think that in the US, we tend to idealize certain countries in Europe. It is no surprise, then, that in many of our movies, an American struggling with the feeling that there is something “missing” in her life (cue Julia Roberts) goes to Europe to “find herself” (cue images of cobblestone roads and handsome foreign lovers).

And surely, when we think of France, we think of fine wine and baguettes, the Eiffel Tower and soft lights on the river at night.  When we think of Spain, we think of bulls and big plates of paella, golden beaches that stretch on for miles and wild street parties likes the ones Hemingway loved in 1920s San Fermín.

To travel for a bit in these countries is often to access these things— objects of palatable “cultural difference” that inevitably carry the tourist’s stamp of approval. To truly live in a country, though, is something entirely different.  Once you decide to stop being a tourist and start being a traveler, you begin to immerse yourself in a community of human beings that demonstrates the same social complexity of the place that you come from. When you start seeing that, the country becomes a more rich and affecting place—and I would argue that so do you.

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Here in Spain, for example, I see a country that is yes, admirably and unequivocally beautiful, teeming with stunning art, great music, and vital tradition. But now I also see a country in the middle of one of the worst recessions in its history, tainted by political corruption and an unpopular monarchy, and struggling to find some sort of compromise between the customs of old Spain and the new, globalized interests of a younger generation.

Furthermore, though the truth might be contrary to my experience, I see a country that is at times unaware of or closed off to all things “guiri” (a negative word used for anything considered “foreign”), especially in terms of other races. In my first week here, for example, I went to buy paper in the store below my apartment– one of what the Spanish call “chinos”, or shops owned by Chinese immigrants.

When I turned the corner toward the section with the register, I saw two Spanish men leaning over the counter, pointing aggressively at a trembling store owner:

“You don’t speak our language,” the first said in Spanish,” and you don’t belong here. Got that?”

The two then grabbed multiple handfuls of lighters from the display on the counter and stormed out. The storeowner had tears in his eyes. He did know Spanish, and I will never forget it.

This is not to say that all Spanish people are this way (they are most certainly not), or that there aren’t one million things about Spanish life that aren’t perfect and good: spending slow afternoons on sunlit terrazas eating tapas with friends, swimming in the warm Mediterranean, walking through crumbling Roman and Moorish ruins, dancing until morning in a discoteca, and of course visiting some of the most beautiful churches in the world. It is just to say that living in a different country is sometimes a more complicated experience than the traditional study abroad conclusion that “another culture allowed me to see things in a new way.” More so, the experience allows you to delve into the story of another place, perhaps the darker side of it, and see how human we all are, and how we express that humanity—for better or for worse—through the lenses of the places we grow up in.

So maybe it’s not so much that “Spain is not Spain,” but that Spain, like anything else, is more complex than meets the eye. In this way, I now see the graffiti in the Plaza de Santo Domingo less as a declaration and more as a challenge to get to know the country as deeply as possible.

After all this, I’ve come to understand that rather than “finding myself” here, a la Eat, Pray, Love, what I’ve found instead is a place that I developed a relationship with in the same way that I try to develop relationships with other people— with a sincere goal of getting to know them as profoundly as I can, and a recognition that both their imperfections and their attractions make them worthy of love.

What Are You Taking? English Department Fall Preview

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By Ana Fonseca

As registration for the Fall 2014 semester approaches, rather than trying to interpret the brief catalog entry offered on Self Serve or asking your English major friends for feedback, check out this scoop on upper division English courses, straight from the source. I asked professors a few questions about the courses they will be teaching in the fall, and got their useful (and funny!) input on what to look for next semester.

 

imgresDr. Hersh on English 323- Chaucer

What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?

This is one of the only English classes that spends the entire semester reading a single author and a single text; we will be reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales together.

What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?

What themes won’t we be tracking? Chaucer tackles almost every issue imaginable (ok, maybe he doesn’t write about iPad use or Facebook) and we’ll be discussing issues such as gender, religion, politics, sexuality, economics, and race, while also taking a self-reflexive look at the role of literature in the world.

What’s one of your favorite things about this course?

As I mentioned before, it’s rare that one gets to spend an entire semester getting to know the work of a single author and text in such depth.  As an added bonus, each tale of Chaucer’s text is very different so you never get bored (and you only have to buy one text!).  Chaucer is deliciously ambiguous so it’s super fun analyzing his writing and it’s amazing how he can tell us so much about the Middle Ages and still speak to us as modern readers.

What’s something you hope students will get from this course?

We will be reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which can be a little intimidating at first.  But I believe that tackling a text that forces students to slow down because it is linguistically different actually teaches close reading and attention to detail.  This class will thus give all participants the tools to become better, more nuanced readers of any text they pick up.

Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?

If you like fart jokes you will like The Canterbury Tales.

 

urlProfessor McDonald on English 337- Modern/Contemporary Arabic Literature

What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?

Distant View of a Minaret, Alifaa Rifaat (Egyptian)

Saddam City, Mahmoud Saeed (Iraqi)

For Bread Alone¸ Mohamed Choukri  (Moroccan)

Hunters in a Narrow Street, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Palestinian)

The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany (Egyptian)

Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, Ghassan Kanafani (Palestinian)

Arabic Short Stories, Roger Allen ed.

What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?

The theory of unhomeliness (by critic Homi Bhabha), “Forced Migration” (Palestinian displacement and the diaspora), gender, women and marriage, Bedouin culture, tradition and progress in Arab culture, Post-Colonialism, occupation and dissent.

What’s one of your favorite things about this course?

I love Arab culture. It is so diverse, rich, and complex. We tend to oversimplify it here in the West (something the late Edward Sa’id addresses in his classic book Orientalism. Also, I think it is a rare experience for students to get a literature course like this at UP; though now that the course is “official” (permanent in the course bulletin) it will be offered somewhat regularly.

What’s something you hope students will get from this course?

I hope students will understand how complex Arab culture is and appreciate the diversity of the literature. Also, students, I think, will realize how Arab/Islamic cultures have contributed to global culture.  Ideally, I hope students will visit an Arab country at some point in their lives.

Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?

The readings cover a period from the mid-20th century-early 21st century. Arabic literature is political (as is all literature). You will learn a little Arabic by taking the course.

 

imagesDr. Weiger on English 345- Victorian Literature

What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?

In addition to poetry by authors including Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, we’ll be reading brief prose fiction and nonfiction by Victorian writers including John Ruskin, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling.

We’ll feature full-length narratives and plays by Charles Dickens (Great Expectations), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Isabella Bird (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains) and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).

What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?

Victorian culture is distinguished by a rapid proliferation of material things. Due to the crowding of people into cities, widespread exploration, and leaps in its manufacturing prowess, Britain “discovered,” made, consumed, celebrated, and discarded more material things and objects than it had at any other time. These material things included printed texts, made accessible to a rapidly expanding, literate middle-class. In this survey of Victorian literature and culture, we will investigate the ways Victorian literature was shaped by its materials and how Victorian literature itself shaped the way the materials of culture and the natural world were imagined and represented. Topics we will consider include childhood, the country and the city, industrialization, natural history and evolution, gender, and transatlantic literary currents.

What’s one of your favorite things about this course?

My favorite thing about this course, which I’ve subtitled “Curious Materials,” is the strange, even bizarre nature of many of the texts we read. They keep readers delightfully off-balance!

I also enjoy reading Dickens’ Great Expectations as readers first encountered it: in serial form (over the course of the semester, we read sets of chapters, only completing our reading of the novel in the term’s final days).

What’s something you hope students will get from this course?

My hope is that students will gain an appreciation of Victorian literature and culture that goes beyond the stiff petticoats and stiff upper lips commonly associated with the period.

 

images-1Dr. Orr on English 471- American Romanticism

What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?

A couple of Hawthorne novels—Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. The second one is very different from other Hawthorne that people have read. The poetry of Whitman and Dickinson. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Probably some Poe. Stowe for sure, but I might not do Uncle Tom’s Cabin this time around. And, of course, Moby-Dick!

What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?

In Europe in 1848 there were several failed revolutions, and that revolutionary fervor appears in many of the works we will be reading. As well, we’ll spend lots of time looking at Romantic ideology and the ways that these authors play off of it.  It’s an interesting time period because the US is moving towards a war over race, yet race is relatively speaking absent from many of the works.

What’s one of your favorite things about this course?

Often, it’s the research that the students do. I genuinely learn from them as they have become experts in some area.

What’s something you hope students will get from this course?

I hope they get through Moby-Dick! I’ve threatened to make certificates for the students who actually read the entire novel. These are some of the great works in our literary heritage, so I hope that students come away with a greater appreciation for the American literary tradition.

Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?

This is why you come to college!  Challenge yourself with some hard but very rewarding books.

 

url-1Dr. Brassard on English 480- Postcolonial Literature & Culture

What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?

I typically select from countries in Africa and from India, in other words authors from former British colonies, like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Nigeria), Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (Kenya), Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (India/Pakistan), and Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe).

What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?

The themes vary between texts but key concerns include colonial history, gender identity, education, language(s), religion, violence, nationalism, and sexuality.

What’s one of your favorite things about this course?

Favorite things include introducing students to authors and texts they usually find a refreshing departure from familiar/canonical British or American authors, and encouraging students to develop an expertise (through research and writing) on a subject inspired by the literature.

What’s something you hope students will get from this course?

I hope students come away from this course with an open-minded view of cultures and traditions quite different from the Western canon and also curious to find out more about the impact of imperialism and history on literature and culture.

Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?

For students who sometimes lament the lack of diversity in course offerings, this is your chance to experience the shock of difference but also, ultimately, the recognition of our common humanity across cultures and ethnicities.

 

Spring 2014 Readings and Lectures Series: Julie Joosten

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Joosten photo copyby Hannah Wilkes

On Monday, March 3rd, the English Department will welcome writer Julie Joosten to campus as a part of the Reading and Lectures series.  Julie Joosten lives in Toronto, Canada and released her first collection of poetry, Light Light, last September.

Here is a review of Light Light from the website of literary press BookThug:

“Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, Light Light is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges the histories of botany, empire, and mind to take up the claim of “objectivity” as the dissolution of a discrete self and thus explores the mind’s movement toward and with the world. The poems in Light Light range from the epigrammatic to the experimental, from the narrative to the lyric, consistently exploring the way language captures the undulation of a mind’s working, how that rhythm becomes the embodiment of thought, and how that embodiment forms a politics engaged with the environment and its increasing alterations.”

As a preview of her upcoming lecture, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. in BC 163, here is a short interview with Joosten about her background with poetry and what she will be speaking about this coming Monday:

When did your interest in poetry first begin?

I don’t remember when my interest in poetry began exactly.  But I loved reading and being read to as a child.  I was drawn to the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the storytelling, and the wonderful rhymes that are a part of many children’s books.  I think my interest in poetry, though wholly unformed and in many ways unconscious, began then, in the stories my parents read me.

light-lightWhat is your writing process like?  Do you have a particular writing process that you go through?

I’m still trying to figure out my writing process.  Part of the difficulty of that figuring is that I suspect my writing process is always changing.  What doesn’t change is that I read constantly.  And I take notes on what I read.  And then I work from my responses to my reading and notes and begin gradually to form an interest or a series of questions that I enjoy tinkering with or elaborating or thinking about or sitting with.  And then I start to write.  I’m a draft writer, so my work undergoes many, many revisions.

Is there a poem or piece of writing that has special meaning to you or has inspired your work?

In Light Light I quote a passage from Keats’s Letters.  In it, Keats writes of “having no idea but of the Morning.”  This passage – and many others from Keats’s letters and poems – have been wonderful inspirations in my thinking, feeling, and writing.

What can your audience next Monday expect to hear?

My audience will hear poems interested in the juxtaposition of various kinds of language and histories; there will be some non-linear narrative, some plants, some animals, some skies, some empire, some thoughts about thinking, and some modes of attention.  There will be verbs and nouns and present and past and future tenses (and everything in between), all a bit mashed up!r

Is there one book or poem recommendation that you have for students?

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses.

If Shakespeare took your midterm…

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01v/11/arve/G2582/016by Kate Stringer

Have you ever wondered at the poetic wisdom of Shakespeare or the brilliance of Zadie Smith? Do you think the authors lining your bookshelf are in better mental shape to take your upcoming midterms? Or maybe you’re looking for deeper answers to the questions of your interdisciplinary studies than the ones from a textbook.

If you handed the exam to your favorite authors, here’s how they would respond:

 

Metaphysics

Why is there something rather than nothing?

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

 

What is the meaning of life?

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

What is happiness, according to the views of three philosophers?

“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”

– Charlotte Bronte, Villette

 

History

Describe three events that caused WWI.

“All this happened, more or less.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

 

Analyze the causes of the French Revolution.

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure”

-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

 

Name three people that made great contributions to science in the 20th century.

“What difference does it make after all?–anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

 

Intro to Literature

What are some of the major themes in the books we read this semester?

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

-Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

Explain why Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist of his time.

“The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

 

Art History

Explain the importance of Renaissance art to the modern man.

“Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.”

― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

 

Biology

Name three infectious diseases and their symptoms.

“A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.”

– Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

 

Calculus

4xsin(y) – x2 = 1. Find dy/dx where y = 3.14/6

“The horror! The horror!”

― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

 

Literary Meals

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by Dorian Pacheco

Everyone peruses the Internet. Whether you’re procrastinating on your Theology homework or catching up on your English Department’s (synonym for “cool”) blog, it seems as if the Internet eventually sucks you in like some inescapable black hole. So naturally, my story begins with the Internet:

Earlier this week, I stumbled across “literary meals,” an art series that had been briefly mentioned during last fall’s blog meeting. Dinah Fried has re-created 50 dishes that appear in some of our most beloved books ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Moby Dick. 

Visit her website to check it out!

OliverTwist1_2714203a
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Ontheroad1_2714204a
On the Road by Jack Kerouac

How will YOU inspire Arizona’s next generation?

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JobPosting_Square_AZ_zps17f9acf6For any graduating seniors interested in teaching, the Arizona Teaching Fellows is a highly-selective program that trains talented graduates to become outstanding teachers for Arizona students who need them most. Most fellows teach in Phoenix, NE Arizona, Tucson, or Yuma and subject areas include: Biology, Chemistry, Elementary, English, Math, Physics, Science, Spanish as a Foreign Language, and Special Education. Please visit their website for more information and/or apply now.

The application deadline is Monday, February 24th, and if you have any questions please contact Carmen at carmen.orozco@tntp.org