Wednesday, 15 September1999
READING MATTERS Vol V, No 4
Writing Matters
Wow! NonfictionWriting Program Graduates and Students
Hit it Big
A wonderful thing happened when I asked Paul Diehl if he could tell me some of the things current students and recent graduates of the MFA in Nonfiction were doing: the ensuing flood of e-mails listing publications by, positions held by, and awards won by NWP students and grads completely overwhelmed me. I don't have the time or the space in this issue to begin to offer a complete list of NWP accomplishments, but will only try to suggest the vitality of the NWP's students and graduates. For instance, a brief glance at the list shows that NWP folks have been publishing in magazines and journals such as Transition, 4th Genre, The Asheville Review, The Florida Review, The Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Sonora Review, Orion, Creative Nonfiction, Tuesday's Child Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, The Missouri Review, The Hudson Review, SportsJones, Tractor Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review.
NWP folks also have pieces in a number of anthologies, have authored several books, and have won impressive awards for their writing. Among NWP award winners are Jo Ann Beard, the Mary Tannenbaum Special Award for Nonfiction; Michele Morano, an American Dissertation Fellowship for the 1999-2000 academic year by The American Association of University Women; Teri Bostian, the Flyway Award for Nonfiction; Faith Adiele, a finalist for the John Gyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, Crab Orchard Review; Diane Horton Comer, an NEA Creative Writers' Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction; John Price, 1997 runner-up for Editor's Choice Award, The Florida Review, and a 1998 Nominee for a Pushcart Prize. And NWP graduates hold a wide range of positions, including Don Nichol, Director of Communications, The United States Mint; Colin Dunn, Director of the Armed Forces Broadcast Network; John D'Agata, Associate Editor, Seneca Review, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Assistant Professor, University of Central Florida, and Doug Hesse, Associate Professor, Illinois State University. I'll try to include a more complete listing of NWP publications and honors in future Reading Matters.
and, speaking of hitting it big!
Congratulations to Rowena Torrevillas, IWP program associate, who has won the National Book Award for 1998 in the Philippines for her book Flying Over Kansas. The book is a collection of essays and literary criticism. Some of the essays depict her experiences at UI, where she was an IWP participant in 1984, and where she has been program associate with the program for 14 years.
The "PhDs--Ten Years Later Report" that was the subject of the Chronicle article reproduced in last week's Reading Matters mentioned many things I've been thinking about, but one part in particular keeps coming back to me. Citing PhD complaints that "workplace skills weren't emphasized in graduate school, the report noted: "Fewer than a fifth of those surveyed said they had gained experience in teamwork, collaboration, or managerial skills in graduate school, even though more than half of them need such skills in their current jobs." "Workplace skills," "teamwork," "collaboration," and "managerial skills" are not things we much address when we think about our graduate program or when we think about our professional lives. Those skills would seem to have more to do with our service than with our teaching or with our scholarship and it occurs to me that not only our graduates but we, ourselves, have paid a price for remaining largely silent on these and other issues relegated to the "service" part of our responsibilities. Even the most recently amended copy of the English Department Tenure and Promotion Handbook dismisses service in two sentences:
Faculty members are expected to serve on committees in the department, and occasionally in the college and the university. Untenured faculty must do some of this work, but must not be overburdened by it.
The rhetoric may be dismissive ("here's the little bit you need to know about service, which should occupy as little of our time and as little of our thinking as possible"), but I doubt that even the newest of us feels those two sentences offer anywhere near an accurate map of the territory of our service. I suspect that most, if not all, of us feel that service takes more and more of our time, and who's to say when untenured or tenured faculty alike feel overburdened by service? My point is not that service imposes too much of a load on us (which it almost certainly does) or that we should reduce this load (which we almost certainly can't), but that we may be long overdue for a departmental discussion of what service really means for us, really demands of us, and how it does and does not really reward us. It might be a good time to consider that service is pretty much what makes us a department rather than a list of CVs and classes. At the very least, we need to do something about those ridiculously inadequate two sentences in our Tenure and Promotion Handbook.
Placement Matters
Bluford writes. . .
Here are some things all of us can do to help our Ph.D. students in their search for academic jobs:
1. Write strong letters of recommendation. Job seekers should have contacted you by now for letters of recommendation or updates of old letters. Please take a few minutes to consult with each student about the role of your letter in the dossier: Are they looking for a letter about their teaching, scholarship, or both? Are there particularly strengths they would like you to emphasize in the letter? Particular accomplishments they want you to highlight?
2. Consult with your dissertating students about their job searches. Have you heard anything about the particular needs of the departments they are applying to? Do you know people in those departments who might advocate for our students? If so, contact them. It seems that we are being out-networked by other English departments. In some cases, a phone call to a colleague at another institution might be all it takes to help a candidate land an interview. Please do all that you can to put your contacts to work for our job-seekers.
3. Help prepare our students for the job market by participating in the
colloquium on interviewing and on-campus visits (in November) and mock
interviews (in December).
4. Share your wisdom about job-searching and job-finding with the Placement
Committee--Doug Trevor, Susie Phillips, Bluford Adams and with this year's
searchers:
Beatty, Greg <gbeatty@earthlink.net>Thesis:"The Serial Killer Novel: A Study in the Structure and Meaning of a Genre."Director: Rob Latham
Brandser, Kristin <kristin-brandser@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "In Contempt: Women, Law, and the Victorian NovelDirector: Garrett Stewart
Byrd, Jodi <jbyrd@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Un-Settling Terrains: ŒSettler Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory"Director: Mary Lou Emery
Clarke, Michael < mtclarke@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in Turn-of-the-Century America"Director: Ed Folsom
Crachiolo, Beth <beth-crachiolo@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "ŒI Am God's Handmaid': Virginity, Violence and the Viewer in Medieval and Reformation Martyr's Lives"Directors: Claire Sponsler and Jon Wilcox
Dietz, Elizabeth <elizabeth-dietz@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Partiality: Sight, Memory and Love in Early Modern England"Director: Huston Diehl
Knutson, Lin <lknutson@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: ""A Politics of Location': Women, Race, and Space in the US: 1970-1995"Directors: Mary Lou Emery and Anne Donadey
Kotzin, Josh <jkotzin@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "The Museum Mood: American Literature and Modern Styles of Retrospection"Director: Tom Lutz
Lesinska, Zofia (Sophie) <lesinska@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Writing the Catastrophe: Women Authors and History, 1930-1944"Director: Ruedi Kuenzli
Miller, Jon <jsmiller@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Prohibition and Parties: Temperance in American Culture and Literature, 1805-1859"Director: Tom Lutz
Morano, Michele <michele-morano@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Grammar Lessons: A Study in Language and Memory"Director: Carol de St. Victor
Quinn, Richard <rquinn@email.unc.edu>
Thesis: "Playing Together: Improvisation, Jazz and Poetry in Late Twentieth-Century America"Director: Dee Morris
Schmid, Julie <jschmid@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Performance, Poetics, and Place: Public Poetry as a Community Art"Director: Dee Morris
Stafford, David <dstaffrd@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Drury Lane and the Origin of Modern Celebrity"Director: Robert Kelley
Trubowitz, Lara <lara-trubowitz@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Writing the Wandering Subject: Metaphor Making and the Jew"Director: Dee Morris
Tyx, Carol <carol-tyx@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "Adjusting the Tension: A Midlife Memoir"Director: David Hamilton
Vanskike, Elliott <e_vanskike@yahoo.com>
Thesis: "Reading Masochistically: Postmodern Detective Fiction of Stein, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, Ballard, and Acker"Directors: Brooks Landon and Rob Latham
Welker, Holly <holly-welker@uiowa.edu>
Thesis: "The Rib Cage"Directors: Kevin Kopelson and Patricia Foster
IWP Matters
The Faculty Assembly will meet from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 22
in Room 221 of the Chemistry Building
(enter from the Market Street side and go up a half flight of stairs).
This meeting will be devoted to a discussion of the issues related to the current and future status of the International Writing Program.
Web Matters
John Brogan says he still needs bios from the following professors for our new web pages:
Bolton, Clouse, Emery, Kuenzli, Marshall, Nagel, Porter, Raeburn, Stewart, Strong, Wiessbort, Woodard
He is missing photos for all EXCEPT the following:
Adams, Eckstein, Folsom, Hamilton, Harper, HDiehl, Kopelson, Landon, Latham, Lavezzo, Mangum, Morris, Nazareth, Porter, Round, Snider, Sponsler, Wilcox, Witt, Wittenberg, Diffley
Money Matters
Travel plans due to Amy Monday, September 20
Meeting Matters
Meeting for all untenured faculty and for members of this year's tenure committees on Thursday, September 23 at 3:45 in the Gerber Lounge. Huston and I and Cheryl will go over and try to make sense of the Provost's changes to promotion and tenure procedures.
READINGS, LECTURES, WORKSHOPS, AND CONFERENCES
Sep 23 Full-Text Research Seminar: Helen Ryan says: I will conduct three short seminars this Fall to describe ways in which students and scholars throughout higher education have conducted research in full texts. These seminars will be held in the Information Arcade Classroom on the first floor of the Main Library. There is no registration required-just show up. I urge you to announce these sessions to your students and other interested colleagues. Other seminar dates and times are: Oct 1. 3:00-3:50 PM and Oct 14. 12:00 Noon-12:50. If you are unable to attend a session and wish to know more, call me at 335-5945 or email me at helen-ryan@uiowa.edu and I can meet with you individually.
Sep 24 John Harper will present a lecture on "The History and Mystery of Anna Madrigal" at 7PM at Hancher. This precedes the 8PM concert of Chanticleer, which will perform a new work based on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series, with Frederica von Stade singing the role of Anna Madrigal.
Sep 29 Jonathan Lethem will read from his new novel Motherless Brooklyn at Prairie Lights at 8:00 pm. Lethem is one of the most celebrated of a new era of "slipstream" authors who work the territory between mainstream and science fiction writing. He's an exciting writer well worth your attention (unsolicited editorial comment from Landon).
Oct 1 Freya Manfred will read from her Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers at Prairie Lights at 8:00 pm
Oct 13-14 Houston Baker visit and lecture Oct 13 8pm in Buchanan Auditorium. Future Reading Matters will contain more information about this visit.
Oct 15 The Center for the Book will sponsor a lecture by Robert Darnton on Friday night, October 15, at 8PM in Tippie Aud, with a reception to follow in the Anderson Galeria in PBAB. His Saturday AM discussion may have a different topic, perhaps concerning e-texts, and will be open to all those interested.
Nov 12-13 Barry Moser will be on campus as an Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor, his visit to coincide the publication of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible that he has designed and illustrated. Barry Moser is considered the foremost wood engraver in the United States and one of our finest book designers and illustrators. When the Pennyroyal Caxton Press Bible, which he has been working on for twelve years, reaches completion, it will be the first Bible illustrated by a siingle author since Gustave Dore's famous Bible published as the Civil War was coming to a close. A recent interview with Barry Moser can be read at http://www.staff.interport.net/~hdu/moser.htm a site describing connections between painting and writing and Moser's work can be seen at http://funnelweb.utcc.utk.edu/~estes/illumine.html and information about the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible can be found at http://www.pennyroyal-caxton.com/
(From 9:00 am to 4:00 pm on Friday, November 12, Mr. Moser is available for scheduling two or three sessions with students, either within regularly scheduled courses or as separate sessions. On Saturday afternoon, November 13, Mr. Moser will give a hands on demonstration of new engraving techniques for faculty and students. Please contact me (Brooks) if you would like to try to arrange time with Mr. Moser with one of your classes or with your students on November 12.)
Nov 12 Barry Moser Ida Beam Public Lecture: "Tanakh and Testament: A Reprobate Tinkers with Holy Writ" 8:00pm Shambaugh Auditorium, Main Library
Sep 17 Proposals for semester assignment due in chair's office
Sep 20 1999-2000 Travel Plans form due to Amy
Oct 1 Proposals for Faculty and Global Scholars due in chair's office
Oct 1 Application Deadline for NEH 2000 Summer Stipends. NEH Summer Stipends support two months of full-time work on projects that will make a significant contribution to the humanities. For more information about this and other NEH programs please see http://www.neh.gov
Oct 11 Central Investment Fund for Research Enhancement (CIFRE) applications due by 5:00 in the Office of the Vice President, 201 Gilmore Hall
Oct 29 Council on Teaching Instructional Improvement Award proposals due by 4:00 pm in 111 Jessup