Reading Matters, Vol. 15, Issue 3, October 16, 2009

From (the Edge of) the Chair's Seat

We’ve now reached the point where almost no freshmen have any experience of life before the internet. If they were born in 1991, as many in the entering class of 2009 probably were, they missed the creation of the World Wide Web by one year, but arrived just in time for the first Web server, created by two physicists as a way to share a database of 300,000 physics references. Two years later, when our freshmen were toddlers, the first Web browser for the masses was created; within a year, thousands of people were downloading the browser every day. Early web sites were simple, with few graphics. But as they have multiplied, websites (or Websites, Web sites, or web sites, the uncertain orthography an indication of the relative youthfulness of the term, linguistically speaking) have grown increasingly complex, with new design elements aimed at appealing to the end user, a term I suspect our freshmen are comfortable having applied to them.

Wikipedia, itself a recent example of the ever-more voracious appetite for all things digital, defines a website as “a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network.” Most of us are by now familiar with the blue-ink hyperlinks embedded in that definition, a distinctive feature of web design, and we are also familiar with the notion of websites intended to display the work or identity of an individual or organization, including those organizations known as departments of English.

Our current departmental website evolved from a site constructed from scratch by Brooks Landon around 1994, in the very early days of the World Wide Web (just think: he coded each issue of Reading Matters by hand!). We were early adopters, in tech parlance, and in its time our website was a cutting-edge combination of text (lots and lots of it) and images (clever pictures of acts of reading, many of them gathered with the help of Garrett Stewart, Cheryl Herr, and Dee Morris). Our site has grown to “astounding size,” as Brooks notes, but retains many virtues, including its distinctive look. I think it’s fair to say that our website has served us extremely well both as a repository of essential information and as the face our department presents to the world. We are enormously grateful to Brooks, Dee, Cheryl, and the other members of the department who were instrumental in creating it and to Karla Tonella for her design and maintenance work on it over the years.

Now, with the help of a team of web designers from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we are undertaking a from-the-ground-up rebuilding of the site, in an effort to create the third version of our website since its beginnings in 1994. The earliest stages of planning have involved figuring out what appearance our site should have, what we want it to do, and whom we envision as its audiences (count those freshmen end-users among them). From numerous meetings with numerous parties some guiding principles have emerged. We would like a site: that offers a sense of place and people (evocative as those pictures of reading are, they don’t reveal much about English at Iowa); that is user friendly (especially for the potential undergraduate and graduate students we hope to attract), that has more visual features and fewer words (more Herbert than Milton); that is clean and spare, but also warm and witty (preserving the best of our current site and avoiding corporate slickness); and that is well-organized and easy for staff to maintain and update.

No one knows where the internet is taking us, but the department’s website 3.0 hopes not to be left behind. The College’s design team is currently making mock-ups of possible home pages, and developing a basic structure for the site. I will keep you posted on our progress as we move towards the anticipated unveiling of our new website in January of 2010.

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Lori Branch has been invited to give a lecture based on her second book project on Nov. 12th at the University of Michigan's Department of English.  The talk will be titled “Enlightenment Erotica’s Sacred Spaces: Seduction and Secularism.”folsom photo

There is a great article featuring Ed Folsom in Thursday's Daily Iowan titled "Spotlight Iowa City: Twined with the chant of his soul". Click here to read the full article.

Patricia Foster has an essay titled "You Girls" forthcoming in Fourth Genre. 

Blaine Greteman had two articles published recently:  “‘Exactest Proportion’: Iconoclastic and Constitutive Metaphor in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” appeared in EHL and “‘Perplex’t Paths’: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Mask” appeared in Renaissance Quarterly.

Robin Hemley’s book, Turning Life Into Fiction (Graywolf, 2006), is going into its 3rd printing.

Cheryl Herr published two essays recently. “Roll-Over-Beethoven:  Johnnie Ray in Context" is in Popular Culture 28, and  “Being in Joyce’s World” has appeared in John McCourt's Joyce in Context (Cambridge).  

Robyn Schiff gave a reading in October at The New School in New York City as part of their Poetry Forum series; and her book Revolver was reviewed in the October issue of Poetry.

Outreach Matters: World Book Encyclopedia short videos

When Jennifer Parello of World Book Encyclopedia was looking to develop a sequence of short videos addressed to high school students answering their questions about literature, she turned to the University of Iowa for our fame as the Writing University.  Steve Pradarelli of University Relations steered the request to the writing units on campus and to the Department of English, recognizing this as an excellent opportunity to get Iowa faculty out into the schools.  Thanks to the following for rising to this call:
Lori Branch
Miriam Gilbert
Robin Hemley
Michael Hill
Steve Kuusisto
Chris Merrill
along with Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science

Here are Jennifer Parello’s guidance about the videos:
1.  These videos are posted online and are intended for students in middle school and high school, so the interview subjects should be relaxed and, in Jennifer’s words, “Try to have some fun with the questions.” In other words, don’t be overly serious or scholarly. World Book’s objective is to use video to encourage students to read more on a particular topic. And based on research that students respond more to videos of “low production values,” these videos are intentionally not slickly produced.
 2.  An example of a question-and-answer situation about Sylvia Plath may be found here (visitors should type in “wballprod” in both fields on the site to view the video).

And here are the questions she was posing:


Historical questions
1.  What’s the oldest novel? The first novel written in English?

2.  Who wrote the first dictionary in English? (brief history of the dictionary)

3.  What's a Greek chorus?

4.  What was the first Gothic novel in English? (discussion of evolution of gothic novel)

5.  What is considered to be the first modern detective story, and who wrote it?

Poetry questions
6.  What did e. e. cummings have against capital letters?

7.  Do all poems have to rhyme? (or What is a poem?)

8.  Why are limericks often naughty?

9.  What are the different types of poetry?

10.  What poets would you recommend to middle-school students?

Questions about authors/books
11.  What's so great about Shakespeare?

12.  Who was Flannery O’Connor?

13.  Is Harry Potter considered literary fiction? (also discussion on other classic juvenile/young adult fiction)

14.  Why do so many famous authors develop alcohol problems or commit suicide?

15.  Who are some writers who may have been unfairly overlooked for the Nobel Prize in literature?

General questions
16.  Why do some schools ban Huckleberry Finn? (discussion on book banning in general)

17.  Is there such a thing as the Great American Novel?

18.  In recent years, we’ve seen top awards go to novels with a heavy science fiction influence, such as The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Are the boundaries between genre and “literary” fiction beginning to dissolve?

19.  Authors such as John Updike got their start writing short stories, but these days, relatively few short stories are published. How has this changed the fiction landscape?

20.  How do you deal with writer’s block?

Watch this space for details on how to access the resulting videos.

Platforms for Public Scholars Matters

The Platforms for Public Scholars conference is this weekend. Organized by Teresa Mangum, it features a distinguished group of scholars who are exploring the currently crucial issue for the humanities of public engagement. The Friday night panel in 101 Becker at 8:00 p.m. features, among others, English department faculty members Ed Folsom and Linda Bolton. Click here for the conference schedule.

Graduate Student Matters

In her role as a HASTAC Scholar (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Techonology Advanced Collabotory), English Department Ph.D. student Bridget Draxler is helping host a month-long online forum, "Democratizing Knowledge." She has been blogging about the Platforms conference, see here.

Ph.D. student James Lambert had an article published in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. Click here to read the article.

Nonfiction Writing Program Matters

Summer/Fall 2009 News


Ann Bauer (MFA 2002) has a new book out: Damn Good Food, a culinary memoir and cookbook (Borealis Books, 2009). She won the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction Award for “The Monster Inside My Son,” published on Salon in March 2009.

Ashley Butler (MFA 2008) has a book, Dear Sound of Footstep, just out from Sarabande and will be reading at Prairie Lights on April 1st, 2010.

Tim Denevi was recently awarded the Thomas P. Jones scholarship to attend the Squaw Valley Writers' Workshop. His essay "Tantrum" is  forthcoming in the fall issue of Arts & Letters.

Wilson Diehl (MFA 2002) gave a reading at Bumbershoot: Seattle's Music & Arts Festival in September, 2009 as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers-in-the-Schools Program.

Andy Douglas (MFA 2005) has an essay, "The World He Loves," in the most recent issue of Bayou.

Patricia Foster has an essay, "You Girls," forthcoming in Fourth Genre and two essays, "Legacy" and "Vertical Drop," in the book Enacting Pleasure, edited by Peggy Davis. Her short story, "A Meeting in the Garden" is out in Antioch Review and her essay "Sick of Smart" is in the current issue of The Florida Review. She had a Stanley Grant to the Philippines but has had to delay it due to illness.

Kirsten Giebutowski (MFA 2007) had a piece, "Things I Have Written in Cover Letters," in McSweeney's Internet Tendency in July. Her short essay on reading Billy Collins poems at the farm stand appears online at Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books project.

Kendra Greene’s chapbook, Love is in the Airport, was purchased by the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest will publish an essay called "Confessions of an Author Nomad" in Poets and Writers Magazine, November/December 2009; and a book review of "Best New Stories From The South, 2009" in the Texas Observer, October 2009. In mid-October, she will be performing from her 2008 memoir Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines at the University of Nebraska-Kearney as part of the Reynolds Writers Series. Over the summer, she gave a keynote at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Dallas and participated in Sandra Cisneros's Macondo Workshop in San Antonio. She was recently named series editor of Travelers' Tales annual anthology, Best Women's Travel Writing.

Jenna Hammerich’s essay, “Undark,” was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2009. She also aired three audio essays on national radio stations.

Robin Hemley’s new book Do-Over appeared in May and has had favorable reviews in such places as The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and Publishers Weekly; he’s been interviewed in such places as NPR’s Weekend Edition and the CBC in Canada. The film rights were optioned by Mandalay Productions. His essay, “Field Notes For The Graveyard Enthusiast” was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2009. He continues to write his “Dispatches from Manila” column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He brought a group of NWP students and others to Townsville, Australia for the Oversea’s Writing Workshop in May and also taught in the Prague Summer Program at Charles University in Prague as well as at York University in Toronto. His book, TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION, is going into a third printing with Graywolf. “Things That Could Have Killed Me” appeared in The Wall Street Journal, May 22nd, 2009, and his story, “All You Can Eat” is in Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions From The Flyover (Quarry Books, Indiana University Press, 2009).

Gabriel Houck (MFA 2009) had an essay, "Point Nemo", published in the Drunken Boat 10th Anniversary issue online this summer.

Kerry Howley has work in the November issue of The American Prospect, the November issue of Reason, and the July/August issue of The Atlantic.

Jeremy Jones (MFA 2009) was hired as an Assistant Professor of English at Charleston Southern University. His essay, "In Search of Dreadlocks and Captain Zero," was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2009.

Amy Kolen (MFA 2000) has an essay, “Moenkopi Dance,” listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2009.

Nick Kowalczyk (MFA 2008) had an essay titled "Manhood, Lorain-Style" published in the University of Iowa's POROI journal and an interview posted online on Rust Wire.

Rossina Liu (MFA 2007) was a finalist in Glimmer Train's "Family Matters" fiction contest for her essay, "Good People." She also has eleven essays in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore (Greenwood Press, 2010).

Tom Montgomery-Fate (MFA 1987) has had his nature memoir, Cabin Fever, accepted for publication by Beacon Press.  A chapter of the book, “Lake Glass,” was published in the summer 2009 issue of Notre Dame Magazine.

Annie Nilsson’s essay "For Milk, For God's Sake" was awarded second place in Fugue's 2009 Nonfiction Contest, judged by Patricia Hampl.

Cheyenne Nimes is the current writer in residence at the Iowa Art Museum, and has nonfiction in the current issue of Convergence Review. She is teaching nonfiction at Iowa and composition at Kirkwood Community College.

Elena Passarello (MFA 2008) won the LBJ journal's 2009 Urb Bird contest for her essay "He Knows Me as the Blind Man Knows the Cuckoo." Her essay, "The Wilhelm Scream," appears in next month's Gulf Coast. Another essay, "Playing Sick" is in the current Superstition Review. Finally, she was the Bernard O'Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction at the 2009 Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Jen Percy received a Stanley Award for International Research and a UI Museum of Art "Word Painter" Fellowship.  She has an essay in the Summer Issue of The Literary Review, the current issue of The Indiana Review, and the next issue of Brevity.

David Torrey Peters (MFA 2009) has essays in the fall issues of Fourth Genre and Epoch, and a short story in the fall issue of The Pinch. His essay "Bamenda Syndrome" won the Grand Prize in the Solas Awards for Travel Writing and was published in Best Travel Writing 2009.

Mike Potter has an essay in the anthology Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon Press, 2009).

Amy Scott’s essay "When the World Explodes" was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2009, and she has a piece, “This Is Not To Say,” in the current issue of Brevity. She took first place in the Arts division in the 11th Annual James F. Jakobsen Graduate Conference last spring.

Angela Stewart has a piece in the current issue of Relief..

Jess Wilson has an interview in the current issue of the Seneca Review Online..

Rachel Yoder’s writing appears or is forthcoming this fall in Action Yes (“Summer of the Raccoon”), Necessary Fiction (“Arizona’s Lonely” ), Nerve (“I, Cougar” ), Wilderness House Literary Review (“Fun in Recover” ), Kenyon Review Online (“Shark”), and Wigleaf (“The Four Seasons” ).  Her piece “Creatures” was awarded third place by Tom Perrotta in Opium Magazine’s 500-Word Memoir Contest and appears in Issue 8.  Her short story “I Want To Forgive Everyone, Trousers” (The Sun) was named a Notable Story of 2008 in Best American Short Stories.

Center for the Book Matters

The UICB’s Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Peter Stallybrass will be on campus Oct. 29th and Oct. 30th.  He’ll be giving two public lectures—“Why We Need to Know How to Write” (Thursday, Oct. 29, 7:30 pm, Shambaugh Auditorium) and ““The Blank History of the Blank Book” (Friday, Oct. 30, 4:00 pm, 304 EPB)—and should be available for smaller meetings as well. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, Stallybrass is a renowned historian of culture, with a particularly alert eye to the history of printing, reading, knowledge, and cultural transformation. He directs the History of Material Texts seminar at Penn, a weekly gathering of book historians and visiting speakers that sets the terms for study in the field. Well versed in both theories of cultural materialism and practices of book analysis, his writings have overturned conventional thinking about literature, religion, and history. Co-sponsored by the Provost’s Office, the UICB, English, History, and Special Collections.

Library Matters

Welcome to Library Matters, a new feature in your e-newsletter.  We thought it would be a good way to regularly let you know about resources, services, and happenings at the UI Libraries.

Collections:

  • Over the summer we updated our English and American Literature LibGuide by adding 19th Century UK Periodicals under the “Journal Articles” tab and African American Women Writers of the 19th Century under the “Selected Websites” tab.
  • A new database we have added to our collection recently  is Parker Library on the Web.  This is the product of a multi-year undertaking of Corpus Christi College, the Stanford University Libraries and Cambridge University Library, to produce a high-resolution digital copy of every imageable page of most manuscripts in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College.  

Services:

  • Digital Library Services (DLS) is offering a new journal hosting service. This new service is part of a larger effort by the Libraries to help advance scholarly publishing. The journals are accessible through Iowa Research Online.  The  journals currently in production (two more are expected to be added this fall) can be found here.  You will note that the look and feel of each journal can be customized. DLS staff are available to help you through the entire process, ranging from developing the site and adding content to requesting an ISSN and drafting author copyright guidelines.  For more information contact Nicki Saylor, nicole-saylor@uiowa.edu in DLS.
  • Now is a good time to remind your students that there is always research help available! Students can contact Kathy Magarrell for an appointment, or stop by the Information Desk in the Main Library.

Happenings:

  • The U I Libraries invites you to hear Molly Kleinman, Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan and a copyright specialist, talk about: “Open Access or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Internet” at noon on Tuesday, Oct. 20th in the Bijou at the Iowa Memorial Union.  This event is part of our celebration of Open Access Week, October 19-23, 2009. Co-sponsors of this event include the Department of Communication Studies, Graduate Student Senate, the UI Center for Human Rights, College of Public Health, Widernet, Executive Council of Graduate and Professional Students, and the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI).

Remember that we work as a team to build the collection, answer your reference questions, talk to your classes, and help you in any way we can.  We’re the liaisons from the UI Libraries to your department.
Marsha Forys  (collections) marsha-forys@uiowa.edu
Kathy Magarrell  (reference and instruction) kathy-magarrell@uiowa.edu

Facebook Matters

The English Department is now on Facebook! Go to http://www.facebook.com/IowaEnglish to become a "fan" of the Department.

Department Calendar

The calendar is now housed on its own page, and both the calendar and Reading Matters are now available via links from the main English Department webpage, making them easier to access. You can find a full listing of upcoming events at the English Department Calendar.

Other Calendars

UI Master Calendar | UI Academic Calendar | NonFiction Writing Program Calendar | The Writers Workshop Calendar | The International Writing Program Calendar

The English Honors Program Calendar

Future Issues

The next issue of Reading Matters will be on Thursday, November 5. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4 to erin-hackathorn@uiowa.edu.