Letter from the chair/Writers in Residence/ Sheldon Greene/Department news/ Nov. 17th colloquium/Suzanne Ferguson/Holiday Party Pix/Words for Wellness/Legacy of Thrity Umrigar/Alumni News//

Letter from the Chair

On a recent Friday afternoon in Guilford House, Camila Ring, this year’s MacIntyre Award winner for the best graduate student essay, presented her dissertation work on Gerard Manley
Hopkins. There were forty people in the room; curious visitors, like Jane Vondrak, the Executive Assistant to the President, stopped by to listen from the hallway. Among the many jewels of
Ring’s talk, one stood out to me. According to Ring, the famous density of Hopkins’s poetry (“dapple-dawn-drawn falcon…”) treats us, his readers and listeners, to an auditory experience
prior to seeing or understanding, an idiosyncratic word-world that is worth exploring on its own terms.

As the fall semester ends, the department is positioned to grow in a way that advances our core values and priorities. We have begun our search for a new tenure-track Assistant Professor of
Creative Writing—in the genre of fiction. We are recruiting graduate students for our fully funded MA and PhD. More temporary visitors to campus this spring will include poet and
memoirist Airea D. Matthews, who is presenting the Gertrude Mann lecture, and Ama Codjoe, our Gary Stonum Writer-in-Residence. Lectures in eighteenth-century literature, Romanticism,
Charles Olson, and American literature will fill out the colloquium schedule through April. We’ll end the semester with a visit from Jill Bialosky, Vice President and editor at W.W. Norton.

This fall, we have welcomed new majors in English, minors in Creative Writing, and new concentrators in Film. Guilford and Bellflower have hosted students across the university who
take our Academic Inquiry seminars. I was curious what might compel a student to declare an English major, so I asked Vida Barzdukas. A double major in English and Classics, Vida replied:

When arriving at Case, I was unsure whether I wanted to major in English, despite
enjoying English classes in high school. I wasn’t sure whether it would be too hard or
whether it would ruin my love of the subject. But when I talked to my friends majoring
in English and when I met faculty members…they took the time to get to know me and
welcome me at events, even though I was not in their department. Their kindness
assured me that English would be a good fit for me.

Vida and the rest of her class in American Literature have been reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. In that world of “faint implications and pale delicacies,” the encounter
between two pairs of eyes brings a deeper understanding “than any explanation would have done.”

As an English department, we examine creative works for the traces of the human intelligence that made them. Confronted by a new poem, film, novel, or essay, we develop hypotheses,
conduct experiments in the human posture of attention. We train our students to navigate uncertainty and contradiction—not through equivocation, but rather through engaged
attention to the varieties of human experience and difference. Sometimes we must proceed with nothing more than the faith that we’ll find something and that the trust in each other will
lead us there.

—Walt Hunter

Voices from Within: Writers in Residence
by Elysia Balavage

“In my neighborhood we think about is you gonna eat or / starve or strive to make it out the trenches.” –C. H., “Trench Baby”

Voice, story, narrative, empowerment.  As students, scholars, and lovers of literature, we know the power of the pen and the potency of poetry. And we’re not the only ones. In Ohio, over 2,000 youths, some younger than 12, are incarcerated in “juvenile correctional facilities”—prisons for minors—with youth of color comprising a disproportionate number of this total. If a completed text can evoke change in mind, ideology, or policy, then what about the writing process itself? Can the act of creative engagement help a marginalized individual, such as a teenager confined to a youth prison, find their voice, or reclaim their individualism?

This is the endeavor of Writers in Residence, an organization that responds to these questions with an emphatic “yes.” Co-founded and guided by Executive Director Zach Thomas, Writers in Residence— “WiR”—works with incarcerated youth and encourages them to write creatively and share their stories. What began as a student-run group at John Carroll University has grown into a nonprofit that connects higher-education institutions with juvenile facilities across Ohio. In short, WiR is an ally and advocate for a vulnerable population.

“Life gets hard before it gets better / Jail food is not good / Life is not easy / Am I gonna get out on my mom’s bday?” J. D., “Untitled”

Everything that the WiR directors, mentors, and student volunteers do has a singular aim in mind: to show the residents that they possess and can assert their unique voices. It is perhaps unsurprising to hear that the juvenile justice system in Ohio fails to rehabilitate imprisoned youth, a distressing reality confirmed by an eight-month investigation into the system. Helmed by Ohio’s major newspapers, including The Cincinnati Enquirer and The Columbus Dispatch, the investigation’s discoveries were published on 11 November 2023, and revealed that 43% of juveniles held in facilities reoffend within three years of release. Without proper support networks, both inside and outside detention center walls, the proverbial snake of disenfranchisement will continue to eat its tail, fuelling a system that steadfastly neglects these young people.

For Spencer Dolezal, WiR’s Re-entry, Community Outreach, and Advocacy Director, Writers in Residence is a support network that offers a chance to escape or prevent the reproduction of marginalization entirely. He notes, “For many youth, the juvenile justice system is a revolving door that is difficult to exit. By providing a trusted adult who can build relationships, help them achieve goals, and build vital life skills, we hope to help these young individuals through a transitional time in their story and to help them see their own potential.” Eliana Tandy, a volunteer with our CWRU WiR student organization, echoes Spencer’s attitude and asserts that “Writers in Residence gives [residents] the opportunity to construct their own narratives and reclaim control over their lives. It is imperative that our community understand the talent and ambition that these residents possess.” By reclaiming their identities and narratives, residents ideally replenish their confidence, self-worth, and even hope.

“My name came from a / beaten soul, not quite put together, not / quite whole…as I grow older I / began to see why my name / was assigned to me,” M. B., “M. B.”

Mentorship, teaching, and expression buttress WiR’s mission, and this is where creative writing enters the equation. It is the organization’s bedrock principle. Teaching artists and student volunteers from local academic institutions lead creative writing workshops in several juvenile facilities throughout the state. And just this Fall, CWRU became an official part of the WiR community with our newly established student organization, aptly named “Writers in Residence.” Since September, our talented, dedicated student volunteers have worked with the residents at the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center (CCJDC) at weekly writing workshops. Student volunteer Hannah Jackson describes her positive experiences with the residents as “rewarding” and “life changing.” She explains, “As you work through the semester with the students, you start to see them open up and lean into the workshops. The work that they produce is exceptional and a true testament to the importance of writing as a form of expression.”

While both the residents and volunteers benefit from the workshops themselves, they are not the end of the process. At the conclusion of each workshop cycle, WiR publishes the residents’ prose and poetry in chapbooks, which are displayed and disseminated in juvenile facilities, on college campuses, and throughout the broader community. For Spencer, publication is an integral component of the process because it allows the residents to feel a sense of fulfilment, a rare experience inside prison walls. He explains, “In publishing their work, we hope that [residents] can take pride in seeing their words in print, and that it will sit with them deeply, so they can continue to write as they grow.”

“[F]loating like nothing / it takes no effort / who needs Zoloft / when you can / just glide by / do nothing,” J. B., “Untitled”

Creative writing indeed can transform lives. As readers, scholars, and writers ourselves, we know the strength of the written word and the catharsis behind the act of writing. The directors, mentors, and volunteers at Writers in Residence know this, too. So, I’d like to end with impact statements from two of our CWRU student volunteers. Through her volunteer work, Eliana both hones her current competencies while simultaneously passing them on to the residents. She observes, “Writers in Residence [is] the perfect opportunity for me to practice my writing skills, learn about the legal system, and positively contribute to my community…I am grateful to be able to support [the residents] in their creative endeavors.” And, in a call to action, Hannah remarks that “anyone who loves reading and writing and wants to share their passion for it with others should volunteer with WIR…Now that we are established on campus, we hope that we can encourage more CWRU students to offer their time to these students and help them navigate the juvenile justice system through writing and mentorship.” The effort of Writers in Residence is collective and cooperative. Students like Hannah and Eliana and directors like Spencer work tirelessly to ensure sunnier futures for Ohio’s incarcerated youth. As emblazoned on the back of each chapbook’s cover, “[t]his is for them.”

If you would like to learn more about Writers in Residence, please reach out to me (exb468@case.edu) or Jamie Hickner (jxh1516@case.edu).

Sheldon Greene Visit
by Hayley Verdi

On Wednesday, October 11th, the English department was fortunate to host CWRU alumnus Sheldon Greene. Greene spoke with a group of undergraduate and graduate students about his career. Beyond his work in a range of legal and public service roles, Sheldon Greene is a prolific author publishing both well-received novels and a number of articles in scholarly journals. His novels include Lost and Found, published by Random House, as well as Burnt Umber, Prodigal Sons, Pursuit of Happiness, The Seed Apple, After the Parch, The Lev Effect, and Tamar. Primarily focusing on his work as a novelist, Greene spoke to students about the value of training in English even alongside other professional pursuits. Gesturing to a stack of his published works, Greene drew students into conversation with his generosity and willingness to discuss his writing process.

As he spoke with students, Greene emphasized the importance of creative work as a source of energy and recreation even in the midst of a demanding career. For him, he explained, writing novels is a way to contemplate aspects of human experience that, in turn, helps to inform his approach to work in other areas. Many of the students in the audience responded to this approach leading to discussion of how Greene finds the time to pursue his creative work. Asserting the value of both reading and writing literature, Greene observed that these kinds of pursuits complemented rather than competed with his professional obligations. As Greene discussed several of his novels in greater detail, his passion for exploring life through developing characters and plots was evident.

Listening to Greene speak about his work as a creative writer took on greater meaning when considered in connection with his achievements in other fields. Sheldon Greene has had a multifaceted career with experiences in a range of fields including law, business, and renewable energy. His legal expertise spans diverse areas, including commercial lending, insurance, personnel, administrative agency matters, commercial construction, contracts, commercial arbitration, and high-impact litigation. Throughout his career, he has been a public interest lawyer, tackling critical issues ahead of their national prominence. He has been a pioneer in addressing challenges such as flaws in the healthcare delivery system, the economic impact of illegal immigration, renewable energy, and public land policies. As a member of the national energy policy team for the Obama campaign, Greene contributed to shaping discussions on both immigration and energy policies. Active in renewable energy for over 25 years, Greene currently holds an executive position in a wind energy development company. His involvement extends to serving on the Board of the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University. Notably, he played a foundational role in establishing the New Israel Fund, drawing on his experience as the General Counsel of California Rural Legal Assistance.

Sitting in the parlor of Guilford with a ring of students around him, however, Greene spoke relatably about the demands of shaping characters, conducting research for his novels, and refining each draft of his work. For us as students, this conversation was a chance to learn about the role of the imagination in both creative work and in the world of work beyond the written page. Greene’s visit encouraged students to consider how their training in English will benefit them even in their pursuits of seemingly unrelated career fields.

Department News

Elysia Balavage gave her talk, “Class and Consumption: George Orwell and the Desecration of Bread,” at Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities in September, and she gave the same talk to Cleveland’s Rowfant Club as well.

George Blake‘s article about the progress of lead safety in Cleveland has been published in The Land.

Cara Byrne presented at the annual MMLA conference in Cincinnati, funded by a flash grant from the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

Michael Clune‘s essay, “What is an Author?” has been published in the 50th anniversary issue of Critical Inquiry.

Vicki Daniel took some of her AIQS students to the Mummies exhibit on October 28th. They visited in connection with Daniel’s Bodies Behind Glass course about human remains in museums.

Charlie Ericson gave a Baker-Nord Graduate Work-in-Progress Talk: “Djuna Barnes, Logic, and Metaphor: How to Take Fiction as Structure” on Tuesday, November 14th.

Mary Grimm has a flash in the new issue of Border Crossing.

Jamie Hickner participated in the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative’s Anisfield-Wolf Faculty Summer Seminar at CWRU, which focused on teaching Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao. 

Walt Hunter’s book of poems, Some Flowers, has been reviewed in the Cleveland Review of Books.

Amber Kidd presented her work as part of a panel on Research Pathways and Community Colleges at the 2023 Humanities Mellon Scholars conference in October.

Kurt Koenigsberger presented work in a seminar on metafiction at the Modernist Studies Association meeting Oct 25th-28th. He also participated in a memorial roundtable for Professor Mark A Wollaeger at the conference.

William Marling‘s podcast on “Anarchism and Rhetoric” aired November 6th on the Anarchist Studies website.

Marilyn Mobley‘s book on Toni Morrison’s narrative strategies is forthcoming from Temple University Press.

Congratulations to Hannah Potantus and Alyssa Viscounte who have both passed their MA oral exams!!

Stephanie Redekop presented her work on essay-writing as a spiritual discipline in November at the American Academy of Religion conference in San Antonio as part of a roundtable discussion of Thomas Merton’s sensory-spiritual labours.

Congratulations to Camila Ring who has won this year’s MacIntyre Prize for her paper “Overhearing Doctrine: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Accident of the Poem.”

Robert Rowan‘s article, “Student Self-Diagnostics: Engaging Students as Co-Respondents to Their Own Writing,” was published in the Fall 2023 issue (9.2) of Journal of Response to Writing.

Robin Beth Schaer read poems as part of Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Afterparty Reading at Cleveland’s Worthington Yards Courtyard.

Martha Schaffer presented a paper at Writing, Thinking, and Learning with AI: Exploring Relationships of Rhetoric and Artificial Intelligence, a virtual conference hosted by the SUNY Council on Writing and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University on October 13th and 14th. Her presentation was titled, “10 Things Teachers Need to Know About AI: A Rhetorical Analysis of Teaching Materials for AI & Academic Writing.”

Lindsay Turner‘s book of poems The Upstate has been published.

The Women’s National Book Association’s 2023 Great Group Reads has selected  Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, The Museum of Failures, as one of their books.

Xia Wu received a fellowship from the Freedman Center and will be directing a documentary about Chinese international students for this project.

November 17th Colloquium

Professor Jaji’s lecture: “Gathering Thoughts: The Anthology as a (Modernist) African Genre.”

News Report from Suzanne Ferguson

After moving here to Academy Village near Saguaro National Park (East) from Florida six years ago to be near my daughter, I’m doing a lot of “journalism.” I write Arizona Senior Academy Website previews for some of the academic and practical lectures we present (such as the UA Osiris-Rex project to bring back samples from the asteroid Bennu or the local fire department on How to Protect Your Home from Wildfires); do reviews and profiles for The American Recorder; interviews, articles and (alas) obituaries for the Viola da Gamba Society News; and engage in “white paper” debates over community governance. This past spring I taught a course at the Village’s assisted living facility on “Poems about Paintings” and have proposed one on “Prosody—the Nuts and Bolts of Verse” for fall, a subject about which I learned much from Bob Wallace’s work. The ASA also sponsors concerts—classical, ethnic, jazz, or eclectic combinations thereof—movies, and art exhibits for ourselves and the public around our desert neighborhood.

What’s more fun, though, is that I play the viola da gamba regularly with a serious amateur quartet we call “Chuparosa” (a desert shrub and a Mexican name for hummingbird). We don’t do concerts but hour-long Early Music Seminars in which we play a few pieces to illustrate some aspect of music before 1700. In June we did “The Early Repertoire of the Viola da Gamba,” with pieces by 15th through 17th century composers, in which we talked about and illustrated the characteristics of the early viol, of the music first played on the viol (nearly all vocal) and how it led to the sophisticated polyphonic English Jacobean consort repertoire. This fall we’ll do a program on William Byrd, during the 400th Anniversary year of his death.

Holiday Party Pix

Words for Wellness at Writers House

As Chief Clinician Experience Officer for the University Hospitals Health System and Professor and Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Case, I have been charged for a number of years with monitoring and improving the well-being of physicians and other health care professionals. The role grew out of the considerable attention “physician burnout” received a few years ago. I set up programs to help build a sense of community among health care professionals, a newsletter to celebrate the achievements of junior faculty members, a confidential hot line for physicians for help with professional and personal needs, and a peer support system for physicians affected by trauma, such as the death of a patient. All this ran quite smoothly. Then came the pandemic and the world flipped upside down.

The first few months were the most traumatic for health care professionals. You’re undoubtedly familiar with images from the news of doctors and nurses in New York working heroically to save COVID patients and being applauded from balconies as they began or ended their shifts. The level of stress in my own institution was high. As our hospitals filled and deaths mounted, how best to tackle the enormous psychological burden became at least part of my duty. It didn’t help that I too was severely affected. I felt isolated, vulnerable, frightened. What was going to ultimately happen and when would it all end?

As the hospital was a place to avoid unless caring for patients, something I did only two days a week as a Department Chair, I found myself with extra time saved from not commuting. The shuttered shops and restaurants also meant that many of the usual distractions were unavailable. To cope with the stress and uncertainty and make good use of any extra time, I turned to an old friend: My passion for writing.

My identity as a writer is as important to me as my identity as a physician. I’m the author of four books, editor of a prominent medical journal, and have served in many editorial roles over the past twenty-five years. I’ve also taught writing skills to physicians for more than twenty years. But I’ve found nothing more fulfilling than writing interesting stories which have become novels. My first novel, Rainy Day Comrades, was published in 2021. Each writer’s process is different of course. I immerse myself in a topic I find interesting. Read what I can. (I’ve spent considerable time reading about the impact of lightning strikes on the brain, and the secret lives of the Amish, for example.) And then construct an interesting story about it. Writing is therapeutic for me. My characters become my friends. I’m sure, of course, what they’re going to do next, and I might be impressed by it, or disapprove of it. They come to life and keep me company in the lonely days in my office.

I began to wonder in 2022 if the benefit of creative writing I experience was something others might as well. There is some evidence that creative writing can be a useful outlet for stress. Some believe that writing allows us to reflect carefully about our own lives, our emotions, and our values. That reflection makes better doctors by being better able to understand patients. In short, there were many reasons for me to share the value of my experience with others. In early 2023, I started Words for Wellness. It’s a group open to anyone interested in creative writing that has at least some connection to health care and Case Western Reserve University. We meet on the last Tuesday of every month for an hour and a half at the Writing Resource Center. The agenda includes discussing our individual writing projects, group exercises in response to writing prompts, peer feedback, and planning for publication. This fall we have been focused on short stories and spend considerable time understanding the genre, developing ideas, and correcting basic problems of usage and style. I am the group’s leader but I learn as much as everyone else. We have been growing slowly, adding roughly a new member each month. We now number around twenty active members. Some join us by Zoom, but most come in person. We serve a light dinner and members are welcome to bring whatever they wish to drink.

Health care professionals in academic settings are often highly driven, and have a strong need to accomplish tangible things to feel that their time has been used wisely. So each of us is to complete a short story ready to submit for publication (somewhere appropriate) by the end of January.

I welcome everyone to come learn more about us.

Sincerely,
Goutham Rao, MD
Goutham.Rao@UHHospitals.org

The 20+ Year Legacy of Thrity Umrigar; or, The White Whale of the Blank Page
by Matthew Greenfield

During my last seven weeks as a Case undergraduate, I would hold up blank signs on the circle in front of Kelvin Smith Library every Thursday during what was then dubbed “Provost’s Hour,” a class-less interval when student groups would demonstrate, protest, and/or advertise. After seeing a gamut of signs with actual writing on them during this weekly community time, I literally meant nothing by it. Whether I was juxtaposed with vitriolic Iraq War protestors, pro-choice demonstrators, IMPROVment advertisers, other-cheek-firmly-turned Christian groups, or even the cold rain falling down (as it did one Thursday in late March), my blank signs took on nuances of meaning that I could not have anticipated at the outset of this social experiment: some thought I was satirizing protest as an effective means of political expression, others thought I was advocating for white supremacy, and one older man thought I was conducting a vision test which he was not able to pass. When I saw demonstrators in China this past year holding up blank signs of paper to protest government censorship, I understood even more the power of blankness.I am reminded of that chapter from 1851 called “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Melville, The Herm Whale himself, was such a brilliant pre-post-modernistic author that it seems odd to me that he does not include a would-be writer’s blank white page as a foreboding sign of horror and apprehension for artistic types everywhere. Nonetheless, Ishmael and doubtless Melville too must have had a writerly Ahab of some sort to invoke a higher (or lower) power and bless (or curse) his sharp writer’s implement before stabbing out at the blankness and proudly leaving his marks on those proverbial blank white leaves. I had such a captain—thankfully not an Ahab—to give me the confidence to take my first proud stabs at writing but, more important than that, to give me the inspiration to captain my own vessel one day.

As I approach the 20th anniversary of my graduation from CWRU, I am reminded yet again of the debt I owe to that institution and to the English Department in particular. Before my years at Case, I was writing closet drama—not in the style of the Romantics but instead plays meant for my closet rather than any real audience. It was only after I was introduced to the workshop model at Case that I ventured to share my writing with a broader public. For the past 20 years, I have attempted to bring that same workshop model to middle- and high-school students. Each and every workshop, I am reminded of my original instructor, my first captain, Professor Thrity Umrigar.

I was lucky enough to have Thrity as a teacher during her first years at Case, during which time I took four courses with her, traversing genres from Creative Writing (ENGL 203) to Short Fiction to American Fiction to Journalism. By the time 2004 approached, I knew I was headed into education after graduation, and I took mental notes of Thrity’s teaching style that I have consulted over the past two decades much more often than any published teacher’s guide or state-approved curriculum. With Captain Umrigar, I discovered the strength of my voice and the range of my style; no matter the genre, Thrity inspired each and every writer in workshop or literary analysis or interview write-up to discover their own perspective. I look back now at my early writerly experiments with pride, and I have tried my best over the past two decades of teaching to emulate Thrity in action. Between 1,000 and 2,000 students have come into my classrooms and I’d like to think that most all of them exit with the same pride in their craft and their words that I have had since I exited Case in May 2004. In fact, when I was offered the chance to take on the Creative Writing program at Gilmour Academy here in Gates Mills, I copied borrowed much of Thrity’s design of ENGL 203. My students’ success is as much Thrity’s legacy as it is mine.

As for me, I fared much better than Cap’n Ahab. Some ten years after I graduated Case, when I greeted a daughter into this world, I decided to take on the Herm Whale himself, crafting a chapter-by-chapter parody/homage of Moby-Dick but flipping the patriarchal script: an all-male whaling crew embarking on the high seas in the 19th century is replaced with an all-female high-school trivia team in the 1990s, navigating a labyrinthine sister-school library one Christmas Break looking for the answer to an elusive partly-faded question prompt (called “the Mocha-Rich” after a variety of coffee). Whether this work should also be considered part of my and Thrity’s legacy, I leave up to discerning readers of this newsletter with time and patience enough to tackle an Ishmaelian voice and digressive narrative structure: https://rise-of-west.com/epic/mocha-rich-or-the-question/ (Regardless of if you make it all the way to the end, please comment at the bottom of the page and let me know “How I’m Driving.”)

I, for one, hope that Captain Umrigar continues to stab that white whale: not just the rapidly-filling blank pages of her impressively growing canon but also (and perhaps just as importantly) indirectly filling up the reams just now being born, swimming in the depths to face Generations Z and Alpha. With Captain Thrity at the helm, those white whales don’t stand a chance.

Alumni News

Alum (’91) Will Allison’s second novel, the New York Times bestseller Long Drive Home, has been selected by the Ridley Park (NJ) Public Library’s One Book, One Town reading series for October 2023.

Iris Dunkle (’10) will begin teaching in the MFA program at Dominican University beginning in January.

After graduating from CWRU in May 2020, Brian Eckert started a graduate program at Johns Hopkins where he graduated with a Master’s of Liberal Arts (MLA) in May 2022. Right now, Eckert’s applying to PhD programs to start in Fall 2024. He had two poems (“Just Cancer” and “Spoopy Tejas”) published in the Spring 2023 issue of Confluence, where his first peer reviewed essay will also be published in Spring 2024. It’s titled “The Artist’s Novel: Defining the Künstlerroman.”

Alum (’81) Bonnie Jacobson‘s manuscript The Mystery of Food and Thought: 100 sonnets was one of five finalists in the 2023 Passager national poetry competition.

Brian McLaughlin (’16) is halfway through with his PhD in Hispanic literature at the University of Salamanca. He says: “still grateful for the skills I learned in Guilford, whether in English or Spanish. Thank you to all my professors and mentors for helping me on this path through academia.”

Aaron Perine (’16) interviewed Nia DaCosta, the director of The Marvels recently.

Brandy Schillace (’10) spoke at the University of Lynchburg in October.

Brita Thielen (’22) was recently elected to the chapter board of Apra-MN. It’s a two-year term beginning in January. Apra is the professional organization for prospect researchers and those in related roles within nonprofit development.

Marie Vibbert (’10) taught “Three Sentences to Unlock Your Plot” at Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator in September.

Send Me Your News

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which more than five hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.

The post Department of English Newsletter: December 2023 appeared first on Department of English.

//Letter from the Chair/Burgess-Van Aken Retirement/Grad Student to Medical Writer/Earlier This Year/Department News/The Way We Write Now/Alumni news//

Letter from the Acting Chair

This spring, I have had the privilege of serving as the department’s Acting Chair – don’t worry our intrepid poet-scholar, Walt Hunter, will return next semester – and, while I am no stranger to administrative tasks, I confess that this particular appointment has given me an entirely new appreciation for the depth, breadth, and awesome diversity of our department. We really do contain multitudes. (Apologies to both Walts.)

Over the last several months, we have celebrated the births of new members of our extended departmental family (welcome, again, to Malek, Julian, and Clara!), and we are eagerly anticipating the arrival of several new faculty colleagues next fall. We have served an essential role in the university’s brand-new Unified General Education Requirement, offering one hundred and nineteen Academic Inquiry Seminars to this year’s incoming first-year students. This spring, our English majors are taking an exciting array of courses, from Science and Magic in Renaissance Literature (Maggie Vinter) to Trans Minor Literature (Baker-Nord Postdoctoral Fellow Aaron Hammes), from African American Dramatists (John Orlock) to Hitchkock (Rob Spadoni). In her doctoral dissertation defense just last week, Hayley Verdi demonstrated the value of interdisciplinary inquiry by adopting and interrogating narrative medicine advocate Rita Charon’s concept of the “corporeal gap” for the ways that it allows new readings of nineteenth-century illness narratives.

All semester, I have had a soundtrack weaving its way in and out of my consciousness, returning always to David Bowie’s “Changes” with its haunting imperative chorus: “Turn and face the strange…” It is a strange world, indeed, when headlines proclaim that generative artificial intelligence will soon make our jobs as teachers obsolete and our literary craft a quaint relic of slower times. And yet. According to Annettee Vee, our speaker for the Edward S. and Melinda Sadar Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines last December, the  “intelligence” in artificial intelligence resides in the reader and not in the chatbot. She suggests that in our fascination (and horror), we imbue Chat-GPT with our own deeply human facility for connection, interpretation, invention. The initial jolt of recognition – when the technology accurately predicts syntactic structures and produces an application letter, a five-paragraph essay, a reader’s report – might best be faced with curiosity rather than anxiety. What can we learn about the routinized forms that characterize contemporary discourse? How should our students engage with the bland prose (and verse) produced by these tools?

In realms where pixels dance and bytes take flight,

Where ink meets algorithm, shaping words with might

The union of writing and AI begins to ignite,

A symphony of creativity in digital light.

–ChatGP

This makes me think what we do – both in our classrooms and in our creative and scholarly work – is still relevant and necessary. I look forward to facing the strange and imagining new possibilities together, as humans.

–Kim Emmons, March 2024

A Few Words on the Occasion of Barbara Burgess-Van Aken’s Retirement

by Bernard Jim

During the more than sixteen years that we have worked together at Case, Barbara has been a colleague, a mentor, and a friend.

Ours is a friendship that is a study in contrasts I suppose. When we go out for a drink, she orders wine, and I order beer. Barbara is diplomatic, poised, and thinks about the long game. I am impolitic, rash, and want to get my licks in. She taught me that there is more than one way to achieve your goals.

She is everything you could want in a mentor, and when I desperately needed a mentor, she obliged me. Generous with her time, connections, and opportunities, she’s a patient listener who knows how to talk you down from a ledge. Maybe she will take up hostage negotiations in her retirement?

She works hard, but never complains. (Editor’s Note: At her retirement party, she claimed that she does, in fact, complain. But not to me, apparently!) When you saw how much time and effort she put into the Celebration of Student Writing, for example, you didn’t need her to ask you, you wanted to pitch in.

As her colleague, I noticed that she built relationships rather than networks. Before any of us, she had developed relationships with Siegal Lifelong Learning Center, with Reflection Point, with Case Wellness, and with the Bar Manager at l’Albatros. You will not be surprised to learn that Barbara was selfless about sharing the benefits of those relationships..

I remember when we were doing observations, and I visited Barbara’s classroom. I guess it was for the sake of the Observed, but I was the one who learned something. My classroom is like a mosh pit. Hers a ballet. I am full of nervous energy. She was all grace and agility. Barbara had complete command of her seminar, and it calmed all her students down. She led the room in a few minutes of quiet meditation at the start of class. They knew she cared about their well-being, and her colleagues knew she felt the same way about them.

In the early days of SAGES, the Fellows would gather over the holidays and exchange silly gifts. Barbara would bring her Christmas cookies. They had intricate designs — trees, holly leaves, Santa — and she iced them with fine details. The care she took with those cookies was the same care she always took for her students, colleagues, and friends.

Barbara, from all of us whose lives you have touched over the past 21 years — Thank you!

After years as a higher education administrator and consultant for nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions nationwide, Barbara Burgess-Van Aken earned her PhD at Case Western Reserve University and embarked on a career of college-level teaching and research. Her academic interests include early modern women writers (particularly playwrights), Shakespeare, and higher education pedagogy.

From English Graduate Student to Medical Writer: Reflections on the Journey

by Mary K. Assad (’14)

I decided to pursue my MA in English because I was drawn to the power of literature. I wanted to read the most beautiful language I could find, examine what made it so moving, and craft analyses that would make others think, “wow, what a fascinating insight.” As a professor said in one of my earliest seminars, our goal was not to study ordinary language, but rather the most extraordinary language.

After completing my MA, I continued into the PhD program. Soon, I started to find myself drawn to language that wasn’t so extraordinary, at least not on the surface. Language of everyday life, language that gets things done. Ordinary language. I grew interested in the field of rhetorical studies and the ways in which scholars parsed language in all areas of life to gain insight into the human experience.

Taking a course on the rhetoric of health and medicine was like pulling back the curtain on a window I never knew was in the room. I realized that when you study ordinary language in a healthcare context— like personal health narratives, public health posters, or pharmaceutical ads — you could learn how people connect over shared diagnoses, or you could start to understand the fears or misgivings that patients bring to medical encounters.

Discovering medical rhetoric changed my doctoral path and shaped my approach to classroom teaching. It also made me realize that somewhere down the road, I wanted to be the one writing the messages I was analyzing. I wanted to have the opportunity to educate people on health and illness in ways that would, hopefully, inspire or empower them. Graduate studies in English led me to where I am today: working as a medical writer for Cleveland Clinic.

I have written about 250 articles in a little over two years, each one averaging 2,000 words. They’re published to the Clinic’s online Health Library, which aims to reach readers (mostly through web searches) across the nation and world. Each week, I receive several new assignments, and sometimes they’re vastly different.

I might be writing about RSV in children while researching a rare genetic disorder and finishing up a piece on the social determinants of health. I’ve written dozens of articles on surgeries, mostly cardiac and vascular. I’ve learned which blood vessels connect with the heart and at which chambers, and I’ve examined diagrams of the eye to figure out how to explain a corneal disease.

I am a humanities student thrown into a science classroom where the measure of my success isn’t a final exam but an essay I must produce to help someone understand how a disease is affecting their body. Or their loved one’s body. Maybe their child. I feel so responsible, and sometimes so helpless.

But I also feel empowered. This is something I never dreamed of doing when analyzing imagery in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s something I never knew could be possible with a PhD in English. It’s a place I never would have reached without a deep appreciation and love of the English language and its poetries, its harmonies, its rhythms and whispers. The extraordinary language that drew me to Guilford House is still in my heart and my mind, and studying it allowed me to realize how much we need words, in all their shapes and structures, to understand ourselves and our shared existence.

I have produced more ordinary language than I ever thought I could. I am told to make my sentences shorter and simpler. I remember to add more paragraph breaks and bulleted lists. And I make a note that it’s OK — even a good idea — to start sentences with conjunctions. Then, readers will feel connected. They’ll engage and understand. And maybe they’ll feel more confident asking their doctor a question or speaking up about their side effects. Maybe they’ll be the voice for their spouse or their aging parent. Perhaps I can reassure them there’s hope or remind them of their agency in a healthcare system where it’s all too easy to get lost or never have the opportunity to enter at all.

I am a medical writer producing words that will never be literary, nor will they pretend to be. I simply want to craft language that will make a reader think, “wow, so that’s how it works” or “now I understand.” I seek to explain which symptoms should prompt a doctor’s visit, or how a parent can manage a new diagnosis in their child.

The words we use to talk about health can have the power to move someone to pick up the phone. To feel more confident as a caregiver. To feel they’re not alone, or not to blame. And to me, that’s pretty extraordinary.

Earlier This Year

Jimmy Newlin delivering his lecture “Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television” in January.

 Josh Hoeynck delivering his lecture in February: “Archival Apocatastasis: Completing the Charles Olson and Robert Creeley Correspondence.”

Department News

George Blake’s article about the progress of lead safety in Cleveland has been published in The Land.

Cara Byrne and Kristin Kondrlik (’16) recently published their article “Rainbows in the Window: Static Childhood in COVID-19 Children’s Picture Books” in New Directions in Childhood Studies: Innocence, Trauma, and Agency in the Twenty-first Century.

Michael Clune‘s novel Pan will be published by Penguin in 2025

Congratulations to Cadence Dangerfield and Ellard Stolze who both passed their MA oral exams!

On Tuesday, January 23rd, Vicki Daniel gave a Zoom talk to the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture at the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society. The talk was titled, “‘Could a situation be more ghastly?’: Doctors, Disinfectants, and the Dead After the Johnstown Flood of 1889.”

Hayden’s Ferry Review has published five of Joseph DeLong‘s visual poems and an interview with him as part of their online folio Mixing up Media.

Mary Grimm has won the C&R Press Award in Fiction for her book of short stories Transubstantiation.

Aaron Hammes, a postdoc in our department, is featured in The Daily.

Walt Hunter‘s book Some Flowers was reviewed in the Cleveland Review of Books.

In late December, Kurt Koenigsberger was awarded $1.49M by the Mellon Foundation, in support of a third phase for the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative (which he directs), running through June 2027.

Dave Lucas gave the keynote at the annual conference of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Language Arts (OCTELA) in Columbus.

Alexandra Magearu published a short story about the criminalization of abortion in 1980s Romania in the other side of hope,

Marilyn Mobley‘s book on Toni Morrison’s narrative strategies is forthcoming from Temple University Press.

Jimmy Newlin‘s book Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television was published by the Strode Series in Renaissance Literature and Culture of the University of Alabama Press.

Steve Pinkerton‘s review essay, “Ralph Ellison, Democracy, and American Vernacular Culture,” will appear in Resources for American Literary Study, 45.1.

Stephanie Redekop has received a 2024 Life Worth Living Faculty Fellowship from Yale’s Center for Faith & Culture

Camila Ring’s piece, “Precisely Knowing Not: Emily Dickinson and Generative Negation,” is now out in ELH.

Earlier in March, Robin Beth Schaer led an open-level and multi-genre workshop on Nature & Ecological Writing in Cuyahoga Valley National Park for Literary Cleveland.

Lindsay Turner’s poem “The Forest / Wanting a Child” was published in The New York Review of Books.

Thrity Umrigar had a review of Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life published in the New York Times.

Hayley Verdi began her new position as Writing Center Coordinator at Ursuline College in January.

Marion Wolfe just had a chapter come out in an edited collection. Her essay is co-written with Elizabeth Rodrigues and is titled “Post-it as Praxis: Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives” from the collection Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood: In the Spaces Provided, edited by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle.

Saar Zutshi, an English major with a concentration in film, is one of two Case students who will show work at the Short. Sweet. Film Fest.

The Way We Write Now

by Dave Lucas

—“Who is speaking thus?”—

English faculty of a certain generation may have been haunted through graduate school by that question of Roland Barthes’s. In those days it was a delicious theoretical proposition: the death—and rebirth (and redeath?)—of the author.

Today the question returns—with far more practical stakes for those of us concerned with English studies and writing pedagogy. Who speaks? Our students? Or artificial intelligence?

If you believe the hand-wringing think pieces that accompanied the public debut of Chat GPT, in November 2022, you might think that the author is long dead, the student essay next, and complete submission to our new robot overlords not too far down the road.

Annette Vee, the 2023 Edward and Melinda S. Sadar Lecturer in Writing in the Disciplines, says it’s not that simple. In her December 11th lecture, “Automating Writing from Androids to AI,” Vee argued that attempts to automate writing are nothing new, despite the novelty of large-language model technology.

The eighteenth-century Swiss clockmaker Henri Maillardet produced a complex automaton that could write, if not compose. A century ago, W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees turned to the spirit world for creative inspiration, as Georgie’s “automatic” writing, or psychography, became the basis (even if she never received an author’s credit) for the poet and occultist’s late work, A Vision (1925).

But it’s not just the writing that so worries and excites various observers. It’s the intelligence itself, and with it, a question of Alan Turing’s that might be set alongside Barthes’s: Can machines think?

If by “think” we mean “do human language” (a different, similarly complicated question), then the answer is no. Not yet, anyway. Vee, who teaches and directs the Composition Program at the University of Pittsburgh, explains that what large-language models like Chat GPT (that’s generative pre-trained transformer) do, instead, is to gather text and predict language based on a data set. These networks “learn” statistical relationships in large sets of data (text on the internet, for example) by exchanging language for numbers, turning those numbers into vectors that map relationships between words, then using that multidimensional map to produce words in a likely sequence.

In other words, Chat GPT isn’t speaking to you; it’s predicting what someone might say. If it looks like AI is reasoning, Vee argues, that’s because we fill in the reasoning. We humans are still—for better or worse—the (non-artificial) intelligence. Perhaps this is why—as our own Walt Hunter has argued—Chat GPT remains a lousy poet. (https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/02/chatgpt-ai-technology-writing-poetry/673035/)

What about our students’ papers? Vee reminds us that—whatever our best pedagogical intentions—we’ve never known with absolute certainty who’s writing those, whether our students or their roommates or someone else entirely. Whether those essays were composed in a dorm room or bought online or manifested from an astral plane, we can never truly know.

We can develop and employ software to police other software, or we can recognize the opportunity at hand: Chat GPT, Grammarly, and other writing applications offer us a chance to reengage with our students in a discussion of the complexities—the very human struggles and victories—of the writing process

Indeed, as Vee reminded us in her lecture, the best faculty approach requires no technology whatsoever, only that human element that artificial intelligence cannot replicate: talk to your students. Ask them their own thoughts and fears about AI, other emerging technologies, and enduring creativity. Listen to what they say. Our human interactions remain—for the time being, at least—where language, thinking, and writing remain most truly alive.

Edward (ADL ‘64, MED ‘68) and Melinda Melton (FSM ‘66) Sadar established the Edward S. and Melinda Sadar Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines in Spring 2009 to showcase research and scholarship in writing across the disciplines, including the histories, cultures, and contexts of specific writing practices, writing instruction, and communicative technologies. The lecture is held annually.

Alumni News

In 2023, Mary Assad (’14 ) gave invited presentations in two fellow CWRU alums’ writing classes: Kristin Kondrlik‘s Professional and Technical Writing course (West Chester University) and Danielle Nielsen‘s Writing for the Web course (Murray State University). Mary’s talk, “Professional Writing in a Healthcare Setting,” focused on what it’s like to work as a medical writer, how to get started in the field, and how to craft health content that people can understand. Mary is entering her third year as a medical writer for Cleveland Clinic’s Health Library.

Lisa Chiu (’93) has an essay in Labor Of Love: A Literary Mama Anthology about the foods her mom prepared for her after she gave birth.

Laura Evers (’18 ) has an interview in The Georgia Review with poet and Cave Canem 2022 Prize winner Ariana Benson about her book Black Pastoral.

Alum (’16) Kristin E. Kondrlik’s article has been published in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Journal. This article represents an international perspective on celebrity, media and pandemics. Kondrlik worked with @wise.beck, @colleenderkatch, and Hua Wang on this idea, which grew out of a Twitter conversation during the pandemic.

Andrew Reichel (English BA with film concentration, ’17) is concluding his final year at New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Master of Arts Program. His most recent internship was with Electronic Arts Intermix in New York City.

Brad Ricca (’02) interviewed Henry Winkler at his Writers Center Stage appearance in November.

Brandy Schillace (’10) discussed her new novel—The Framed Women of Ardemore House—at the Orange Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

In February, Michelle Smith once again orchestrated her annual performance showcase Blax Museum.

On February 29th, Nadia Tarnawsky presented “Vesna Krasna: Beautiful Spring,” an exploration of Ukrainian spring songs at the Ukrainian History and Education Center.

Alum (’07) Christopher Urban‘s long short story / novelette “The Reading Lamp” was recently published at On the Seawall.

Alum (’10) Marie Vibbert’s latest story just came out at Clarkesworld—Rail Meat”–a professional thief tries her hand at being living ballast in space yacht races.

Send Me Your News

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which more than five hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.

The post Department of English Newsletter: March 2024 appeared first on Department of English.

Graduation Day/Letter from the Chair/Writing Program Faculty Awards/Students to Progressive Field/Making the Colloquium Happen/Department News/Promotions & New Appointments/Recalling Lee K. Abbott/Alumni News/In Memoriam/Send Me Your News

Graduation Day, May 2024

Graduation selfie with (back row) Hayley Verdi, Isabelle Toler, Cadence Dangerfield, Kurt Koenigsberger, and (front) Kim Emmons.

Letter from the Acting Chair

My Aunt Dottie is the family archivist – her garage is bursting with documents, magazines, furniture (“for someone’s first apartment”), and memorabilia from her travels. Recently, she sent me a packet of newspaper clippings dating from the Moon Landing through the inauguration of Barack Obama. Leafing through the surprisingly intact newsprint (it has, after all, spent decades in a Los Angeles garage), I was reminded of something my mother once said to me, when I was grumbling about a high school history assignment. “You only really appreciate history,” she said, “once you have lived a little while.” Now that I have, I hope I find time to appreciate the value of looking back, even as I look ahead.

This time of year in academe means that anticipation and nostalgia arrive together, with cheers and with tissues. This spring, we celebrated the accomplishments of our many undergraduate students, applauding the 20 who earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts, 12 of whom achieved Honors in English, and 15 additional minors in English, Creative Writing, and Film. We applauded the outstanding work of the authors of 15 English Capstone projects, as well as the Sigma Tau Delta (English Honor Society) members, and the writers and editors at The Observer and The Case Reserve Review.  We also recognized our graduate students for their determination and excellence, especially those earning the degrees of Master of Arts (Cadence Dangerfield, Hannah Potantus, Ellard Stoltz, and Alyssa Viscounte) and Doctor of Philosophy (Hayley Verdi).  And, finally, we cheered for the department’s many award winners, including outstanding student writers and excellent teachers.

We are excited to welcome new students and faculty to our department this fall. While fuller profiles will appear in this newsletter in future editions, please join me in happy anticipation of the arrival of: Caren Beilin (Assistant Professor of Creative Writing/Fiction), Chiyuma Elliott (Professor of English/African-American Poetry & Poetics), Steven Justice (Distinguished Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies), and Ben Mauk (Associate Professor of English & Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and Media Writing). We will also be welcoming new Writing Program Lecturers, once those searches have concluded this summer. I look forward to the fall, when the halls of Guilford House and Bellflower Hall will once again be filled with bustle and creativity.

In Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day,” written in honor of President Obama’s inauguration, the poet describes quotidian acts (“the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables”) and the presence of history (“our ancestors on our tongues”) as precursors of possibility. “In today’s sharp sparkle…” the poem sings, “any thing can be made, any sentence begun.” To all of our graduates: I look forward to learning what sentences you will begin next. To those of us returning to campus next fall, I look forward to the collaborative compositions we will author together.  Happy Summer!

–Kim Emmons (June 2024)

Writing Program Faculty Awards Announced

The Writing Program is pleased to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of student writers and writing faculty at CWRU. Writing is fundamental to the work of the university: our words enable the development and circulation of knowledge, create and sustain our communities, and advocate for social and community action.

Congratulations to the faculty and student writing consultants whose expertise and dedication have supported our writers at all stages of their careers.

The Jessica Melton Perry Award for Distinguished Teaching in Disciplinary & Professional Writing* recognizes outstanding instruction in writing in professional fields and/or disciplines other than English. This year’s winners are:

Dr. Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Art History. As a graduate instructor, Dr. Gertsman is recognized for her thoughtful approach to her PhD students’ writing development. She provides many writing assignments with useful feedback, and she shares her own writing process as a scholar. As one student eloquently described, “Prof. Gertsman teaches us how to critically approach the authors of our field and learn a spectrum of writing qualities in our vibrant class discussions. She lets us voice all the aspects we enjoyed as well as our critiques, and then she gently guides our views and suggests further insights. She also gives us frequent writing assignments during the semester in every class. Her critical feedback on these assignments allows us to improve incrementally and map our own progress.” Dr. Gertsman’s writing instruction is a model for all faculty who work with graduate students as they endeavor to be scholarly writers.

Dr. Suet Kam Lam, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. One of Dr. Lam’s medical students explained, “I would describe her teaching philosophy as one that allows the student freedom to try on their own with frequent follow up and discussion for improvements.” This philosophy clearly informs Dr. Lam’s mentoring and support of medical students at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. Dr. Lam supports her students with instruction on organization and explanation, emphasizing the importance of situating one’s work in a larger body of research. She provides future doctors with a firm foundation in scientific writing.

The AIQS Innovative Teaching Award recognizes transformative teaching methods and approaches that enhance the experience of our first-year students in Academic Inquiry Seminars. This year’s winner is Cara Byrne, Lecturer in English. Dr. Byrne is notorious for her accolades as a teacher, mentor, and writing consultant throughout the university. She is a passionate advocate for students, children, and innovative teaching. In her AIQS course on children’s literature, she enables her students to write academic essays, to think critically, and to consider their own and others’ values and perspectives–just as an AIQS should do. But Dr. Byrne goes beyond that, lugging lots of children’s picture books across campus for students to see and feel, partnering her class with a local group of second graders in order to experience reading through their eyes, and engaging students in multimodal communications with visuals, materials, and recordings. Students rave about her course and about her. Dr. Byrne, always humble, writes, “All in all, I am passionate about my work as an AIQS instructor. Even though I have taught first year writing for many years, I’m constantly seeking ways to improve and help my students develop as critical thinkers, writers, and ethical decision makers. I’m deeply grateful that I get to do this work.” The Writing Program is grateful to have her.

The WRC Excellence in Consulting Award recognizes outstanding writing instruction for students of the University and exemplary service to the Writing Resource Center during the academic year. This year, two consultants were recognized for the high quality of their consulting work:

Narcisz Fejes, Lecturer in English. Dr. Fejes received numerous nominations from the students with whom she consults in the Writing Resource Center. She is highly regarded for her supportive and helpful practices as a consultant. As one student explained her experience with Dr, Fejes, “Talking through my thesis and my claims, and answering Professor Fejes’ questions helped me to make my points more clear and more concise – increasing the overall quality of my writing. Ever since I booked appointments with Professor Fejes before every major writing assignment I had to turn in, and I’m planning on continuing this habit in the upcoming semesters. I’m really grateful for Professor Fejes’ kind and encouraging coaching, and for her highly professional yet clearly understandable advice.” Another student captured all of Dr. Fejes’s nominations with this short but sincere sentiment: “She’s amazing.”

Sarah Secrest, Undergraduate Peer Writing Fellow. As a Peer Writing Fellow, Sarah offers meaningful opportunities for undergraduates to consult with another student about their writing. Described by several nominations as patient and helpful, Sarah provides useful advice in her consultations with the larger and more profound effect of boosting writers’ confidence. And Sarah makes her consultations fun, with some of her peers reporting they enjoy talking to her about their writing.

* The Jessica Melton Perry Award was established in 2009 by Edward S. Sadar, M.D. (ADL ’64, SOM ’68), & Melinda Sadar (FSM ’66) in honor of Melinda’s mother, who worked in the Center for Documentation and Communication Research at Western Reserve University from the late 1950s into the late 1960s.

–Martha Schaffer

Students Take an Early-Season Trip to Progressive Field

Students from English 307/307C, the Magazine and Sports Feature Writing class, attended a Cleveland Guardians game along with journalism instructor Denise Polverine. The trip was part of the class’s final project in which students were assigned to write a feature story from the game. During the outing, students were asked to observe and research all that goes into the experience of a Guardians game.

They interviewed Vice President, Communications and Community Impact, Curtis Danburg, during a press box tour. Several students also conducted interviews with fans attending the game. It was a chilly night at the Guardians game, but the students had seats in the press box and worked alongside professional sports journalists from a wide range of media outlets. A professional sports writer may not always be assigned to covering the hits, runs, and errors, but instead may be assigned to covering the unique and unpredictable experiences of a specific game. The students put into practice the skills they have been honing all semester such as turning their curiosity on a topic into a viable feature story, observation, research, fact-checking, storytelling, and more.

The students also needed to integrate multimedia storytelling into the final article by using photos and/or video and social media as it made sense, in addition to a written article.

–Denise Polverine

Making the Colloquium Happen

Charlie Goyal and Tychicus McClendon making the colloquium happen.

Department News

Next year’s common reading selection is Daisy Hernández’s The Kissing Bug.

Elysia Balavage has a short piece, titled “Rebellious Space and Radical Movement: The Dil Pickle Club of Tooker Alley,” published in Genealogies of Modernity.

Kwame Alexander spoke to three sections of Cara Byrne‘s AIQS 100: Children’s Picture Books. Alexander shared that he was a premed biochemistry major at Virginia Tech until sophomore year Organic Chemistry encouraged a switch to an English degree.

Michael Clune‘s “Anatomy of Panic” has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2024, forthcoming in October.

Mary Grimm has a memoir piece in The New Yorker: “Swimming with My Daughters.”

Walt Hunter has an essay on “Lowell and War” in Robert Lowell in Context.

Denna Iammarino‘s class, AIQS 100: What is a Book?: Art, Function, Form, visited the Morgan Conservatory for a papermaking session. Andrew Mancuso and Dani Fish from KSL led the session.

English major Hannah Jackson discusses her spring break abroad with The Daily.

Megan Jewell‘s essay “First Feminism” in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts: ‘Draft 49’ as Counter Archive” will appear in Thinking with the Poem: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis from the University of New Mexico Press in 2024.

Kristine Kelly delivered a paper titled “Disappearing Points and Practices of Mobility in Teju Cole’s Everyday is for the Thief at the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies annual conference in February.

English major Malachi Levy received second place in The Guthrie Public Speaking Prizes which are awarded each spring for excellence in public speaking by undergraduates at Case Western Reserve University. His speech was titled “Ignorance and Wisdom: Lessons to Be Learned from Hip-Hop.”

William Marling‘s photo “Said’s Book Shop,” from his book Killers in Tutus (2017), plays a role in the documentary “Chanting of the Dunes” directed by Mokhless Al-Ha

Michelle Lyons-McFarland presented a paper titled “The Travels of Memoirs of the Duke of Sully” at the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies 2024 annual meeting in Toronto on April 5th. The panel was sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America and called “Bibliography by the Numbers: Meta-Bibliography and the Study of Eighteenth-Century Book Culture.”

Elizabeth Miller received the Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to study Russian language in Latvia this summer with the University of Georgia! She is a third year student, double majoring in English and International Studies, and double minoring in Russian and Political Science.

Marilyn Mobley presented a paper on her forthcoming book at the Toni Morrison Society panel at the American Literature Association meeting in Chicago on Saturday, May 25th. Her co-presenter was Dr. Herman Beavers, professor at University of Pennsylvania (in the middle), and their respondent was Dr. Robert T. Tally, Jr., professor at Texas State University and editor of several series in geocriticism (sitting at the end). Also in the photo is the session chair, Dr. Carolyn Denard, founder of the Toni Morrison Society. Mobley’s paper was “Two Scholars, Same Neighborhood, Divergent Rereadings: Rereading Toni Morrison through Spatial Literary Studies.”

Jimmy Newlin presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association of America. He appeared on a panel dedicated to his collection of essays, co-edited with James W. Stone, titled New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains.

On Saturday, March 23, two sections of Stephanie Redekop‘s AIQS seminar “13 Ways of Looking at Taylor Swift” visited the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. One of the curators led them on a private tour, and the visit informed and inspired students as they created their own mini museum exhibits for the course.

Camila Ring‘s blackout poem, “Tidal Song: A Dirge for Earth” was published in Gordon Square Review’s Solar Eclipse special issue.

The Spanish translation of Robin Beth Schaer‘s poetry collection Shipbreaking will be published next month by Komorebi Ediciones in Chile. The book was translated by Agustina Pardini and Eleonora González Capria

Lindsay Turner‘s poem “Forms of Displeasure” is on Poetry Daily.

Thrity Umrigar‘s novel, The Space Between Us, is featured in this scholarly work.

Congratulations to Hayley Verdi on her successful dissertation defense: “Bodies That Feel and Tellers Who Report: The Work of Illness Narratives in the 19th Century.”

Lucas Yang presented at the Pop Culture Association Conference in March.

Promotions and New Appointments

Gusztav Demeter (promotion to Senior Instructor)

Walt Hunter (promotion to Professor)

Lindsay Turner (promotion to Associate Professor with tenure)

Caren Beilin (appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor)

Chiyuma Elliott (appointment as Professor)

Steven Justice (appointment as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies)

Ben Mauk (appointment at the rank of Associate Professor with tenure and the position of Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and Media Writing)

All of these promotions/appointments will take effect July 1, 2024.

Recalling Lee K. Abbott

by Lee Morgan (’87)

In 2012, I was chosen to be a field veterinarian for the Annual Iditarod Sled Dog Race held every March in Alaska. It is a 1049-mile journey from Anchorage to Nome, and takes competitors through some of Alaska’s most challenging conditions. Dogs and humans pit themselves against steep mountain passes, bitter cold, fierce winds, and traverse the frozen Norton Sound. I was thrilled to be part of the adventure. My job, along with an army of veterinary volunteers, was to make sure that the dogs were healthy enough to compete. Stationed at any one of 26 checkpoints, we examined each and every husky-dog. Injured, ill, or tired dogs were removed from the race, cared for by the veterinary staff, and flown back via bush plane to Anchorage to await reunion with their team after the race. That first Iditarod was an amazing experience for me. I relished the opportunity to be in the Alaskan wilderness so much I have been a trail veterinarian for almost every Iditarod since then.

I kept a journal. After several years and several notebooks full of accounts, I decided to write a book about my adventures. In one sense writing Four Thousand Paws: Caring for the Dogs of the Iditarod: A Veterinarian’s Story took me twelve years, as I began writing during that first experience, and then adding to it each year. In another sense, it took a year for me to formulate each individual story into a sensible narrative.  Creating a book from pages of journal entries is not an easy endeavor. However, the task was manageable because of the lessons I learned from my creative writing teacher, Lee K. Abbott.

During my senior year at CWRU, I took Creative Writing 101 under Lee K. Abbott. As a biology major with a chemistry minor, I hadn’t had the opportunity to study some of the more interesting electives. However, Fate deigned that I would be 1 credit short of graduation, and the powers that decide such things dictated that I would provide them with that 1 credit, or no diploma.

I had written all my life, although not as a serious undertaking.  I wrote mainly for myself; small stories, humorous anecdotes, lots and lots of travel journals. But nothing with structure or discipline.

The first day I walked into Lee Abbott’s class, I was intimidated. Everyone seated looked the part of a serious writer. They exuded the aura of confidence which the naturally artistic radiate. I exuded only a nervous sweat.

Two weeks into my freshman year, I had suffered that same feeling. I didn’t belong here at CWRU. The people were too smart, the classes were too hard, and I was too unprepared. I needed to transfer and soon, perhaps to a small community college. I crept into Coach Bill Sudeck’s office to announce my plan. “Thanks for the opportunity to run for you, Coach, but I am drowning here.”

He took the measure of me, and in the voice and phraseology that coaches everywhere have been born with, replied, “Ah, Morgan (those that have ever played for, run for, worked for a coach know that athletes only have last names), you have it here,” he said, pointing to his legs.” And you have it here,” this time pointing to his head, “Ya need to have it here,” now pointing to his heart. Typical coach-speak, minimizing life’s tougher choices. It was all he said and it was all I really needed to hear.

So I slid into the middle row of Mr. Abbott’s classroom, the perfect place for the mediocre to hide; in the middle. Mr. Abbott introduced himself. He was young looking, as though he had only recently graduated himself. His first words to the class were, “I want to dissuade as many of you as possible from becoming professional writers.”  Whether this was tongue-in-cheek, or he was being quite sincere, I still haven’t figured out. I took this as a good omen; I had no intention of becoming a professional writer.

Mr.  Abbott believed strongly in the maxim that writers write. “Don’t tell, show” was one of those dictums. “Avoid stereotypes and cliches, both in character formation and description” was another. And of course, “Write, always.”

With each lecture we were expected to submit short passages of our own, based on the material presented. For instance, if we discussed “Character Development”, we were expected to bring in a short composition incorporating that subject. However, most of one’s grade would be based on the quality of a short story we had to present. The remainder of the year would be devoted to a classroom discussion of each short story.

Since the beginning of that class, I had been contemplating a theme. Once, a few years before, our family had attended a concert of Glenn Miller music. The Airmen of Note, his big band, performed at the Air Force Museum in Dayton. The band set up right there among the aircraft on display. I enjoyed Glenn Miller, and for my parents, this was the music of their youth. My mother and father began swing dancing. And as the music continued, my mother danced deeper and deeper into total oblivion. She was a young girl now, listening to the popular tunes of her time. She danced with complete abandon, transported to a time and place where having a family was as far removed from her as was the war then raging in Europe and the Pacific.

As I watched my mother swing around the room, moving with so much grace, executing moves that would leave any disco dancer floored with envy, I was struck by the fact she had lived her own youth.  I had always seen her role as “My Mother,” a needed extra in my own story where I was the central character. Seeing my mother completely absorbed in the music, unaware of us kids, I realized she had once lived an entire existence long before I was even the most remote idea in her mind.

I chose this as a basis for a short story I crafted about a young boy who finds out that his grandfather had once done something of note, and he has the same realization. One of the peculiarities of Mr. Abbott’s class was that you were allowed to make changes to your short story, even if you had already handed it in. Thus, after an hour of listening to criticisms of other stories, I would identify passages in my own where I had made similar errors. I would race back to the fraternity house, make the changes, and race back with the revised copy.

I liked the final form of my short story and felt I had crafted it to the best of my ability. Still, I was anxious as Mr. Abbott seated himself.

“Well, what do we think?”

The class got busy critiquing my writing. Generally, it was very positive. Halfway through, though, Mr. Abbott stopped the discussion, something he had never done before. He got up from his chair and leaned against his desk. He began describing an experience he had as a child. He recounted how once he and his brother had been driving around with their father, running errands. It was something he said, they enjoyed doing every weekend, just time for the men to spend together. As they sat in the back of their family’s Oldsmobile, they noticed that their father had a bouquet of flowers sitting next to him. They drove outside their New Mexico town to a neighboring area which neither brother had visited before. Soon, their car pulled up to a small cemetery. Their father stopped and picked up the flowers as Lee and his brother exchanged quizzical glances. He slowly walked up to a headstone and gently placed the flowers at its base. He then returned to the car, not saying a word.

“Who was that?” Lee asked for both brothers.

“My first wife” was his father’s reply.

No further words were exchanged as they drove the remainder of the trip in silence.

Mr. Abbott explained that this was the first time he too had come to the realization that his parents had a life far removed from his own. He then turned and asked me to comment on my own story. He said he was making an exception for the author to speak about their work because he felt personally moved by it. He then added that my story was “tied for third best story” he read that year. For me, this was (and still is really) the biggest compliment I had ever received from a professor. At the end of the course, I asked him to inscribe my copy of his work, Strangers in Paradise. He wrote “To Lee- who’s set the high mark for himself”. It sits on my shelf now, beside a copy of my own book.

One of the main reasons I wrote my book Four Thousand Paws, was that I wanted my son Spencer to have a record of some of my life’s most meaningful experiences. I wished for him to see that his parents had a life, full of dreams and adventures that stood on their own. For him to have the same realization I made about my mother, and Mr. Abbott made about his father all those years ago.

Lee K. Abbott served on the faculty of the English department of Case Western Reserve University from 1976 to 1989, during which period he won one of his two O. Henry Awards and all three of his Pushcart Prizes. Lee was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature in 1982. His collection, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, won the 1980 St. Lawrence Award for Fiction; he has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies.

Alum (’87) Lee Morgan practices veterinary medicine at Georgetown Veterinary Hospital in Washington, D.C. He has been a field veterinarian for the Iditarod for the last twelve years. His first book, Four Thousand Paws: Caring for the Dogs of the Iditarod: A Veterinarian’s Story, was published by Liveright/W.W. Norton and Company.

Alumni News

Ali Black‘s debut full length poetry collection, We Look Better Alive, will be published by Trio House Press.

Assistant film/TV writer/alum (’16) Julia Bianco‘s fantasy novel Broken Coven will be published by St. Martin’s.

Cadence Dangerfield (’24) will be teaching at Hathaway Brown this coming academic year.

Alum (‘10) Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb is being published by the University of California Press.

Miriam Goldman (’10) has recently been promoted to Principal Consultant at RQM+.

Beginning in Fall 2024, Jamie L. McDaniel (’04) will begin a three-year appointment as Director of Women’s and Gender Studies. He is a Professor in the Department of English at Radford University.

In Memoriam

Zita McShane LeFevre (1939-2024) received an MA in English from Cleveland State University in 1975. She went on to the doctoral program at Case Western Reserve University where she was a student of Gary Stonum. She earned her PhD in 1983. Her dissertation was titled “Functions of the Grotesque in Twentieth-Century American Fiction.” She taught technical writing at CWRU for several years, went on to Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York, and then to Frostburg State University in Maryland from which she retired around 2010 as Professor Emerita. She died in Texas on January 12^th.

Send Me Your News

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which more than five hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.

The post Department of English Newsletter: June 2024 appeared first on Department of English.

Walt Hunter has an article in The Atlantic—“The Two Women Who Wrote as ‘Michael Field.’”

The post Current Work appeared first on Department of English.

Letter from the chair/Welcome back lunch/Department news/New faculty/Ada Limon/September colloquia/Journey to publication/Alumni news/Send me your news//

Letter from the Chair

It was the middle of a Friday afternoon in late August and the atmosphere was buzzy in Guilford House. Over a plate of chicken wings and sliders, Laura Sarafian, a first-year student studying English and Dance, was chatting with a group of juniors and seniors. “I wouldn’t have talked if I didn’t feel so comfortable here,” Laura noted in passing as she skipped out to Friday afternoon dance practice. The English Welcome Back lunch is a tradition of departmental hospitality, an invitation to the CWRU community to join us as we begin again.

The lunch also marked a new beginning for several English faculty who have recently arrived: Caren Beilin, Assistant Professor; Chiyuma Elliott, Professor; Steven Justice, Distinguished Visiting Professor; and Ben Mauk, Wormser Chair of Journalism and Media Writing. They’ve expanded our course offerings in journalism and magazine writing, fiction writing, narrative and medicine, the Harlem Renaissance, William Langland—and that’s just for the coming academic year. In the Writing Program, new lecturers Michael Druffel, Xixin Qiu, Kevin Lucas, and Amy Sattler bring their expertise to our first-year writing and non-native speaker courses.

With their prominent research and award-winning work, our new faculty enhance the national reputation of the English department and advance its excellent record of teaching. On any given day in Guilford or Bellflower, students are preparing for their classes: Shakespeare, Black British literature, and Detective Fiction; new seminars on “Free Press and Protest” and “Rhetoric and the Art of Public Speaking”; graduate seminars on Milton’s Paradise Lost and The City in American Literature. First-year doctoral student Juliana Amir told me why she chose to study at CWRU over other competing programs:

The creative work and writing produced by the professors was inspiring. I was also drawn by the interdisciplinary approach, which allows students a limitless opportunity to learn and explore similar ideas from different fields.

The English department does not aspire to uniformity, that “hobgoblin of little minds.” We aim to transform the minds of students by encouraging them to explore, to respect the commitments of others, and to pursue the wayward course of the slightest hunch.

I asked Professor Elliott what it was like to join the English department at CWRU. (Keep an eye out for her forthcoming book, The Rural Harlem Renaissance.) Her reply captures my desire for this year and the years to come in Guilford House and Bellflower Hall: “I can’t wait to see what we dream up together.”

–Walt Hunter

Welcome Back Lunch!!

Friday, August 30th, 2024.

Department News

Juliana Amir‘s chapbook Mythic Perspectives just came out from Bottlecap Press.

Caren Beilin is included in the new Bloomsbury textbook Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (2024), particularly her piece “Freinds” (fanfic of Friends, the sitcom) for the chapter on “Creative Repurposing.”

George Blake‘s article “Addressing the injustice of Cuyahoga County’s pre-trial detention policy” recently appeared in The Land.

Cara Byrne participated in the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Collaborative Summer Faculty Seminar. Led by Dr. Derrick Williams, the focus this year was the male achievement gap, specifically the dwindling numbers of Black and African American men in higher education.

Michael Clune was named a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, and is now listed on the masthead.

Classics major Silvana Corrales Cantelmi’s paper–“Beyond the Myth: Reassessing Rape and Revictimization in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”–has been accepted to the Ohio Classical Conference (OCC), where Silvana will present on a graduate student academic panel.

Vicki Daniel ran the 2024 virtual Graduate Student Conference for the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science on Friday, September 13.

Narcisz Fejes is now the Associate Director for Undergraduate Programming and Initiatives at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

Mary Grimm has a new flash, “Painted on the Sky,” at Stirring.

In September, Jamie Hickner and Valentino Zullo will co-facilitate the first of four book discussions of the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Award winners. On Tuesday, September 17, Monica Youn’s poetry collection, From From will be discussed. This discussion series is co-sponsored by Cleveland Public Library, the Ohio Center for the Book, The Cleveland Foundation, Ursuline College, and Case Western. Discussions take place at 6:30 p.m. at Bookhouse Brewing in Cleveland.

Walt Hunter discusses poetry’s place in the larger world.

Kristine Kelly presented “Shaping Sympathetic Classroom Communities: Interactive Games about Mental Health” at the Keystone DH conference in May.

English and French major Susie Kim discusses her internship in New York City with The Daily.

Dave Lucas took part in the First Wednesday Reader Series along with Roger Craik on September 4th in Youngstown.

Michelle Lyons-McFarland published “Review of On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations, by Stephen Ramsay” at ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830.

William Marling was a member of the organizing committee of the international conference “Aimer Charles Bukowski” at the Universite Bordeaux Montaigne on June 6-7. He also presented the closing paper, the first ever examination of Bukowski’s art: “Charles Bukowski’s drawings: sketching Europe in Los Angeles.”

Ben Mauk has a piece in The Nation, an essay on the life and work of the late anthropologist/political theorist James C. Scott.

Marilyn Mobley was interviewed at the Union Market Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, about her new book, Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing (Temple University Press) on Thursday, September 5th. The interviewer/moderator in the photo is Dr. Dana Williams, Dean of Graduate Studies at Howard University, President of MLA, and immediate past president of the Toni Morrison Society.

Steve Pinkerton and Elysia Balavage will be speaking at “Literary Cleveland Presents: A Tribute to Franz Kafka,” an event that marks the centenary of Kafka’s death.

Campbell Pratt’s article, “Implications of Touch and the Importance of Nonsexual Intimacy in the Biographical Materials of Pedro Zamora,” was published in the Macksey Journal.

Lindsay Turner‘s first poetry book, Songs & Ballads, will be published in France in August as Chansons & Ballades (Joca Seria editions, translated by Stéphane Bouquet). The book was celebrated at the Écrivains en bord de mer festival in La Baule, France, where Turner gave a reading, and was reviewed in L’Humanité.

Thrity Umrigar is a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction for her novel The Museum of Failures.

New Faculty in the English Department

Please join the department in welcoming these new faculty members for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Mark Your Calendar: April 2025!!

Ada Limón, Poet Laureate of the United States, will present at the English Colloquium on Saturday, April 12th, 2025.

September Colloquium Events

Steve Pinkerton‘s lecture: “The Profane Preacher and the Modern American Novel.” Friday, September 6th, 2024.

Arielle Zibrak‘s lecture: “Manifesting in the 19th Century: New Thought and the Emergence of Positive Thinking.” Friday, September 13th, 2024.

Journey to Publication

by Julia Bianco (’16)

It started with forcing my poor second grade teacher to read the 20-page short story I had written instead of the sentences he wanted for the vocab homework. And with a librarian who knew me by name and weekly trips to the town Book Barn, used paperbacks going for five cents apiece. It started without a question in my mind that I would write a story of my own some day.

It warped with pages upon pages of unrelatable high school required reading, the chore of it making me forget why I loved books in the first place. With the pounding pressure of the world to pick anything else, to backburner the big dream in favor of something more reasonable. I came to college with it buried, determined to shoehorn myself into science and math.

Luckily, dreams don’t stay quiet. Writing found me again in my freshman year, when a friend recruited me to write for The Observer. Writing for the paper– and eventually serving as News Editor and Director of Web and Multimedia– got me back in front of the keyboard and reminded me of the beauty of crafting a story. I also started taking English classes, earning minors in English and Creative Writing and getting the honor of learning from Professor Thirty Umrigar who taught me how to identify the building blocks of the storytelling I’d been absorbing my whole life.

After graduation, I made one more valiant attempt at the reasonable path, spending a year working as a reporter at a local TV news station before deciding that if I only got one life, I was going to knock it out of the park. Over the years, my love of storytelling had extended from books to television, and I decided to get my MS in TV Writing from Boston University.

During that time, I wrote my first novel, a sci-fi called Interlopers. It was, frankly, not good. I wrote it completely from the hip– no outline, just vibes– and the plot was a hot mess. But I finished it. This beautiful, book-shaped thing that I printed out at a local FedEx so I could hold it in my hands. My very own novel. My five cent paperback.

It was heartbreaking at the time, but in hindsight, I’m very glad that I wasn’t able to find a literary agent for Interlopers. It was my first pancake– messy and imperfect, but it helped me nail my recipe down. And it got me hooked on the novel-writing bug.

After graduate school, I moved to Los Angeles and started working in the entertainment industry, first at a management company, where I sent a lot of emails; then at a development company, where I also sent a lot of emails; and then, after COVID hit, at the same development company, sending a lot of emails from my living room. With more time on my hands, I dove into writing my second novel, an expansion on an idea I came up with during a CWRU creative writing seminar. Calamity was a very personal book, one that quickly became a repository for all of my early pandemic anxieties– more of a panic diary than something that could actually sell. But every writing project, whether it’s meant to be read or not, is a learning opportunity. I honed my sense of structure, voice, and character, all of which would come into play in my next book– Broken Coven.

Meanwhile, I made strides in my TV career, landing a job as an assistant on a multi-camera comedy on HBO Max. My first time in a TV writers’ room was a dream. You go to work every day and sit around a table with some of the smartest, funniest people you’ll ever meet, and then you just… create. There’s no better training as a writer for being light on your feet, quick to pivot, and able to hear notes.

There’s also no better reminder of the passion and fun that can come from writing something you really love, which is what led to Broken Coven. It was the book I wanted to see in the world– the voice-y characters and expansive fantasy I’d loved as a kid, mixed with the romance and angst I’d become obsessed with as a teenager, with a dash of the mysteries and thrillers I’d started reading as an adult.

And this time, I had the experience of writing two books under my belt. I knew I needed an extensive outline. I knew how to set deadlines for myself and work at the fast pace of TV. And, perhaps most importantly, I knew I could do it.

Writing Broken Coven was a three year on-and-off process, moving from outline to first draft to second draft as I balanced jobs in film and TV. The book went from good to great when I started working on a supernatural dramedy TV show with a similar voice and genre to my book. If writing is a muscle, I was doing Crossfit every day. I started coming into work two hours early every morning to write, and eventually, through many more edits and critique partners, I nailed down a draft that was ready to go to literary agents.

To be frank– trying to find an agent sucks. You will become obsessed with the sound of your email notification. You will reread your first 10 pages so many times that the words stop feeling real. You will question if any reasonable person would choose to do this. But eventually, you’ll get the break that makes it all worth it.

Mine came after doing a major revision at the request of an agent, who then gave me my first offer of representation. I wound up with seven agent offers total, and chose to sign with a wonderful agent at CAA.

If you’d asked me at the time what I thought the next part of this story would be, I’d have said more months of waiting as we repeated the querying process all over again, this time with publishing houses. But my rockstar of an agent had my first offer of publication within two weeks, and an auction going a couple weeks later. The whole thing was so surreal that I honestly barely remember it. At the end of my auction day, some friends and I went out to dinner to celebrate and I almost fell asleep at the table as the adrenaline of the last month all flew out of my body at once.

And now here I am, five months later. When I look back at my diary entries from a year ago, when I was getting near daily rejections from agents, I’m in awe of how far I’ve come. I’m editing my novel and plotting its sequel, and someday, someone will walk into a library and ask the librarian where they can pick it up.

Sometimes, being unreasonable pays off.

Bianco’s novel Broken Coven, a grounded contemporary fantasy about a Los Angeles-based witch coven, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2026.

Alumni News

The New York Times bestselling novel Long Drive Home, by Will Allison (’91), was adapted for the stage in September 2024 at Theatre Aspen’s Solo Flights 2024, an annual one-person play festival.

Ali Black has two poems in the Cleveland Review of Books.

Shelley Costa (’83) has a new Marian Warner mystery out.

Iris Dunkle (’10) is interviewed about Sanora Babb and her forthcoming biography: Riding Like the Wind:The Life of Sanora Babb on Access Utah.

Jasmine Gallup (’17) worked for INDY Week, a local alt-weekly newspaper in her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. In February, she quit her full-time job to travel abroad for a year. She was able to pursue her dream thanks to a freelance editing job that allows her to work remotely from anywhere.

Paul Hay (’10) has been promoted to Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Hampden-Sydney College. His first monograph, Saeculum: Defining Historical Eras in Ancient Roman Thought, was published in 2023 by the University of Texas Press.

After teaching 23 years at the recently closed Notre Dame College, serving as department head for at least a decade and promoted to full professor there, Amy Kesegich (’01) has accepted a position as Visiting Professor of English at Lake Erie College.

After 42 years in education, the last 25 at Lynn University, Jeff Morgan (’99) has retired from full time teaching. In fall, he is slated to run a four week Robert Frost class at a local lifelong learning center and teach a Creative Writing class at Lynn, where he started months after earning his doctorate at Case, working closely with Roger Salomon and Bob Wallace, whose guidance led Morgan to four books, numerous essays, and too many poems to count.

Annie Nickoloff (’16) won several Ohio SPJ Awards! She got first for Best Reporter in Ohio for her magazine’s circulation size, along with first for Best feature reporting and 2nd for best aers reporting.

Here is alum (’70) Mary Turzillo’s latest book, which she co-wrote with SFPA Grandmaster Marge Simon. It is presently on the Elgin ballot: Cast from Darkness, Mind’s Eye Publications, December 2023.

Marie Vibbert (’10) is teaching a class on plot.

Alum (’88) John Vourlis‘s documentary The House Next Door was released officially on July 16th.

Send Me Your News!

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which almost six hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.

The post Department of English Newsletter: September 2024 appeared first on Department of English.

Letter from the Chair/Holiday Party/Department News/Sadar Lecture/Intersections/Summer Internships/Colloquium/Alumni News/Send Me Your News//

Ryan Pfeiffer delivers the MacIntyre Lecture on Friday, December 6th:
“Edward Taylor’s Epideictic Imagination.”

Letter from the Chair

One of my favorite descriptions of a university comes from the poet Adrienne Rich, who calls it “a place where people can find each other and begin to hear each other.” The other day– a wet December afternoon at the end of classes–I saw Rich’s definition put into practice. The English department had gathered in Guilford Parlor to hear the fall semester’s undergraduate Capstone presentations. One student, Hunter Lin, read their original poetry, including a searing poem about addiction that returned to the same line over and over. Another student, Carsten Torgeson, presented the stories of refugees and thought carefully about the act of speaking for others. The program concluded with Charlotte Goyal, who had been interning at the Cleveland Clinic while finishing her degree. Charlie recounted how she found herself speechless, unable to transform the pain and suffering she witnessed into what she felt would be an adequate language. And so her capstone project became her courageous attempt to write through that cautious silence.

These three students had one thing in common: they had found a faculty mentor who had heard them out and encouraged them to risk putting their ideas into narrative prose and poetry. Their very different Capstone projects were a reminder that the intellectual commitments of the university and the department are thriving, and constantly taking on new vehicles and voices.

This spring the department continues its growth and expansion: our faculty will help students learn how to read poetry, fiction, and plays; to learn the foundations of creative writing, journalism, and professional writing for law, health, and business; to immerse themselves in Jane Austen, the Harlem Renaissance, Science Fiction films, and much more. We’ll also bring in Ada Limón, the poet laureate of the United States, for a conversation with the provost on April 12th, the culmination of a lively colloquium series of speakers that includes Iris Dunkle, Michael Snediker, and Yopie Prins.

The purpose of an English department is to bring students and faculty together to talk about ideas that take on a singular form in creative works of great beauty and imagination, and to learn how to express these ideas clearly and vividly in writing– in other words, to find each other and begin to hear each other. I’m proud of what we’ve done this fall and of the contributions we’ve made to the intellectual life of the campus and the broader community. Every semester is an unfinished project, with the action continuing deep underground, soon to emerge in a fresh configuration in the spring.

–Walt Hunter

The English Department Holiday Party

The party was hosted by Gary Stonum and Marilyn Shea-Stonum.

Department News

On November 7th, Juliana Amir spoke at Dobama theater to the cast and crew of Peter Pan about J.M. Barrie’s life, his works, and Scottish folklore to give them some background information.

Elysia Balavage‘s article, “Orwell, Class, and Consumption: The Desecration of Bread in The Road to Wigan Pier,” is forthcoming from English Studies.

Michele Tracy Berger‘s debut collection of speculative stories,  Doll Seed: Stories, was published in October by Aunt Lute Books.

Jacob Bowers has a book review of Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible forthcoming from the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

On October 9th, Joan Spoerl from the Literacy Cooperative met with Cara Byrne‘s AIQS 130 students. They completed several service projects (including preparing picture books for distribution and upcycling damaged picture books into puzzles) and learned a lot about the Imagination Library program (started by Dolly Parton), child development, and literacy in Cleveland.

Best American Essays 2024 features an essay by Michael Clune.

Joe DeLong presented his paper “Fantastical Disorders in Haruki Murakami’s Fiction” at MMLA.

Charlie Ericson‘s article, “Hieratic Morality: Ali Smith and Hannah Arendt,” has been accepted for publication at Contemporary Literature.

Nárcisz Fejes is one of the faculty organizers of the Ecology, Attention, Action Discussion Group, which is funded by the Expanding Horizons Initiative of the College of Arts and Sciences. Everyone is welcome to attend their monthly discussion groups centered on ecological attention. .

Mary Grimm is interviewed about her third book, Transubstantiation, in JMWW.

Jamie Hickner chaired and moderated the panel “Shaping Discourse on Racism and Diversity: The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards” at the American Studies Association’s Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD in November.

Walt Hunter wrote an article about Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain.

Kristine Kelly‘s article, “A work, or a walk, in progress: Associative practice in Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked,” is included in the recently published collection Ruptured Commons, edited by Anna Guttman and Veronica Austen.

Dave Lucas has written the libretto for an upcoming cantata, “A Moment’s Oblivion,” to be performed by Les Délices this February.

Ben Mauk co-wrote “The Long Road from Xinjiang” with the writer Nyrola Elimä which was published in the New York Times Magazine on November 10th. The story follows one man’s escape from China and long incarceration, part of their two-year investigation into a human smuggling route in Southeast Asia and China’s transnational repression of Uyghur asylum seekers.

Marilyn Mobley discussed her new book at Elizabeth’s Bookshop in Akron, her hometown. Carla Davis, former director of marketing and communications at the Akron-Summit County Public Library and former president and board chair of the Akron Press Club moderated the discussion about Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing (Temple, 2024).

James Newlin delivered the Dr. Paul J. Kane Memorial Lecture at Concord University on Thursday, November 7th. His paper was titled: “Signs and Semblances: The Problem of Likability in Some Recent Productions of Much Ado About Nothing.”

Ryan Pfeiffer presented a paper titled “Robert Bridges: Technical Virtuosity: How Schemes Engender Value” at the ALSCW conference in Washington DC on October 19th.

Robin Beth Schaer took part in a panel conversation on “The Beautiful Struggle” as part of the Case Western Reserve University’s Social Justice Institute Think Tank featuring a keynote address by Marc Lamont Hill in October.

Robert Spadoni delivered “Style in Star Trek“:  a Faculty Work-in-Progress Lecture in December.

Carsten Torgeson has an article up at Matter: “Refugee Stories: Getting to Know Leondard.”

Lindsay Turner has three poems in the October issue of Poetry.

Maggie Vinter is featured in Discussions: The Undergraduate Research Journal for CWRU.

Marion Wolfe and Gabrielle Parkin, along with Peer Writing Fellows Sarah Secrest, Pehel Patel, Bernice Eads, and Vani Subramony, presented the roundtable “Product Over Process: Negotiating Conversations about AI at a STEM-Focused University” at the International Writing Center Association’s annual conference.

Lucas Yang won the M. Rick Smith Memorial Undergraduate Student Essay Prize at the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference.

The Sadar Lecture

Cassandra Phillips delivers the Sadar Lecture on Monday, December 9th–“Literacy and Materiality: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching To Reach All Learners.”

Student Research Projects

Student Research Projects at Intersections (December 2024).

Summer 2024 Internships

I’m a rising junior and an English student here at Case Western Reserve. Last summer I worked for Midstory, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that focuses on creating media to advance the Midwest narrative—which means working on journalism that uplifts and prioritizes Midwestern voices, rather than the dominant media coverage from the East and West Coasts.

An internship made possible from Tim O’Brien’s support helped pay for the rent, groceries, and transportation costs of living and working in urban Toledo for 10 weeks. Without support, this experience would have been financially impossible for me, and I’m so grateful to have had this opportunity to learn about the professional environments of both nonprofit and journalism industries. The best part of Midstory was the way that interns get to build their own experiences, and whether it was drafting stories, research, interviewing, designing, or creating audiovisual content, I was truly able to do a bit of everything this summer.

Heading into the first weeks, while I was confident in my writing abilities, I had very little training in writing news-style stories. With the help of workshops, writing exercises, and the infinite patience of my mentors for panicked questions, I adapted to the kinks of AP style (I’m shocked and offended that modern journalistic standard is to omit the Oxford comma).

My biggest project this summer was compiling a history of the Akron Sound, a supernova explosion of alternative music that burned brightly and briefly in the mid-1970s. It produced Devo, an international sensation, but also a slew of wildly creative, critically acclaimed punk bands like Tin Huey, the Rubber City Rebels, and the Bizarros. The best part of Midwestern culture is the way that it’s so passionate and close-knit, and getting to interview members and fans of the bands was an incredible way to explore that. My absolute favorite quote was from an interview with Harvey Gold of Tin Huey, on the uniqueness of the Midwest’s art and creative expression:

“When [Akron’s] rubber shops left, it created absolutely — and very quickly — a real schism, a cultural dissonance, an economic dissonance. But you still have the kids, [who, to this day,] have that cultural, aesthetic hunger as part of our DNA…You had some pretty strange bands coming out of Cleveland. You had some really high-intensity bands come out of the Detroit, Ann Arbor area because of the car industry going down. Everything in the steel industry went down in Pittsburgh. The effect is a little different in each town; there’s a certain recipe that each one of them had that was a little bit unique. If you take that and then throw in the herd mentality of the record labels — you got yourself the Akron Sound” (How Akron Became ‘the New Liverpool’ of Punk Music).”

Getting to publish that story has truly been one of the highlights of my writing career. I had complete creative control—I created the graphics, secured rights to the images, and designed the image and text layouts. Contributing to the Sigma Tau Delta seasonal newsletter was a great primer for that process, and I’m excited to continue that work as editor-in-chief for the coming fall semester.

–Lucas Yang

As a Creative Production Intern for Centre Stage Theatre in South Carolina, I spent two months this summer learning the ins and outs of non-profit operations and theatrical production. My internship spanned from May 27th to August 19th, following my graduation from CWRU. Therefore, I was able to propel into the internship with vigor and a newly acquired Bachelor of Arts. In the first half of the internship, I focused on the administrative side of theatrical operations. Specifically, I shadowed both the Artistic Director, Laura Nicholas, and the Marketing Director, Cheyenne Rivenbark. Additionally, I worked alongside the New Work Coordinator, David Veatch, to plan the 2025 New Work Festival, hosted by the theater every January. In an effort to plan this festival, we started setting up venues, checking the calendar for appropriate dates, and publicizing to writing communities and other potentially interested participants. While shadowing Laura Nicholas, I attended meetings with the board of directors, audited auditions for the upcoming season, and aided in the day-to-day operations of the theatre as well as the mounting of two productions: Legally Blonde the Musical and Beautiful: A Carole King Musical. While shadowing Cheyenne Rivenbark and working with David Veatch, I learned how the theatre publicizes its shows and events. Along with Cheyenne’s guidance, I contacted local newspapers and social media outlets to market the summer productions.

In the second half of the summer, I continued many of my administrative duties, however, I also began to Assistant Direct for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. As Assistant Director, I attended every rehearsal and worked alongside the director to hone the work. I was able to use my time as a CWRU English major to excavate central themes of the narrative and use those motifs to bring the story to light with intention and clarity.

My entire experience as a Creative Production Intern for Centre Stage Theatre allowed me to understand the operations of a non-profit theatre from many different perspectives. My collaborations with others of varying occupations allowed me better understand arts administration as well as the creative process. With the tremendous aid and experience from the CWRU English Department and the support from an internship made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support, my experience allowed me to dually learn from a new group of people in an original, challenging experience and to contribute my knowledge to a new community. I look forward to continuing to use the skills acquired from my time as a CWRU English major, and I thank the department for its support and guidance.

–Maizy Windham

November Colloquiuum

Sharon Holland‘s Lecture on November 1st: “What Can Be Represented?”

The Bellflower Group

The Bellflower Group is the area’s first creative writing interest group for undergraduates from institutions across northeast Ohio. Founded in 2024, the group meets in person at Bellflower Hall on the campus of Case Western Reserve University and maintains an ongoing conversation via Discord. This year’s meetings featured a panel of visiting writers addressing “What We Wish We’d Known,” and a presentation on Afrofuturism and genre fiction by Isaiah Hunt (John Carroll University). Attendees have included students from CWRU, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland State University, John Carroll University, Lakeland Community College, and Oberlin College. Interested undergraduate writers should email thebellflowergroup@case.edu for more information. We hope to see you in 2025!

Alumni News

The New York Times bestselling novel Long Drive Home, by Will Allison (CWRU ’91), was adapted for the stage in September 2024 at Theatre Aspen’s Solo Flights 2024, an annual one-person play festival.

Alum (’83) Shelley Costa‘s Battle of Gettysburg-set short story, “The Knife Sharpener,” has been chosen for inclusion in The Best Mystery Stories of 2024 (The Mysterious Press), and was a finalist for the Agatha Award

The New York Times wrote about alum (‘10) Iris Dunkle’s new biography, Riding Like The Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb.

Sarah Forner (’18) is Director of Corporate Relations at the University of Notre Dame.

Marie Lathers (‘15) has published The Okefenokee Swamp: A Natural and Cultural History.

Send Me Your News!

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which more than six hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.

The post Department of English Newsletter–December 2024 appeared first on Department of English.

Letter from the chair/Reading disciplines/Mann lecture/Department news/Spring colloquia/Summer 2024 internships/Alum check-in:Geiser/Alumni news/Send me your news//

Letter from the Chair

On a recent Friday night in Los Angeles, four CWRU English faculty read from their fiction and poetry for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2025 conference. Rumor has it that 130 guests arrived to hear their work, and the work of other Cleveland collaborators. Also in attendance: senior English majors Susie Kim and Molly McLaughlin, there on an Experimental Humanities grant from the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Caren Beilin plugged our graduate programming:

Come to Cleveland! You’ll find a warm, buzzing community of innovative writers, a world class museum (the Cleveland Museum of Art– down the street), and we’d invite you to work on a lit PhD with 5 years of funding while doing something spectacular with a creative dissertation. We are interested in hearing from you.

Professor Beilin commented to me: “We had a blast–and one thing this packed event in LA seemed to make clear: Cleveland is lit!”

English at CWRU ushers beauty into the world, upholds the need for empathy, strikes fearlessly into difficulty and complexity. We teach students habits of mind that can’t easily be replicated in the professional environments they’ll soon enter. To bring our values in line with our degree programs, and to emphasize our core strengths, the faculty have proposed new concentrations in Journalism and in Creative Writing. These illuminated pathways through the major will join our very popular Film concentration.

The next colloquium visitor this spring is Professor Yopie Prins from the University of Michigan on Friday, April 4th, sponsored by the Gary Stonum Colloquium Fund. Ada Limon, the poet laureate of the United States, visits us on Saturday, April 12th, followed by our own Bill Marling on April 18th. Our students take the spotlight on Friday, April 25th for their Capstone presentations.

On my way back from LA, a friend and colleague, Dr. Erika Olbricht, sent me this quotation from Thoreau’s Walden.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe…

What an apt image for the spring currently arriving in fits and starts, and for the creative transformations that, in our writing as in the world, take patience and tenacity, and no small amount of hope.

–Walt Hunter

Reading Disciplines, Reading Students

Maybe you’ve already heard about the “elite college students who can’t read books.” You might have read Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic this past October, or followed its many impassioned responses to the ends of the known internet. Maybe you’ve never read so many Tweets about so many students who are, apparently, reading so little.

We do face a literacy crisis in our time, and it’s not just about Columbia undergrads who can’t—don’t—won’t get through The Grapes of Wrath. (Neither did I, admittedly). Just about everyone everywhere is reading less—and reading worse—than we were ten years ago. You can read all the articles and all the Tweets, and learn only that we don’t know what to do about it.

This should be where we English faculty enter the scene, with expertise in the humanities that serves real humans. But too often those of us who teach composition can become as distracted as those undergraduates who lose track of the Joads just west of Amarillo. If we want to improve our teaching of reading and writing, argues Cassandra Phillips, we need to focus on the readers and writers.

Phillips, the 2024 Edward and Melinda S. Sadar Lecturer in Writing in the Disciplines, warns us that too much focus on the discipline(s) can risk looking past the writers themselves. In “Literacy and Materiality: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching to Reach All Learners,” Phillips argues that the literacy crisis is less about students understanding texts, and more about us understanding our students.

Phillips is Professor of English for the College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also serves as the Writing Program and Developmental English Coordinator. But she began her teaching career at the two-year, open-enrollment UW Colleges, where she found that “our field wasn’t adequately [. . .] helping me do the job I was hired to do”—that is, to reach all writers.

Many of the readers and writers Phillips taught had encountered “barriers to learning and educational access that come from students’ cultural backgrounds, circumstances, or identities.” Nothing in her own graduate training prepared her to offer them the support they needed.

So she—and some likeminded colleagues—sought to fill that gap. Phillips is one of four coauthors (along with Joanne Baird Giordano, Holly Hassel, and Jennifer Heinert) of Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms (Utah State UP, 2023). Emphasizing reading and writing as “interconnected activities,” the text offers examples of “writing assignments to help students develop a wide range of skills for drawing from their learning as readers.”

As part of her visit to CWRU, Phillips also led a workshop for Writing Program faculty, bringing her research into conversation with faculty reports from the classroom—in other words, a bit of shop talk. For example, Nárcisz Fejes asks students in her Academic Inquiry Seminars to read for one hour without other distractions, and to reflect on the experience. Students are often surprised at how difficult—and how rewarding—they find that hour to be. Sharing these experiences, whether for students or instructors, can be a small but important step in addressing our challenges.

It’s a start—and a stance against some of the trends in higher education that have further complicated our best attempts at teaching literacy. At the institutional level, Phillips says, “developmental education traditionally helped students meet the gap between college instructors’ expectations and their prior learning experiences.” But that sort of education is collapsing: the thirteen UW College campuses, for instance, were absorbed into the broader Wisconsin system in 2019.

If those students face a variety of institutional uncertainties, so do many of their teachers. Phillips notes that “the majority of college literacy instructors experience unpredictable employment, a lack of orientation to the institution, and limited connection to the department or program.” Indeed, between 1975 and 2015 the number of tenure-line literacy instructors decreased from 45% to 30%. (Bickerstaff and Chavarin 2018, TYCA Workload survey)

Phillips argues that we need a better understanding of what those students and instructors need. Within the discipline of writing studies, Phillips says, most of the research seems to be about how texts should be read, not how students actually read. What we do know about those students and their literacy needs comes disproportionately from R1 universities. And these are only some of the challenges that students, instructors, and institutions face.

Our own Writing Program meets those challenges in different ways. One of them is the evolution, over the last four years, of the Sadar Lecture into a lecture and workshop. The resulting conversations with visiting scholars have become opportunities to rethink and refine our work, as well as informal celebrations of the work itself.

As Kim Emmons, Director of the Writing Program, puts it, “The addition of faculty workshops has meant that the scholarly insights of our distinguished visitors directly inform our programmatic and classroom activities. This year, Professor Phillips’s work reminded us to think broadly about the role of reading in the writing classroom, to understand the current landscape of student literacy, and to find ways to make our disciplinary ways of reading more legible for all students.

At the programmatic and institutional levels, that work continues. But in the meantime, even the individual instructor can make meaningful changes. We must recognize, Phillips argues, that “there is no such thing as a ‘good student.’ There is also no such thing as a ‘bad student.’ There are students who have more or fewer barriers to their learning; and there are students whose contributions and assets have been valued more or valued less by our educational system and disciplinary practices.”

In 2007, Marshall Gregory asked: “Do we teach disciplines or do we teach students? What difference does it make?” I remember reading and debating his article in my required pedagogy course—a single course—in graduate school. Many of those in my cohort reasonably answered: “Both.” Now in 2025, Cassandra Phillips reminds us that if we want our discipline to thrive, we must urgently seek to understand the students we wish to teach.

–Dave Lucas

Edward (ADL ‘64, MED ‘68) and Melinda Melton (FSM ‘66) Sadar established the Edward S. and Melinda Sadar Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines in Spring 2009 to showcase research and scholarship in writing across the disciplines, including the histories, cultures, and contexts of specific writing practices, writing instruction, and communicative technologies. Since 2021, the lecture has also included a workshop for Writing Program faculty. The event is held annually.

The Gertrude Mann Memorial Lecture

Iris Dunkle (’10) delivered the Gertrude Mann Memorial Lecture on Friday, January 24th, reading from her book Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb and talking about her process of writing biography and poetry.

Department News

A chapter from Caren Beilin‘s forthcoming novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025) is the main text for the Dutch publication series, MsHeresies, which focuses on collaborative graphic design practices and the ornamental as a form of work critique. “A Manager,” which confronts the work of criminality in gynecology, is typeset together with edited printed matter from the archive of the Neapolitan feminist artist collective, Le Nemesiache, active between 1969 and 1995 in Italy.

Michele Tracy Berger was a guest on the podcast Writer Craft (‘Writing as a Black Woman in the Speculative Fiction Genre’).

George Blake will have an essay in Teaching the Rust Belt. This edited collection was officially accepted by Rutgers.

Cara Byrne and Kristin Kondrlik (’16) recently published their article “We Can Be Heroes”: Identification, Superheroes, and the Visual Communication of Agency in Online Children’s Books about Covid 19″ in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine.

Michael Clune is speaking at, and helped organize, a conference at the University of Chicago in early April called “The End of the University and the Future of Criticism.”

Joe DeLong‘s short story “Where It Takes Me” is a piece of speculative fiction online in The Fantastic Other.

Gusztav Demeter presented “Directed self-placement for multilingual writers: Providing student agency to placement into an ecology of first-year college writing” at The 20th Symposium on Second Language Writing in November.

Charlie Ericson has a poem out in JAKE.

Mary Grimm is interviewed by Laura Walter for Page Count, the Ohio Center of the Book podcast.

Jamie Hickner will co-facilitate a Spring 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Discussions Series, with Valentino Zullo of Ursuline College. The series will focus on memoirs by three Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners: Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Allende, and John Edgar Wideman. All discussions are open to the public and take place at the Cleveland Public Library’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch, 10601 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, on “third Wednesdays” from 4-5:45: Wednesday, 3/19, Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey; Wednesday, 4/16,  Paula, by Isabel Allende; Wednesday, 5/21, Brothers and Keepers, by John Edgar Wideman.

Walt Hunter has a short article on the late poems of Stevens, Yeats, and Giovanni.

Just In Case: A CWRU Podcast: Listen to an interview with Bernard Jim about his research on the destruction of cities. Jim has conducted research about building demolition as it relates to societal notions of progress, the construction of identity and the American public’s relationship to the built environment

Amber Kidd successfully defended her dissertation titled “Post-Traumatic Modernism: A Framework for Formal and Narrative Experimentation through the Works of David Jones.”

The work of Kurt Koenigsberger and Dave Lucas is featured in art/sci student monthly.

Alexandra Magearu was invited to deliver a guest lecture, “Women and Children First: Reflections on Displacement,” at the Center for International Education at Lakeland Community College. Her lecture deconstructs the essentialist logic of the phrase “women and children” in refugee and conflict contexts by drawing on recent research on her Bessarabian family history, humanitarian representations of refugees, and Palestine.

William Marling‘s book From Ohio with Love: A Cold War Memoir is now available.

“The Long Road from Xinjiang,” written by Ben Mauk and Nyrola Elimä, has led directly to calls to action by lawmakers and activists, prompted extensive media coverage, and exerted pressure on Thailand not to deport its remaining Uyghur asylum seekers. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China published a letter to UNHCR on the same day as the story’s publication, signed by 50 lawmakers from 26 parliaments, requesting UN intervention and citing this reporting in its announcement. The U.S. House Special Committee on the CCP cited the story in a letter addressed to the Thai ambassador to the U.S., noting in particular the story’s description of the Uyghurs’ detention and its revelation that other countries have offered to settle them. More than 20 members of French parliament and more than 20 members of the European Parliament for France raised similar concerns in a letter addressed to the Thai prime minister that cited this story exclusively.

In October, Marilyn Mobley was interviewed about her book, Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, with poet Parneshia Jones at American Writers Museum in Chicago.

Todd Oakley‘s current open access article was published with his research group in the journal Lingua. Title: Shocking projections: The rise of the [x-shock] construction in macroeconomics.

Camila Ring‘s article, “Overhearing and Underseeing: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Accident of the Poem,” has been accepted for publication in Modern Philology.

Robin Beth Schaer will be taking part in the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Program (AWP) in Los Angeles, speaking on a multi-genre craft panel called “Our Own Name: Writing Jewishness Beyond Zionism, Assimilation & Fear” along with authors Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Irina Reyn, Courtney Zoffness, and Jennifer Gilmore.

On December 3rd, Rob Spadoni presented “Style in Star Trek,” a Faculty Work-in-Progress Lecture.

Lindsay Turner has six prose poems in issue 2.2 of Cleveland Review of Books.

Thrity Umrigar has a children’s picture book, Maya’s Holi, published by Scholastic.

Maggie Vinter is giving the keynote lecture at the 2025 UC-Irvine Premodern Graduate Humanities Conference, “Corporeality & Incorporation: The Body in Literature and Culture Pre-1800.”

Department Colloquia in Spring

“Postnaturalism and Monstrosity,” a Lecture by Michael Mayne. (Friday, January 31st)

“The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the African Imaginary: Transnational African Writing from Ralph Bunche to Teju Cole,” a Lecture by Jamie Hickner. (Friday, February 7th)

“Esoteric Art,” a Lecture by Michael Clune. (Friday, February 14th)

“Baconian Quacks & the Origins of Digital Media,” a Lecture by Whitney Trettien. (Friday, February 21st)

“Psyche in Sequence: Psychoanalysis, Comics, and the American Superhero,” a Lecture by Valentino Zullo. (Friday, February 28th)

Summer 2024 Internships

Five days before our first shoot, I received the news that I had been awarded an internship made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support. The director in me gave a sigh of relief. The producer in me was excited: Father could now come to life. As my Capstone project for my Bachelor of Arts in Screenwriting and Film Production, I directed the short film, Father, a story about a small-town priest who attempts to convert a young singer in exchange for piano lessons. This was an ambitious project from the jump: casting a priest, finding a church to film in, and sourcing proper equipment were all challenges in realizing a high-quality production.

Thanks to the funding, we were able to jump over many of these hurdles. Principally, purchasing makeup and hairspray allowed me to cast a student as the priest, the film’s main character, who was written to be nearly thirty years older. The makeup served to bring out graying hair as well as wrinkles and shadowing in his face. On top of this, a costume for him was purchased, including the clergy shirt, solid black shoes, and reading glasses. A student actor also made directing easier, since rehearsals were conducted on campus twice before shooting began.

In addition to props such as fake cigarettes and production design elements such as wooden crosses, a notable expense came from food, which was an important part of the film. Essentially, ingredients to make pizza from scratch were purchased and used to make three pizzas over the course of one shoot day. All three pizzas appeared in the film at various points.

Meals were also purchased in accordance with union rules, as would be the case on professional film sets, for the cast and crew on shoot days that exceeded eight hours. The two long days were important because of continuity, as the majority of the film takes place in those respective locations, the church and the priest’s house.

The largest projected expense from technical equipment was a camera, but after working with the CWRU Department of Music, I decided to check out a lower-end camera for free, alongside professional quality shotgun microphones. This decision allowed me to put the funding towards other facets of production, particularly audio. To record a high-quality mix, I purchased Logic Pro X, an industry standard audio editing software, which was also used to create and mix the film’s score. This software was used on set regularly to record live audio, voiceovers, and music for the film’s final scene.

With the funding that was left over from the actual production, I turned to distribution at a number of film festivals. I submitted to two that I felt would have a chance to screen Father. The film was accepted to and screened at the 2025 Short. Sweet. Film Fest, where my assistant director and co-cinematographer Helina VanBibber attended in my place. As I have moved to London, I will also look to screen at festivals in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe.

I am now in my second term at Queen Mary University London pursuing a Master of Arts in Film [Directing Fiction] with hopes to work as an independent filmmaker upon graduation.
–Saar Zutshi (’24)

Because of an internship last summer made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support, I was able to embark on a research project with one of the school’s psychology labs, the Lincoln Clinical Neuroscience Lab, on which I was the primary researcher preparing the materials to submit to the research approval board.  This project actually combines both English and Psychology: the project focuses on testing the use of fiction/writing in the development of empathy, perspective taking, and overall emotional development in adolescents. The goal of the study is to see if there is a difference between reading a piece of writing that is more nonfiction/non-interpersonal and a piece that is interpersonal on someone’s scores during post-measures that look for ability to absorb the story, be affected by the story, and also willingness to then help someone else in need. I applied my background as an English major in searching for pieces of fiction that would be able to appeal to the age groups from 12/13 to 18, would not be too short, but also would not take too long to read.

I started off by looking for flash fiction pieces that might evoke an emotive response amongst a varying group of ages, but ended turning to an age old favorite: “All is Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury. I felt that this piece had the best writing in addition to a story that hit the points we wanted: having to understand different people’s motives, maybe leading someone to think about helping another person in need, and also being of a good length. I then looked for a non-fiction piece of writing about a planet that would be the same length and found an informational piece to match.

The second most important part of the project that I applied my background as both an English and Cognitive Science major to was searching for research pre and post measures that I felt would most accurately paint a picture of the influence the pieces of writing might have on a participant. Something that I advocated for with the faculty head of my lab  and which she really appreciated, was seeing the effects of imagery on someone’s absorption. We made a separate group from the normal readers of interpersonal/non-interpersonal that would be primed to engage their sense of imagery before reading. My hypothesis is that there would be more absorption of the story in general and therefore the emotions one might feel by embodying the characters in the interpersonal group as opposed to the others.

Overall, the ability to apply the funds as a stipend to support this otherwise unpaid research project was instrumental in giving me the flexibility to spend time on the various parts of the project while also supporting myself on campus over the summer.
–Charlotte Goyal (’24)

Over the summer of 2024, I found myself in the company of people I would never have otherwise had the privilege of meeting were it not for the funding received from the Baker-Nord Center as well as funding from the English department made possible by Tim O’Brien’s support. My project, which consisted of collecting the stories of a handful of refugees in Ohio, pushed me to hone my interview skills and practice my writing and film photography, and introduced me to a robust community (both refugees and the network of people who assist refugees in Ohio) which had always been in my backyard. The conversations I had through this project have pollinated my Senior Capstone project and have affected my intended postgraduate trajectory such that I aim to continue working with refugees. The project was a good mix of hands-on work assisting USCRI (U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants), the refugee resettlement agency, with house setups, grant writing, and volunteering at events (like World Refugee Day). It was also flexible enough to let me foster relationships with a number of refugees at USCRI, one of whom I ended up interviewing, and lay the groundwork for future interviews through that organization.

Though I struggled to recruit people initially, I spread my net to include a refugee organization in Columbus, where I conducted an additional four interviews. Though this was not intended (and in the moment, it felt like my project was floundering), I am grateful to have had an excuse to drive to Columbus and broaden my network beyond the city limits of Cleveland. The organization I worked with in Columbus (CRIS Columbus), has stayed in touch, helping spread the word about free, remote, PTSD treatment through the CWRU PTSD lab and inviting me to return to do more interviews and be involved in events they are hosting. And my project itself seemed right at home with CRIS Columbus, being integrated into their refugee speakers bureau program which trains refugees to tell their stories and compensates them for speaking at local events.

G.K Chesterton writes in his essay, “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” that the individual man (or woman) who goes to the large city in pursuit of greater humanity, is actually fleeing from the great humanity they have in their own backyard. Evidence of this was found abundantly in my project. It has taught me that humanity is everywhere, if only you look for it. In my reflections of the interviews I took, I frequently wrote that the experience of hearing these stories had the effect of making me feel more human. Now, my world feels larger having heard the stories of only five people. My community feels more diverse, more interesting, more profound, than before. Certainly this is because refugees are, here in the US at least, necessarily foreign. But I have a hunch that sitting down with anyone for thirty minutes to really hear their story would result in the broadening of my horizons.

I have always wanted to do good, but the way to do this has not always been clear to me. Psychology research has seemed detached from the people it is supposed to benefit. Journalism has seemed, at times, predatory—desiring only to rake up views rather than tell something real. The work I did this summer showed me an applicable way in which to have an impact in the world. The funding I received insulated me from the subversive market pressures, allowing me to carry this project out to its fullest form. And just as telling one’s own story is a way to take agency over one’s life, this interview project nurtured a sense of agency within me that I had not previously known.
–Carsten Torgeson (’24)

Alum Check In: Lauren Geiser (’11)

My poem, “The Seam in the Veil,” was published in the January/February issue of Cathexis Northwest Press. I have also had two other poems selected for forthcoming publication. One will be featured in The Broadkill Review (July 2025), and the other will appear in Liminal Spaces Magazine. 

While my career as an attorney in Los Angeles keeps me busy, it has been so gratifying to rediscover my love for writing (and reading!) poetry. I owe every bit of that to the English department at Case, and Sarah Gridley (former professor) in particular. Over the past few years I have sought out workshop classes through UCLA Extension and I also completed the “PocketMFA” program this past fall. Once an English major, always an English major.

Alumni News

Sarah Antine‘s story “The Sabbath Queen” has been published in Glint Literary Journal.

Evan Chaloupka (‘18) has been named as Fulbright Professor to Japan for 2025-6. Evan is currently the Program Chair for Writing at Franklin University, with an impressive list of publications in literature and disability studies.

Laura Evers (’20) and Emily Sferra Kapela offer advice at Inside Higher Ed for how to transition from an English PhD program to a role in career.development.

English alum (’72 ) Susie Gharib is featured in The Daily. She’ll be the convocation speaker this year in May.

Rust Belt Girl interviews alum William Heath.
Matt Hooke (’20) won a Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing Best in Business Award. He and other staff members at the Baltimore Business Journal won for their breaking news coverage of the Key Bridge Collapse. This is a national award with 1,103 entries from 181 news organizations (including big publications like the New York Times, ProPublica etc.).

Melissa Pompili (’19) is co-presenting with Dr. Jamie Hinojosa at the 2025 Teaching and Learning with AI conference in Orlando, Florida, May 28-30. The paper is titled “Writing for Funding: Integrating AI for Grant and Proposal Writing across Contexts.”

Укриття/Shelter is an interactive piece co-created by Nadia Tarnawsky and Vira Hanchar which examines ordinary life interrupted by air raid sirens, time spent in bomb shelters with puppets and the absurd destruction of war. It was performed as part of Cleveland Public Theatre’s Soft Launch Festival which seeks to reinvent what theatre and art can be–installation art, immersive and participatory performances, improvised music composition, solo shows disguised as multimedia breakdowns and yoga classes.

The 2nd edition of Alum (’88) John Vourlis‘s textbook Understanding Screenwriting is now out from publisher Kendall Hunt.

Send Me Your News!

If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which six hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.

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