Meeting the New Kids

Questions for Terri Fredrick, Suzie
Park
, and Charles Wharram

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Terri Fredrick
Terri Fredrick received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Professional Communication from Iowa State University in 2004. Her dissertation, Constructing Authority Relationships in Technical Writing Classes, was a nominee for Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Terri's areas of research and teaching include Rhetoric and Composition Theory, Technical Writing, and Professional Writing. She has presented her work at many national conferences. Her latest presentation, for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, is titled Good Cop / Bad Cop: Teachers' Use of Email to Deliver Negative Messages.—DMM
 
If you were not an English professor, what would you be doing? (Fantasy professions allowed.)
Writing documentaries. It's the one profession I'd consider leaving teaching for. In fact, there are several documentaries out in the world with scripts that I've written. Unfortunately, you will never see most of them because they were produced for corporations. (I can tell you everything you never wanted to know about soy flake processing.) I do have an excellent (in my own opinion) DVD documentary I wrote on the 1939 Iowa Hawkeyes football team, renowned for their near perfect season despite fielding only 11-14 players per game.
 
If you won the lottery (let's say the pot is a whopping six million) would you still teach?
 
Yes, but probably not a 3-3 load.
 
What was your worst subject in college?
Chemistry. I took the course colloquially known as Chemistry for Idiots. By the middle of the semester, my professor took such pity on me that he would stand next to me in lab and say, “Look, just write that the solution turned red.” (The solution was never remotely close to red.)
 
What's your favorite punctuation mark?
The period. I appreciate finality.
What do you like the most so far about Eastern and/or Charleston or Mattoon?
While I like Eastern and Charleston, I feel it's important to get in a plug for Glorious Mattoon. What are some great things about Mattoon? We have three bookstores. We have an excellent auction house as well as four antique stores and three used furniture places. We've got an Amtrak train station within walking distance that will whisk you away to Chicago for only $17. We have legendary celebrations such as Bagelfest. I'm sure there's more, but after only eight months, I've barely cracked the surface of what there is to enjoy in Mattoon.
 
What radio station, CD, or tape (or 8 track) is currently playing in your car?
The radio station is NPR. On CD, I'm currently bouncing between the soundtracks for the musical Wicked and the film Grosse Pointe Blank.
 
What is your favorite book/novel?
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. You just can't beat a story about Satan coming to Moscow to secure a rent-controlled apartment.
 
What's your favorite holiday?

My favorite day of the year is the Friday of the last week of classes during Spring semester. That's the day when the entire summer is looming before me, but I haven't used any of it up yet.

My favorite traditional holiday is Christmas. I love everything about it. I put up four trees and a house full of lights (this doesn't thrill the Jew I live with, but he tries to be supportive). My father is even crazier for Christmas than I am and makes his (adult) children go on themed “quests” for their gifts. Past themes have included Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, time travel, and a visit to the Christmas Swami.

 
What is the worst present you have ever received?
Members of my family like to Google one another too much for me to answer this question without fear of it being seen and affecting my chances of receiving future presents.
 
What was your worst job ever?
Complaints manager for Six Flags-St Louis. I learned two important skills on that job: (1) diplomacy and vague promises can carry you far and (2) it's always good when someone threatens violence because then you can call security.
 
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Suzie Park

Suzie Park received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Her dissertation is titled Compulsory Narration and the Politics of Wasted Feeling in Sentimental Writing, 1784-1814. She has been a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of California, Davis, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Suzie’s areas of research and teaching include Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literature, Theories of Affect, and Information Culture. Her academic writing has garnered several awards, including Best Post-Graduate Essay Award by the International Gothic Association Conference in 2005.—DMM
 
If you were not an English professor, what would you be doing? (Fantasy professions allowed.)
Fiction writer. I like to think that this is still possible as an occupation— one concurrent with teaching.
If you won the lottery (let's say the pot is a whopping six million) would you still teach?
Yup.
What was your worst subject in college?

Biochemistry—by far.

What's your favorite punctuation mark?
The beautiful dash—caesura's dream extension.
What do you like the most so far about Eastern and/or Charleston or Mattoon?

The students are often hungry to learn—but they could always be hungrier.

What radio station, CD, or tape (or 8 track) is currently playing in your car?
None—all are defunct.
What is your favorite book/novel?

Frances Burney's The Wanderer.

What's your favorite holiday?

Chu Suk—Harvest Moon Festival.

What is the worst present you have ever received?

Hairshirt with matching socks.

What was your worst job ever?

Telecommunications operator.

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Charles Wharram

Charles Wharram received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in English Language and Literature with a minor in German in 2005. His dissertation is titled Labors of Translation, 1750-1850: Reconsidering the Romantic Movement in Relation to Translation Theory and Practice. Charles' areas of research and teaching include American Romantic Literature, Translation and Theory, Gothic Writing, and the German Romantic. Charles has spent many years living abroad; he was a resident scholar at both the Universität Salzburg in Austria and at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Germany, and served as curriculum advisor at Palacky Universitat in the Czech Republic.—DMM
If you were not an English professor, what would you be doing? (Fantasy professions allowed.)
 
I would like to be doing one of those fantasy professions, which are, apparently, allowed.
If you won the lottery (let’s say the pot is a whopping six million) would you still teach?
 
This answer might sound humorless, but I would never buy a lottery ticket. It’s against my political beliefs, and, coincidentally, my religious upbringing. No lie.
 
What was your worst subject in college?
Absolutely, without a doubt, and nothing else comes close to: Introduction to Canadian Literature. I’m as nationalistic as the next Canadian, but it just seemed so un-Canadian for the university to force us to read Canadian literature. Only nations with too much pride would consider their national literature worthy of study. There are plenty of great writers who happen to be Canadian, but Canadian literature? What does that mean? Here’s what I remember from the Introduction to Canadian literature: Canada—proud, not only to be not Great Britain, but also to be not America.
 
What’s your favorite punctuation mark?

The dash. The dash—not to be confused with the lowly hyphen—has, I believe, suffered the slings and arrows of Microsoft Word. Once one learns the method, it’s very easy to make a dash using Word, but for some reason the evil genii behind Word decided that the dash did not deserve its own key. The technological explanation for the gradual disappearance of the dash? No keystroke in Word equals fewer dashes. It goes without saying that I prefer the em dash (—) to the en dash (–). For the longest time I knew how to make only an en dash, but then my dissertation advisor intervened, asking me why my dashes were so small. He actually accused me of using hyphens! After a few weeks of moping around and feeling tremendously inadequate, I sought therapy, where I discovered just how easy it is to make one’s dashes longer. Now I can insert——them wherever and whenever I want.

Not less importantly, German speakers call the dash “der Gedankenstrich,” which one might translate as “thought stroke.” Dashes indicate moments in which the writer has been stricken by a thought, or thought strikes off in a new direction for a while. Yet dashes can also indicate moments when thought gets stroked out—one’s thoughts are dashed—and one can’t truly know what caused the writer to put a thought under erasure. The German poet Novalis wrote, “Dashes belong to the realm of the reader.” Which is interesting.

 
What do you like the most so far about Eastern and/or Charleston or Matoon?
 
The auction sales. Or the maples.
What radio station, CD, or tape (or 8 track) is currently playing in your car?
The radio station will likely be tuned to WILL (the local NPR affiliate), but it could be WSCR, a sports-talk station in Chicago. There’s a really weird station somewhere near the end of the AM dial—I have a preset button for it—that seems to have no discernible format. Sometimes they play quirky and interesting music from the 50s, 60s and 70s (e.g., “Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon,” or “Big John”), sometimes they play terrible pop music from the 80s and 90s (e.g., Phil Collins), and sometimes Rush Limbaugh will be blathering away when I hit that preset button. It’s truly the Pandora’s box of east-central Illinois radio. In my CD player, I’m fairly certain that I have The Go! Team. Or Mogwai.
 
What is your favorite book/novel?
The Lorax.
What’s your favorite holiday?

Pancake Tuesday. I fear, however, the holiday may be co-opted by the corporate world, since I have been informed that this year CNN applied the moniker “International Pancake Appreciation Day” to this most frittery of festivals. What’s next? A very special Emeril Live brought to you by IHOP and Hallmark? Is nothing sacred?

Closely followed by TV Turn-Off Day.

 
What is the worst present you have ever received?
Two words: Old Spice.
What was your worst job ever?
I can’t say I’ve had any particular job that strikes me in retrospect as the “worst,” but I can think of one specific job site that stands out. During my undergraduate years, some friends and I put together a painting company for the summer months. It went well and we made a good profit, but one site, a local car garage, turned into a nightmare. We bid the job way too low. Painting the “walls” of an auto repair shop is not like painting—it’s, ah—it was not like painting anything else we’d ever painted. It took an eternity because of all the pipes, wires, and I don’t even remember all the obstacles we had to cover with a coat of paint. It felt like we were on the set of Brazil. We had to bring in an air compressor and spray it, which we didn’t really want to do. I can still remember the feeling of dizzy relief and the paint-fumes-induced euphoria when we finished, but then calculating in my head that we must have earned about 80¢ an hour for that job.
 
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