Jason Brown

I guess my first bit of news, which I am the most pleased with, is that I am writing this “news and views” as a faculty member and not just an alumnus.

As for the other news, I recently had three pieces of mine nominated for Pushcart Prize XXXIV:

• My poem “Why Mr. President Loves Soap Bubbles” – appeared in Natural Bridge no. 19.
• My poem “My Older Brother, June Bug” – appeared in Post Road 16 and as an excerpt on its website.
• My short story “Histrionics” – appeared in Quiddity "Better Angels” theme issue, which features a collection of creative responses — including poetry, artwork, fiction, essays, and a radio play — to Abraham Lincoln's literary essence.

And while at AWP, I did a short interview about my story for Quiddity’s companion public-radio program produced by Illinois Public Radio’s hub-station, WUIS/WIPA, NPR member and PRI affiliate. I am not sure how much of the interview will air or if it will air at all. I should know soon.

Also, my blank verse sonnet “Chores with My Father” is forthcoming in the Tar River Poetry Review in April, and The Truth About the Fact: A Journal of Literary Nonfiction recently accepted my memoir “My First Time in Japan Visiting the In-Laws.”

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John Guzlowski

I got a call from Bread Loaf in late February. They told me my Shit War manuscript was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize. Out of 500 manuscripts, 12 are finalists. One will get published by Graywolf Press! When I heard this, I started thinking about all the changes I made to the ms since I submitted it and that I can't incorporate them into the manuscript!

The UN Sponsored magazine SGI Quarterly: A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture, and Education published a piece I wrote about my parents in their special issue on Parenting. The article also appears online at the magazine's website .

A new essay of mine, dealing with the way my parents' time in the concentration camps affected their parenting, appears in my blog, Lightning and Ashes .

In my other blog, Everything's Jake ,the entry for February 25 is my brief review of Into the Desperate Country, a new novel by EIU alum Jeff Vande Zande. It was terrific — one of those books that reminded me why I like reading so much.

On a personal note, Lillian is expecting a baby around May 15.

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John Kilgore

In January my old essay, "Hamlet in the Closet," was back for a return engagement at The Vocabula Review, as a "Vocabula Revisited" feature. This month a new piece, "C'est Le Vol," explains why you should give me half of your money if you're richer than I am.

Somewhere I need to say that I am seeing a shocking amount of good student writing this semester. The students in 2001, the Creative Nonfiction class, and a tutorial have been digging deep and coming up with some wonderful stuff. I can't account for it. Someone somewhere (not me) must be doing something right.

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Fern Kory

I've been spending a lot of time with Jesse Jackson (no, not that Jesse Jackson).  In 1945, the same year Richard Wright published Black Boy with Harper and Brothers, an African American postal worker wrote -- at the invitation of an editor in the children's division of Harper & Brothers -- a ground-breaking children's book, Call Me Charley, that explored racism and integration in a more forthright way than had been done in previous "juvenile" literature.  I'm interested in the conditions under which African American youth literature is produced and published, and my research into the circumstances of Jesse Jackson's unlikely career has taken me to the Harper Collins archives in New York City to look at the correspondence between Jackson and his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, and other materials related to the books he published with them.  (A travel grant from the Children's Literature Association funded this trip.)  Later this semester, I'll be going down to North Carolina -- to North Carolina Central University, which reportedly has Jackson's manuscripts, and then to Appalachian State University, where (in the 1970s) Jackson was a Visiting Writer and then a faculty member in the School of Education.  There I will look at lots of "unprocessed" materials in their special collections and I should also get a chance to talk to people who worked with Mr. Jackson. (This trip is being funded by a CFR grant.)  In the meantime, I've been reading lots and lots of children's books from the 1930s and 40s through the 1960s plus contemporary articles with titles like "Books that Build Better Racial Attitudes" and "Reading for Democracy" that suggest the role children's literature played in adult efforts to promote "inter-cultural" understanding in the period between the world wars and, especially, in the post WWII period.  

I have now done presentations on different aspects of Call Me Charley at two different children's literature conferences, and I just gave a talk on the broader context for his work at a meeting of an IPRH-sponsored reading group

<http://www.iprh.illinois.edu/programs/reading/>

at the University of Illinois on February 13th.  I will also do a presentation at Appalachian State while I'm there.

In other news, my son, Paul, who will get his M.A. in Mathematics from Indiana this year, just found out that a collaborative paper he wrote as an undergrad at Carleton has been published in The Journal of Integer Sequences.  You can check it out here

<http://www.emis.de/journals/JIS/VOL12/Egge/egge8.html>

if you don't receive the print version at home.

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Chris Hanlon

In mid-February I took a trip to the Houghton reading room at Harvard to examine an Emerson manuscript, a version of Emerson's essay "Eloquence" he gave as a speech ten years prior to the first published version in 1858. I went to Harvard, and to this manuscript, looking for something really specific. I had hypothesized that, in light of certain historical contexts in which I was trying to place the 1858 rendition of the essay, I would find that the earlier version would omit a series of metaphors I imagined were the specific product of events that unfolded in the mid-1850s. Turns out I was dead wrong; Emerson used the same set of metaphors in 1847 as in 1858. So back to the drawing board.

But I did find page after page of crossed-through material, text that never made it into either the 1858 version or the version he included in Society and Solitude in 1870. It wasn't hard, reading this discarded text, in the morning sun and still of the reading room, to become completely absorbed. Here's one bit from a discarded passage, so far as I know never printed in any edition, journal, or collection:

"Yet in the end, eloquence is--is it not?--to alter in a couple of hours, perhaps in a half hour's discourse, the convictions + habits of years. Young men, too, are eager to enjoy this sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic existence. The orator sees himself the organ of a multitude, + concentrating their valours and powers."

Then, an epigram:

"But now the blood of twenty thousand men / Blushed in my face.'"

Anyway, it wound up being one of the most moving experiences I've had reading Emerson.

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Mary Maddox

My poem "The Mushroom Growing from My Shoulder" was published in the Summer/Fall 2008 issue of The Spoon River Poetry Review.

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Letitia Moffitt   &  Dana Ringuette

Congratulations to student members of Writers Ink for two wonderful concerts, February 10 and March 1, devoted to composer Libby Larsen’s music and the Eastern students' poetry.

Larsen’s composition, “An Introduction to the Moon,” involved musical set pieces and improvisations paired with recorded recitations of original poetry about the moon, written by our students. Meanwhile EIU Wind Symphony students created completely original music and "soundscapes" based on original poems about the moon generated especially for this event by members of Writer's Ink, the student creative writing organization. Larsen, one of America's preeminent composers, plans to use EIU's version of this composition as a catalyst for future musical endeavors.

Our student poets were Samuel Cloward, Brendan Hughes, Jennifer Hindes, Anthony Hesseldenz, Jake Dawson, Jennifer O’Neil, Steven Cox, Sarah Fairchild, Sam Sottosanto, Justin Sudkamp, and Liz Surbeck.

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