In late May, I attended the Thomas Wolfe conference in Portland, Oregon; I served as moderator for a plenary session. I was elected to the Wolfe Society's Executive Board, and appointed editor of The Thomas Wolfe Review. It was my first visit to Oregon, and I enjoyed it very much. I now understand why Carol Stevens wants to live in Portland.

In late June, David and I went to Canada for the Lawrence Durrell Society meeting and conference held at the University of Ottawa. My paper was on "The 'Negro' in Durrell's The Avignon Quintet," and I also chaired a plenary session and presided over the business meeting and the banquet. We had a wonderful banquet speaker, the Director of the British Council in Canada, who recalled and embodied Durrell's satirical approach to life in the diplomatic corps. I was re-elected to a second (and final!) term as president of the Durrell Society.

Finally, in August we went to North Carolina for a wonderful family visit and our only non-working trip.

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David Radavich Anne would probably kill me, but here’s a picture from our jet-boating experience in Montreal this June.

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Carol Stevens

Bonnie Irwin, Ned Huston, David, and I, on one glorious June night in Chicago, after dinner at a Greek restaurant with saganaki (aka "pyromaniac's delight") being flamed so close we almost wished for protective gear, saw a splendidly staged TEMPEST at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (our first visit to the Navy Pier, and we were mightily impressed), complete with flying spirits, music, and illusion that was well-nigh perfect. (Dave, whose training in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre came partly from C.W. Hodges and J.L. Styan, noted their influence in the design and experienced a "homecoming" of sorts.) 

Next day we visited the Field Museum for the "History of Chocolate" Exhibit, of which I can only say that if you're not a chocoholic when you enter the exhibit, you will be by the time you leave it. And that if anything can convince this generation and the next one to save the rain forests, the thought that without the rain forest canopy there won't be any more chocolate just might do it. The complex political issues involved in chocolate production, including the use, in some areas, of child labor for the cacao harvest, have us thinking much more carefully about where our chocolate comes from, and making our purchases, on the occasions when we do indulge, in what we hope is a more socially-responsible way.      

Over a period of several weeks and with lots of help from neighbor and EIU Physical Education colleague Sheila Simons, I dug up and replaced our weedy and overgrown front perennial bed with a butterfly and hummingbird garden. The bergamot, buddleia, coreopsis, rudbeckia and company have, so far, been splendidly successful. There are ambitious plans in the works for the back yard as well.     

As a symbolic kick-off to my sabbatical year, Dave and I gutted my study at home and re-did it, ceiling to floor. The project is nearing completion, and feng shui adherents will be pleased to note that the chi of the room is now excellent. We can only hope that mine will match it.     

For our thirty-second anniversary, Dave and I went back to New Harmony, Indiana, our favorite weekend getaway, and let the eponymous peace of the place sink into and refresh our spirits. I visited family in Rochester, New York. We went to Chicago for another theatre evening, this time heading north along the lake shore to our favorite "off-Loop" theatre, Lifeline, to see an adaptation of Dorothy L. Sayers' WHOSE BODY, which was very well staged and seemed to us both darker and richer than the novel, Sayers' first.     

And I read. And read. And read. And wrote. And plan to read and write much more. And to do some research-related travel, especially to the Four Corners area and the Navajo parklands, if things work out. Tell me again why I've waited twelve years to take a second sabbatical?  But Given that nearly every day in the first week of the term has brought news of some hardship or loss for a colleague, the joys of this time of reflection and regeneration through research come at the price of considerable guilt for not being there to carry my share of the burden. My heart goes out to Frank, Bill, Julie and Tom, and Tim S., and anyone else who has had a rough time of it recently. You're in my thoughts daily.

John Kilgore A fine, fine summer, featuring two unforgettable trips: to Alaska for a week in June, to celebrate the solstice with our old buddies Casey and Amy Troy; and to Albuquerque in August, to join my Dad for an 80th birthday celebration that had morphed into an impromptu, wonderfully chaotic family reunion. Delegates from Virginia and Washington already had most of the beds, so we unfolded the pop-up camper in the back yard and had a great time. The best thing to say about Alaska is that we’re already dying to go back: spectacular scenery, lovely temperatures, and 22-hour days that seem to keep the visitor on an extended high. During our brief stay we saw a grizzly, a black bear, a golden eagle, two beavers the size of German Shepherds, lots of cariboux, and plenty of moose—including a momma

and two calves who visited the Troys’ neighborhood for a day and a half, bedding down right next to the bike path. Christy and Jay managed to squeeze their schedules and their budgets to accompany us on both trips, so our grandson, Ethan, is now an exceptionally well-traveled five month-old. The picture shows Dollie and me at the Exit Glacier near Seward, Alaska, on our first day, a few moments before the black bear went ambling by.  Oh yes, a story, “Toys,” was published at the Deep Outside Science Fiction web site in May. A narrative poem, “Ridge Street, 1965” will be up at The Scream Online in October.

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John Guzlowski

When I wasn't fighting with the weeds, the heat, the poison ivy, and the ague down in Kentucky, I was writing, mostly about my father and his experiences as a slave laborer in Germany and as a Displaced Person in the US after the war.  "What My Father Ate," which you'll find elsewhere in Agora, is from a sequence called "In the Nazi Labor Camps." I also placed my poem "Lovers" at The Drunken Boat site, http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/guzlowski.html.

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Can you say “Llansfairpwllfwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”?

No, I’m not making this up.  There really is such a town with this name in Wales, perhaps the only town tourists visit to visit a word.  You can even go in a store and stamp your passport to show you’ve been to “Llans….”  This was one of our stops in Wales after our visit to Ireland.  But let me back up.  I spent five glorious weeks with 16 students and Dana and Renee Ringuette at Harlaxton College.  Our subject was “English and Irish Literary Landscapes,” and we couldn’t have chosen a better place to read Austen, Bronte, Yeats, Joyce, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Woolf.  To describe even the highlights of Harlaxton Manor would require a lengthy essay, but here are some of the brighter constellations in memory:

• Seeing the students perched on the awesome cliff of Dun Aengus, 300 feet over the Atlantic Ocean (this was in Inis Mor, one of the Aran Islands)
• Witnessing Ben Bulben rise from the mists; reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” while gazing at Innisfree
• Sailing back to England on the cruise liner “Ulysses,” where bars and lounges are named after Joyce’s characters.  Finally, Joyce meets Kitsch.
• Visiting the Bronte Parsonage and walking up the steep streets in Haworth, where time has stood still.  There is Black Bull, where Branwell drank himself to death.
• Dove Cottage in the Lake District, where we saw Wordsworth’s passport (on the wall) and his suitcase (on the bed).  The passport was larger than the suitcase.
• Watching A Midsummer’s Night Dream with all of us as groundlings at the Globe, and seeing the look on a student’s face when one of the actors knelt on stage and took her hand.  (The actors appeared on stage dressed in pajamas; one main prop was a toilet brush.)
• Reading, reading.  Talking, talking.

I also stopped in Glasgow for three days to present a paper at an international conference “Places of Exchange: Magazine, Journals, and Newspapers in British and Irish Culture, 1688-1945” held at the University of Glasgow.  Alas, I did not get much writing done; at the beginning of the summer, I wrote a review of Critical Ireland for the James Joyce Literary Supplement.

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