Susan Bazargan

I gave a paper at the MLA convention in December; the title was "Performative Joyce: Signature, Language, and the Performance of a Colonial Self in the 'Proteus' Episode." The session had been arranged by the International James Joyce Foundation. My review of Critical Ireland, ed. Alan A Gillis and Aaron Kelly, just came out in the James Joyce Literary Supplement.

I finished writing my first play, Corazon, Corazon, which I hope to send to the right people (once I know who they are). Personal news? I'm glad spring is less than a month away. I celebrate the old Persian new year at the time of the spring equinox. My dog Max loves to eat snow but won't eat cheerios.

Linda Coleman

Sabbatical! I read, I write, I live something akin to a normal person's life. Most of the reading and writing has been for the advanced composition textbook I'm writing with Bob Funk. We have a contract with Prentice-Hall and a due date of 9/1! I've also written a few book and manuscript reviews and a conference paper. And organized six sessions for the American and Popular Culture conference in New Orleans this spring. All this with time to walk my mutts, read for fun, go to movies, and wonder how it is we crazy academics manage our regular lives....

John Guzlowski

John Kilgore

My curmudgeonish essay, "Why Teachers Can't Read Poetry," has been reprinted in the February issue of The Vocabula Review (www.Vocabula.com). "Axis to Grind," orginally an editor's column for Agora (March 2002), reappears in this month's Chronicles. Two other essays, "Flag Country" and "Curses Not Loud But Deep," are scheduled to appear in the April issue of Chronicles.

Jay Prefontaine

I published a story called "Closing Time" in Quarterly West, the Summer 2002 issue. Quarterly West publishes the winners of the Writers At Work Fellowship Competition, which I won in fiction back in May 2001. They put me up in Salt Lake City for their annual W@W conference; I read the winning
story and led a short story workshop.

In early December, I read a story called "The One Who Walked Her Home" in an old but nicely renovated opera house in Suffolk, New York (Long Island) as part of The Suffolk County Writer's Conference at which I was a visiting writer. I spent the weekend lecturing on the form and theory of the short story and reading the work of and doing workshops for MFA students from Southampton College and a few creative writing students from Suffolk Community College.