I'm happy
to report that after many years of plotting and planning, my textbook
for advanced comp is finally out: Professional
and Public Writing: A Rhetoric and Reader for Advanced Composition
(Prentice-Hall, 2005). I convinced Bob Funk to join me (he's the busiest
retired person I know), and it was yet another very positive experience
in collaborative writing. The text owes much to the students I've worked
with in English 3001 over the last 17 years--and includes several examples
of EIU student writing! Thanks, too, to the colleagues who have engaged
in hallway chat about ethnography, genre, WAC, etc.
I've been trying to get my office ready for the next tenant. I'm getting books sorted out to donate to the EIU library. Not an easy chore. I'm also putting books I'm not donating outside my door for students to search through. What it's teaching me is that students are more interested in primary sources (a collection of stories by Fitzgerald or a novel by Cather) than in secondary sources. I've been trying to give away a terrific book by Crews on Hawthorne (Sins of the Father) for a week, and it's not moving.
Anyway, here's some recent publications. My poem "Poland," about my father's longing to get back to his home in Poland after World War II, appeared in a special issue of Crab Orchard Review dedicated to "Immigration, Migration, & Exile." Two of my poems, "Melon" and "Czego Nauczyla Ja Wojna," were published in Czeslaw Milosz's book Spizarnia Literacka ("Literary Cabinet").
I made presentations at the American Folklore Society conference ("Who's Really in the Bottle?: Arab Djinn and American Genies") and the M/MLA ("Storytelling, Performance, and Authenticity in The 1001 Nights"). Work proceeds on an article on the former for Midwestern Folklore as well as on my MLA book project on teaching The 1001 Nights. 2004 marks the 300th anniversary of the Antoine Galland French translation, the first translation of the work into a western language, and journals and conference presentations on the Nights are popping up all over! I'll be presenting on the work again at MLA in December.
Oh, yeah, and the dean gig is going pretty well also. Come visit me at Booth House sometime!
I have three
article acceptances to report: (1) "'Like a Diamond Shining in the
Dark': Ben's Role in Death of a Salesman," is scheduled
for publication in Notes on Contemporary Literature, March 2005;
(2) "Prufrock and Hamlet Revisited: 'No, I Am Not Prince Hamlet,'"
is forthcoming in The Explicator; (3) "A Source for Isaiah
Thomas's 'Parody on Shakespeare'" will appear in the next issue of
English Language Notes.