Know Thyself

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What is English? This question is at the center of a conversation that has been unfolding since I arrived at Keene State College in 1998. Provisional answers to the question, as well as the multiple ways the question can be answered, have motivated changes in how we conceive and deliver our undergraduate program. How do we cultivate careful reading and the use of literary vocabulary? How do they experience the process of writing about literature and culture and learn to use writing for a range of expressive and persuasive purposes? How do wehelp students understand the ways historical, social, and cultural contexts shape literary works?  In what ways are students introduced to those works in literary and expressive traditions produced by cultures whose collective humanity and aesthetic identity have been historically devalued, denied, or dismissed? How do students come to understand literary genre? How literary works relate intertextually? How the history of language has affected the development of literature? In what ways arestudents exposed to the history of criticism and critical theory, its application in literary analysis as well as current scholarly debates in the field of English studies?

For the past ten years our thinking about (and as) a program has been motivated by a desire to improve conditions for ripinski.5student learning and, at the same time, ameliorate the difficult working conditions faculty face. New members of our department have invigorated this discussion in collaboration with those who have been at the College for some time. And College-wide curricular changes (that English, in part, initiated) have transformed the work that we do.  As a result, we now share the responsibility for a program that grows out of the ongoing and ever-present questions about English as a field of study.

I’ve been thinking about all of this over the summer as the primary author of the English department’s Self Study. For those reading who are not aware, college and universities undertake a self study every ten years or so. The University System of New Hampshire policy requires the Academic Overview Committee (AOC), which reports to the Keene State College Senate, to oversee and facilitate program review on our campus. The purpose of the academic overview process is to evaluate the strengths and challenges of the academic programs and its current and projected resource needs. Program review includes self-analysis by members of the program, external peer review, evaluation by the Academic Overview Committee, and response from the administration.

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So, what is English? Well,  The StoryI tell in this attached excerpt from the forty page document gives an overview of who we say we are and the history of the program, and might be of interest to anyone curious about English at Keene State College. The conversations around our central question are intense, ongoing, and deeply engaging. While we may not have a definitive answer to the question (in fact, we might want to question the value of such a thing), we are always working to articulate the reasons why we have the program we have–among ourselves, with our students and to the others who support the work that we do.

 

Skater Boy

Last month the Times reported that Andy Kessler died at the age of forty-eight. Kessler, as the obituaries page explained, brought skateboarding to New York City in the 1970s, and was a member of a community of skateboarders and graffiti artists named the Soul Artists of Zoo York.

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Mark Long at 8000 feet in the Easter Sierra, circa 1979

It is fascinating to watch skateboarding organizing itself into the landscape of twentieth-century cultural history. The mythology in the Times, according to the writer of the obituary, is that New York skateboarding was neither the sport nor the cultural phenomenon as it was in California, “where scrappy, expert skateboarders like Jay Adams and Tony Alva created a style, ultimately a legend, that came to be called Dogtown.” Of course this is the Times, and it is New York, and the day after Kessler’s obituary appeared something else offered itself up: the acclaimed young fiction writer Bret Anthony Johnston—author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer and a veteran urban skateboarder—published a brief essay titled “The End of Falling.”

By now you are probably wondering why a professor of English at Keene State College is writing about skateboarding. Well, it may have something to do with my years as a teenage rider in the 1970s, my sense of a larger cultural story about our generation, or simply species recognition: for here is an English professor (an award winning author, and current Briggs-Copeland Professor of Fiction position at Harvard, at that!) writing about skateboarding.

In “The End of Falling” Johnston admits that while he never knew Kessler, his life story was legendary among skaters in the city, a figure who pioneered a style of riding that Johnson calls a “gritty, dirty, and beautiful, the shadow-version of the breezy West Coast surf-style.” For this English professor, a one-time professional skateboarder, the image of a hip young professor of fiction at Harvard carving “gritty, dirty, and beautiful” turns on a sidewalk once walked by the likes of William James and W.E.B Du Bois sits well.

Kessler had a rough time, it seems. His story reminds me of a contemporary of mine in California, Jay Adams, whose unfortunate life path is featured in Stacy Peralta’s recent film Dog Town. Yes, drugs were a part of the skateboarding culture East and West, and it seems Kessler himself ended up hooked on heroin. He then turned a corner and led an effort to build a park for skateboarders and roller-bladers in Riverside Park—recruiting a group of disadvantaged youths to build it. The story resonates, at least for Johnston and perhaps his editor, as it falls into the broader contours of a story some of my generation appear to want to tell themselves. “Kessler’s great and lasting contribution to skateboarding,” Johnston intones, “was recognizing its transformative and transcendent qualities, the myriad ways in which a highly individualized endeavor invited, not precluded, community.”

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Mark Long, Carlsbad, California, circa 1978

Well, sure. I guess. Skateboarding is more than not a crime. More to the point, though, is that it is really hard to grow up, especially when the flimsy façade of privilege or youthful freedom breaks down and you find yourself struggling with the brutal facts of a flesh-and-blood life. My hunch is that the narrative Johnston is working with resonates for the over-forty crowd whose life revolves around scenarios predicated in the conceit that things are not what they used to be. And they are not, of course. Johnston deftly holds up the Kessler story as a counterpoint to the commodifaction of skateboarding and the skating culture, “the ubiquitous television presence, the department store displays of designer skater apparel, and the proliferation of free municipal skateparks around the country.” All this is rather dispiriting for a so-called breezy guy from California. But I can’t help but wonder about the cultural nostalgia that animates these kinds of stories. “For most of Kessler’s life,” Johnston goes on to say, “years of which were mired in violence and addiction and the existential angst that torments many a non-conformist, skateboarding wasn’t merely a sport or pastime or even the artistic expression of his soul. It was the path to his soul’s salvation.”

Johnston is a good enough writer to know that this kind of language is a stretch. So he excuses himself on his way to an almost passionate defense of skateboarding against those who still think of it as, well, criminal. “For all of their perceived destructiveness,” he writes, “for all of their purported unthinking and lawless mischief, skateboarders are a creative and compassionate breed. Often, especially when Kessler was nurturing what would become the East Coast scene, the kids who gravitated toward skateboarding were misfits and malcontents, the shy outcasts who’d been intimidated and sullied by the complex pressures of social interaction. Skateboarding gave them an identity and voice, and Kessler, by example, gave them the confidence to declare themselves to society.” Johnston here, appealing to his audience, rhetorician at large.

Mark Long, Logan Earth Ski Catalog, Carlsbad, California, circa 1978

Mark Long, Logan Earth Ski Catalog, Carlsbad, California, circa 1978

For me all of this is mildly reassuring. In northern San Diego, the California skate scene, as I experienced it in the 60s and 70s, was a natural extension of surfing—a way of biding time when the surf was not up. It was also a business, and a few found themselves with a lot of money. Still, the convening of young boys (and a few girls) seeking refuge from the complications and confusions of a post-60s culture was fueled by a deep sense of purpose—though I’m pretty sure none of us really knew what that purpose was. There was a powerful sense of freedom as we navigated our young lives in a slippery, drug- infested counterculture that in retrospect seems far less glamorous or important than people seem to want it to be. It was important as a relatively non-violent and mostly affirming path through adolescence and we tried to find a way to becoming adults.

When urethane wheels and grease-packed bearings appeared new things became possible. We gathered in the streets and school playgrounds to practice turns on imaginary waves and we discovered wheelies and spins and tricks that led us into garages to cut new shapes of boards that would help us twist and turn in the California sun. When we were a bit older, we gathered on the wide, black asphalt hills of what would become the resort La Costa, barefoot and with no pads or helmets, testing our equipment and ourselves at forty and even fifty miles an hour. When the extended drought set in during the mid-70s, reservoirs, empty pools and huge concrete drainage pipes offered terrain to match our skills and imaginations. Empty pools at abandoned hotels and forty foot concrete drainage pipes in the desert became the scenes of our young lives. We were a portable culture of athletic kids that would set itself up in any backyard pool we could find. The D-Town boys were, in fact, one of many groups who were defining the contours of modern skateboarding. Much to our surprise—to mine, at least—a genuine sport developed, and a few of us found ourselves sponsored—with equipment, clothing and even small salaries provided by our sponsors. We found ourselves riding fresh concrete in new skate parks, competing against one another, and doing demonstrations for catalogs and magazines.

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Mitchell Long, San Clemente, California, circa 1978

For whatever reason, I walked away at the peak of it, abandoning the sport just as I had the chance to go on an East Coast exhibition tour. Life moved, and I moved with it, and hence I never found myself in a empty pool or skate park with Kessler. By the time he managed to get the skating park open at Riverside Park at 108th Street in 1995, I was nearing the end of graduate school, completing a doctoral dissertation and teaching writing, poetry and fiction. And while I had spent part of a year living in Manhattan, I missed the opportunity to ride the brick banks under the Brooklyn Bridge, carve a Wall Street handrail or drop into the drained pool in Van Cortlandt Park.

Island Time

From Lynchburg, Virginia, en route from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia, on my way to the eighth biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. There are over six hundred and fifty attendees this year, from twenty-eight countries. We’ve gathered by plane and ferry to the University of Victoria (“U-Vic”) to share our work in the field of environmental writing and literature.

victoria 008Teresita Fernandez, “Seattle Cloud Cover”

I arrive on the Victoria Clipper, a boat passage we never did during our years in Seattle. A number of ASLE folk are on the afternoon boat that departs from Pier 69. It is good to be out on the water again, with the Cascades and the Olympics lingering in the distance. I am reminded of kayak trips in these waters as we cruise along Whidbey Island and then out into open water. When we arrive in Victoria in the evening we flag down a blue Prius cab that takes us to the University where we settle into the residence halls and townhouses on one side of the campus.

victoria 027One of many rabbits on the U-Vic lawns

I spend my first full day on the island at the ASLE Executive Council meeting and then, in the afternoon, help to facilitate a pre-conference workshop on the academic job search. The following day I am part of a roundtable for graduate students—“Finding Your Niche: Thoughts on Negotiating the Job Market”—where I share some of my experiences as a graduate student, job candidate, faculty member, search committee member and department chair. As the Coordinator of the ASLE Mentoring Program, I organize mentoring meetings, and on Wednesday I conduct one of these meetings with a post-doctoral instructor at Stanford University.

victoria 020John Felstiner and Lynn Keller near the summit of Mt. Finlayson

On Friday afternoon I join a group of about fifteen or twenty on an afternoon walk up Mt. Finlayson—one of the highest points in Southern Vancouver Island.  John Felstiner and I enjoy an hour-long afternoon conversation about poets and poetry as we pick our way down from the rocky summit and under the canopy of evergreens. Then, on Saturday, I co-faciltate a wonderful half-day workshop with my colleague John Tallmadge. “Staying Alive: A Workshop for Academic Professionals” brought together a group of fifteen or so faculty to discuss academic life. John’s summary of our meeting is available on our Staying Alive blog.

victoria 007Sculpture on the Seattle Waterfront, near Pier 69

In and around these meetings were numerous conversations, meals with colleagues and friends, an author’s reception (where we had copies of Teaching North American Environmental Literature available) and a wonderful donwtown dinner with K and I and M and J. ASLE  is a remarkable thing, and I am deeply grateful to the commitments I share with this wily group of teachers and scholars devoted to the environmental humanities. Since the inception of our organization, we’ve diversified our membership and the program reflects a vibrant field of intellectual work. Every time I get together with these people, I come away renewed by the ideals that motivate our lives as teacher, readers and writers.

summer09 040A pre-conference afternoon kicking steps in the Tatoosh range, south of Mt. Rainier

The Canadian venue for this 2009 ASLE gathering has been especially rewarding for me, as I was among a group who advocated for a Canadian site on the ASLE Executive Council many years ago. Our conference organizer, Dan Philippon, and our co-organizer and host, Richard Pickard, have done a beautiful job  keeping us all headed in the  right directions and encouraging us to best use our limited time here. Kudos!

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Brooklyn Bridge

From New Hampshire, where I am teaching a seminar on the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman, to Brooklyn for a weekend arts festival on Governor’s Island with L and D. The Figment festivities are a ferry ride away and so, I am indeed crossing (though across to a different island) by ferry and thinking about the good fortune of finding myself here with Whitman muttering in my head. “The crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,” how curious they would be to Whitman today, with painted faces and fairy wings. (A write up appears in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.) But of course Whitman was a step ahead, for as he put it, “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are / more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”

Figment: What will you bring?

This coming week we will be reading the “Calamus” and “Children of Adam” poems and thinking together about what Whitman called “fervid comradeship,” the “adhesive love” Whitman contrasts with the “amative love” that he describes (in his 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas” as “the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization therof.” But I am here, on a ferry, and I keep hearing Whitman.

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and
the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half
an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,
others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood- tide, the falling-
back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

Sure enough, we are watching and seeing.

The joys of barbaric yawps

If only Whitman could wander among the crowds on these rainy June days in 2009. “Not those — but, as I pass, O Manhattan! Your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love, / Offering me the response of my own — these repay me.” Indeed.

Governors Island from the Manhattan Ferry

A Keynote Address

It is the end of May and I am up early running in the Virginia woods near the campus of Lynchburg College. It is humid, not too warm, and I’ve found my way to a trail that winds its way beneath a canopy of oak trees. A white tail deer bounds across the trail, two black feral dogs skitter away as I come into view and catch the scent of a rotting carcass, and I stop to admire the intricate orange streaks on two good sized painted turtles in the trail.

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I am in Virginia as one of three invited speakers for the conference “3-4  Hour: Conversations on Moving to Four Credit Hour Courses.  The conversations among the faculty and staff teams from a range of institutions are familiar to me. The same questions, problems and concerns, the same sense of excitement and sense that we might indeed be doing things differently, perhaps even better, for our undergraduate students—the kinds of conversations we have been having at Keene State College. The conference appears extremely productive for participants as they weigh the promises and the potential pitfalls of transforming their curricula. One of the strengths of the conference is that the colleges represented are at all stages of the process—from exploring the idea of four-credit hour courses to having already decided to move to four-credit hour courses. In my keynote is to tell the story of Keene State College and to speak from my role as one of the faculty members who worked to create the four-credit English proposal and then helped the campus move toward a predominantly four-credit hour curriculum.

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Lynchburg College is a very congenial place—the green grass of the Dell, stately Georgian-style buildings of red brick and white columns, the home of the fighting hornets (“the stingers”). The banners on the Dell say “Above and Beyond,” the marketing tag that captures the Lynchburg brand. Lynchburg, the college brochure says, is a “place to call home,” nestled below the Blue Ridge Mountains. Lynchburg is also the home of Falwell’s Liberty University and the Thomas Rhodes Baptist Church (which we drive by on the way to an Indian dinner on Saturday night)—ground zero of the religious right during the so-called culture wars that flared in the 1980s. Earlier in the twentieth century, Lynchburg was the home of the poet Anne Spencer, who was a friend and contemporary of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and James Weldon Johnson.

American Literature and the Environmental Humanities

Late in May I headed to Boston to present my thoughts at a session on the environmental humanities at the annual American Literature Association conference. My presentation, titled “American Literature, Disciplinarity and the Environmental Humanities, began with a helpful remark by Jonathan Monroe, that “the first discipline of a discipline is, or should be, not to forget that it has not always been a discipline.” I also used Henry Nash Smith’s classic 1957 essay “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” to frame my thoughts on how the study of American culture, as Smith so aptly put it, as a whole “does not coincide with the customary field of operations of any academic discipline” (1). Much the same thing can be said about the environmental humanities, I explained, as the capacious term environment and the contested term humanities are elusive at best. Moroever, in making a case that our work as environmental humanists may move us from the study of literary categories such as American, and the professional identities we cultivate as Americanist scholars, I suggested that among the most productive things we might be doing right now would be conceiving of the environmental humanities as a collaboration across academic disciplines, in Smith’s words, “attempting to widen the boundaries imposed by conventional methods of inquiry” (11). My paper made the case that our definitions of the environmental humanities might therefore need to be somewhat more modest than we might like; at the same time I suggested that definitions of the environmental humanities that arise out of practice in particular intellectual and institutional communities may be more radical and consequential than we might think.

On Writing about Questions

This semester I am once again immersed in Emerson. My students are reading and thinking about his language in my introduction to the major course, English 200. Too, Emerson’s thinking, and his use of language, offered a space to think about being named the 2009 Distinguished Scholar at Keene State College and the keynote address I would be giving to faculty, students and their families at the annual Keene State College Academic Excellence Conference.

While I am skeptical of the discourse of excellence–as anyone who has read Bill Reading’s book or the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu should be–I am an enthusiastic supporter of the goals of the annual event:  to give undergraduate te students the opportunity to share their intellectual work with a broad audience and to work closely with students beyond the classroom. In any given year over 350  students and family members, faculty, staff, community members, area legislatures and university trustees attend the gathering. As I was trying to figure out what to say to such a diverse audience, and how I might approach the occasion, I found in Emerson’s essay “The Poet” a formulation that proved to be useful in organizing the second part of what turned out to be a three-part essay. Emerson says, “We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands.” It was the mountain ramble part that helped.

And so I was thinking: where questions come from, why we take them up, how they move us from where we are to someplace new. My talk began by asserting that whatever the academic field, most research and scholarship can be traced back to a question. However my interest was really how intellectual work is motivated by questions that transcend academic fields, professional identities, the very idea of academic excellence. As a humanist, I explained to my audience, I am preoccupied with these deeper questions. But, as I went on to say, any certainty that I might have had about where questions come from had been unraveling since late February when I was skiing across a frozen lake with my five-year-old friend Ben and he asked, “What is more importanter, living or being loved?”

Another significant moment in mywriting process was discovering something unexpected in a familiar poem by Mary Oliver.  Her poem offered a beautiful way of describing the scholarly process. It also helped me find my way to the three parts to the essay I was trying to write. The gist of it all, she says, is that we keep looking, one question leads to another question, we think again. (That “we,” it turned out, also resonated with me.) If you are interested, here is what I ended up saying to the hundreds of people gathered for lunch in a talk I titled “The Trouble with Scholarship.

What are English Majors Saying about Thinking and Writing?

In the first part of our two-course introductory sequence to the English major I ask students to write an essay about their experiences with academic writing. Their five-page essays allow me to see how students think about writing; and their thinking provides the occasion for an extended discussion about motivations for doing intellectual work in English. Their essays also make visible some impressions of our new first-year course, Thinking and Writing (ITW).

Not surprisingly, thirty-four of the forty essays on academic writing I’ve read this year mention the ITW course. The students who mention ITW confess that the opportunity to write about something that mattered to them is both exciting and terrifying. They express uncertainty about completing a 15-20 page essay. They describe hours of work in the library and their surprise that in fact others have thought about their areas of interest. And they point out how skeptical they are that the area they are writing about is interesting enough for a semester-long project.

If anything, we can count on students coming out of ITW with a vocabulary to talk about thinking and writing as a process. (More so than the students who completed our essay writing course.) Writing in a substantive intellectual context, they tell me, has taught them that good thinking takes time. Moreover, they understand that persuasion requires curiosity and careful reading of, in the memorable words of one student, “interesting people with different views on a topic.” Another student is able to say it this way:  “The most effective essays are written by those who truly believe what they are saying, have a well rounded knowledge of the subject, and have put a lot of thought into how to address opposing claims.”

In addition to understanding writing as a process these students have experienced the challenge of being asked to think about something. Again and again, they point to the unexpected freedom of being asked to write about something they care about. Describing her experience with the semester-long essay, one student excitedly describes developing a “tone of authority combined with credibility, a strong format and use of language.” Another student confesses that he now goes into an argumentative essay believing that he will come out of the process “with a whole new perspective.” And yet another student, writing about encountering adulthood, comments that she was able to “share her experiences with love, death, happiness, and sorrow, and connect it all back to show how these experiences helped me grow and mature.” And in doing so, she concludes, “I learned a lot about myself as a person, and was able to explore “my beliefs, my opinions, and my biases.”

In listening to these testimonials we begin to hear the kinds of changes that take place as students navigate the difficult transition to college-level writing. These changes-as longitudinal studies of student writers confirm time after time-do not necessarily appear on the page. Rather the changes take place in the writer. The most lasting of these changes, it follows, are those that involve the experience of being challenged to think on one’s own as well as receiving support to meet those challenges. One student writes, “I put an extreme amount of effort into this essay, and the final product was a huge success.” Another student, however, says something that has stayed with me. “At the end I did not get a really good grade. But I was interested in learning. And I found out a lot about the modern world.”

Such comments may speak to the dedication of those who of us teach the thinking and writing course. But these  student, more importantly, make visible the kinds of changes students experience in their first college-level writing course. One question is whether a curriculum that takes thinking and writing to be one of the primary pathways across the four years is a curriculum will measure up to the more ambitious goals our students may now be setting for themselves. The question is whether we are ready to meet them where they are.

A Couple of Days at the MLA

Every December English professors and aspiring academics make a pilgrimage to the Modern Language Association convention (affectionately known as the MLA). Once again, I found myself among those professors. This year we all gathered in San Francisco to meet with one another and reflect on our work as professionals, present our scholarship and talk about teaching, plan future projects, or to look for a job or interview prospective candidates for a job. Last year, on sabbatical in India, I actually missed the MLA convention-a first since I was a graduate student, and the first convention I have not been at the MLA convention on a hiring committee since 1999.

San Francisco was MLA’s 124th annual convention, and thousands of us English and Modern Language people filled the Hilton, Marriott and Fairmont hotels. Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association currently has 30,000 members from over 100 countries. There are 134 divisions and discussion groups for specialized scholarly and teaching interests; 45 membership committees overseeing association activities and publications, close to 300 members elected to govern the association through its Executive Council, Delegate Assembly, and other governance committees; over 600 members serve on the executive committees of the 86 divisions and 48 discussion groups that represent the scholarly and teaching interests of various constituencies within the profession; and over 2,000 members give papers and readings each year at the convention. It’s a crazy scene. If you are interested in a glimpse of what happens in these sessions you can check out the program for the 2008 convention at http://www.mla.org/conv_listings.

So what takes someone like me away from family and snowy New England fields between Christmas and the new year? Well, a few years ago I took on responsibility for organizing and chairing the annual session on the small college English department sponsored by the Association for Departments of English (ADE). This year I focused the session around teaching in the small college department. When I was thinking about the topic for the session last winter in Pune, India, Gerry Graff assured me that my session would fit well with his 2008 MLA presidential forum, “The Way We Teach Now.” (Happily, the small college session was listed alongside the featured presidential forum on teaching in a brochure produced for the convention.)  My idea emerged from an abiding interest in complicating the commonplace story of the profession organized around the research institution at the center with all other academic institutions on the periphery. I’ve published essays on the shortcomings of this perspective and have more recently been reading and thinking about the historical contributions of faculty who work in small college departments. These departments have essentially functioned as microclimates in the profession-fostering some of the most significant changes in English studies. My question was how does the small college department continue to generate its own conditions for innovative pedagogy, curriculum development, and the possibility of integrating the professional activities of reading, writing and teaching? More than forty people showed up for the 8:30 AM session, a good turnout indeed. Here is how I introduced the speakers:

During its fifteen years of life this session has focused on the differences between the graduate school and the small college department. Those of us involved in these ADE sponsored sessions have sought to make visible the working conditions in institutions beyond the research university. We have also used this occasion to complain about the organizing fiction of the graduate school at the center of the profession. At the 2005 convention in Washington D.C., however, I organized a roundtable that brought together graduate studies directors and small-college department faculty. For me, this conversation presented a significant turn toward talking together about our profession, as well as our shared commitments to teaching, reading and writing.

So when Gerry Graff invited members to consider showcasing “the best thinking by our members about teaching and its relationships with scholarship and writing” (“Letter”) I happily projected into his words my conviction that most of the best thinking about these relationships comes from members who teach, read and write outside the research institution. However our professional discourse continues to be shaped by persons speaking from the perspective of the doctorate-granting institution to those of us who have learned to organize our intellectual lives around teaching. As Dana Ringuette articulates the problem in his recent response to the “MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion,” research professors have clearly not thought much about “what it means to be primarily a teacher in a community of research, writing, and scholarly exchange” (“We Need to Talk” Profession 2008 190). Faculty at research institutions are quite naturally on the margins of this conversation; and, as Ringuette suggests, we have much to learn from one another as we consider how our intellectual work might be organized around teaching.

As an associate editor for the journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, I have the privilege of working closely with faculty whose writing documents the centrality of teaching to the work of scholars and professionals across the field of English studies. In fact the three speakers this morning are contributors to a forthcoming special issue of Pedagogy focused the small college department. The introduction I am drafting for the dedicated issue, tentatively titled “Centers and Peripheries,” is organized around a question I would like to use to help frame our conversation this morning: How might what happens in the small college department affect what happens in the research university?

 

Our three speakers make visible the working conditions and institutional dynamics that affect teaching in the small college department: in this case, a private and selective institution, Macalester College, a Comprehensive Catholic institution, Marywood University, and a Public Liberal arts college, the University of North Carolina Asheville. We will first hear from Stuart Y. McDougal, is DeWitt Wallace Professor of English Emeritus at Macalester College. Professor McDougal was the chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, when he was recruited by Macalester College to create a new English department. While at Michigan, he held appointments in English, Comparative literature and film studies, published widely in the fields of modern literature and film, and served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association.  The title of his presentation is Promoting and Managing Change in a Small College English Department.” Our second speaker, William Conlogue, is associate professor of English at Marywood University, Professor Conlogue teaches introductory and advanced writing, an introduction to world literature, and a variety of American literature courses. In addition to several articles on American literature and the profession, he has published a book, Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture, and has served two terms as chairperson of the Marywood English department. The title of his presentation is “Institutional Structures and the Small English Department.” Our third speaker this morning is Margaret Downes, from the department of English at University of North Carolina Asheville, a founding member of COPLAC (the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges). Professor Downes currently serves as Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, and has served as interim Associate Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, chair of the Department of Literature & Language, and director of UNCA’s Humanities Program. She recently served as President of AGLS-the Association for General & Liberal Studies-and currently directs that organization’s international activities. The title of her presentation is “Enough! or Too much”: The Blakean Paradox of the COPLAC English Department.”

But I didn’t just fly to my native state of California to introduce this session, or even to take two lovely, long early morning runs over Nob Hill and down to the waterfront out toward the Golden Gate Park.  For I had been asked to speak as part of a special session arranged by the MLA Publications Committee, “The Profession and the Liberal Arts: A Discussion of the MLA’s Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life.” This recently published book included my essay “Reading, Writing and Teaching in Context” and the session offered participants to discuss the range of working conditions for faculty beyond the research institution.

The convention also had me attending a workshop for department chairs as a representative of Keene State College. I also met with three aspiring members of the profession as part of my yearly contributions to the annual MLA job counseling service. These meetings are always gratifying as I feel that my experiences are useful for graduate students considering the job market or new PhDs asking for feedback on their job letter or cv. What else? Well, surely a memorable bowl of Thai soup, sushi, and brief visits with friends and colleagues. And I sat in on a few other sessions-from the great to the not so great. I ran into my friend and graduate school advisor Leroy Searle, as well as one of my former Bread Loaf students, Brian, who recognized me in the chaos of the Hilton lobby.

All in all, a productive few days, though unfortunately neither the time nor the money to visit my brother in LA or friends in the Eastern Sierra. Next year the convention convenes in Philadelphia. And then, early in 2011 in New Orleans, the convention will take place in early January as the MLA moves from its current dates between Christmas and new years.

The Ecological Thought

Someone asked me the other day about my scholarship and I promised to post something about my recent writing. Here is a summary of my contributions to ongoing conversations about American poetry, environmental writing and the profession of English.

American Poetry
williamsI began writing about American poetry with two peer-reviewed journal articles: one on the poet Denise Levertov and one on William Carlos Williams. In 2004, my work on Williams continued with “Ideas as Forms of Beauty: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of Year,” an essay that appeared in  the book Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. More recently, my work in American poetry and poetics has contributed to the emerging field of ecopoetry. My essay “William Carlos Williams, Ecocriticism, and Contemporary American Poetry” appeared in the book Ecological Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Two additional essays were published this fall: a 10,000 word overview of the life and writing of A. R. Ammons, commissioned by the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and a 10,000 word critical history of the relationship between poetry and ecology that appeared in a multi-volume anthology entitled Reading in Contemporary America. In addition, since 2003, I’ve published shorter reference entries on the American poets William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov. I also regularly review new books of American poetry for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. My most recent review is Mary Oliver’s book of poetry Thirst.

Environmental Writing and Ecocriticism

tnaelcover1Four years of work with co-editors Laird Christensen and Fred Waage has resulted in the publication of Teaching North American Environmental Literature (MLA 2008). Our book provides a center of access to the range of pedagogical possibilities for teaching environmental literature. The collection includes over thirty contributors and features essays on the environmental literatures of Canada as well as Mexican and Mexican-American environmental literature. The book includes a section for further reading, “Resources for Teaching Environmental Literature: A Selective Guide.” Before my last promotion I published the essay “Education and Environmental Literacy: Teaching Ecocomposition in Keene State College’s Environmental House” that appeared in Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. This publication has led to a series of publications on environmental writers and ecocriticism. In 2004 I published a 12,000 word entry on John McPhee in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century Nature Writers: Prose. My essay “Ecocriticism and the Practice of Reading” appeared in the fall of 2006 special issue of the journal Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy that I guest edited. Reader is a semiannual publication that generates discussion on reader-response theory, criticism, and pedagogy. My essay, and the special issue, is focused around the relationship between reading and ecological thinking.

My sabbatical offered me the time to write and present a plenary talk at an international conference in Hyderabad, India, “Shifting Ground: The Emergence of the Bioregion and the Watershed in the Teaching of North American Environmental Literature.” A revised version of this talk appeared this fall in the inaugural 2008 issue of the Indian Journal of Ecocriticism. I’ve also written a review of the first collection of essays on environmental literature and theory published in India, Essays in Ecocriticism, that will appear in ta forthcoming issue of  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

The Profession of English Studies

aculturescoverFor over ten years I have been writing about the profession of English. As a graduate student, while co-directing the Expository Writing Program at the University of Washington, I co-wrote and published the essay “Graduate Students, Professional Development Programs, and the Future(s) of English Studies” in the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration. Since arriving at Keene State College, my work in this area has focused on the intellectual work of English in particular institutional sites. In 2004, a Keene State College Faculty Development Pool Grant enabled me to travel to the Association of the Departments of English (ADE) Summer Seminar to broaden my perspective as a scholar interested in the profession of English. Moreover, serving for three years as a member (and for one year as Chair) of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR) furthered my understanding of the general conditions of the field of English studies and the professional lives of teachers and scholars. My subsequent inquiry into graduate training, the professional identity of faculty, and the small college department has been disseminated in a series of publications, book reviews and conference presentations. In 2005 I was invited to write a featured “Commentary” on the small college department, that I titled “Where Do You Teach?”, for the fall 2005 issue of the journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. And my essay “Reading, Writing and Teaching in Context,” appeared in the book Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life (MLA 2008). This essay takes as its subject the representation of faculty work in terms of research and teaching as separate activities. My argument is that this pervasive subplot in the narrative of the profession is rooted in a representation of faculty work that transcends the local institution and the ways that departments and institutions define intellectual work.

From the Editor’s Desk

It is difficult to  sustain a writing project during an academic term. Hence the interval between semesters is the time when ideas and outlines and notes find their way into written form. I also find myself, during my idle time between semesters, preoccupied with ongoing editorial tasks.

Working scholars are often asked to review and offer comments on manuscripts under consideration for publication. Most recently, I have served a a reviewer for PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association; Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry; Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and CultureJAC: A Journal of Composition Theory; 5) IJE: Indian Journal of Ecocriticism; 6) ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Indiana University Press.

In 2004 I was appointed associate editor of the journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. This profession-wide journal—the winner of the 2001 Best New Journal Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals—was founded to reverse the longstanding marginalization of teaching and the scholarship produced around it and instead to assert the centrality of teaching to the work of scholars and professionals across the field of English studies. As associate editor, I am responsible for the book review section in our three issues published each year. I read a range of new books relevant to the readers of our journal and then recruit reviewers, solicit reviews, edit individual and roundtable reviews, and serve as a liaison with book publishers. Currently, I am completing an introductory essay for a special issue of Pedagogy I have been invited to guest edit dedicated to the small college English department. The issue will foreground the ways the small college department continues to generate its own conditions for innovative pedagogy, curriculum development, and the integration of the professional activities of reading, writing and teaching.

Welcome

My professional work is centered on teaching students how to read deeply, think deliberately and write effectively. Beyond the classroom, I enjoy collaborations with my faculty colleagues to improve the conditions for student learning at Keene State College.

I envision my work in terms of practice: learning and growing with my students; designing courses and learning projects that release creativity, including my own; cultivating a beginner’s mind; involving myself in generative thinking about ideas and practices within, and beyond, the College; sharing ideas, stories, wisdom and experience; modeling health, growth, vitality, both body and mind; and giving back to the community in productive relationships with others, in collaboration with students, faculty, and staff, and through mentoring—these activities continue to define my professional practice, and contribute to my evolving professional identity.

My professional activities also involve 1) academic and administrative appointments and projects, 2) professional leadership; 3) curriculum and program consulting, and 5) editorial experience:

Academic Appointments Professor, Department of English, Core Faculty, American Studies Program, Affiliate Faculty, Environmental Studies Program, Keene State College; Faculty member, Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English, University of Southeast Alaska-Southeast

Administrative Appointments Chair of the Department of English (Three terms).  Coordinator of Thinking and Writing program. Chair of the American Studies program

Professional Leadership President, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE); Vice President, ASLE; Chair and Member, MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities; Member, Executive Council, ASLE; Program Director, Mentoring Program, ASLE

Curriculum & Program Consulting External Reviewer for Self Study, Department of English, SUNY Geneseo, New York; External Reviewer for Self Study, Department of English, College of Idaho, Caldwell, Idaho; Invited Consultant, with Gerry Francis, Executive Vice President, Elon College, Moving to Four-Credit Courses, Mount Union College, Alliance, Ohio; External Reviewer for Self Study, Environmental Studies Department, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

Editorial Experience (selected) Founding co-editor, Strigidae: A Journal of Undergraduate Writing in the Arts and Humanities; Associate Editor, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; Member of Editorial Advisory Board, IJE: Indian Journal of Ecocriticism; Editorial Advisory Board, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Developmental Editor, The Mountaineers Books, Seattle, Washington

A comprehensive list of my professional activities is included in my curriculum vitae

From the Classroom

I’m back at the College after our six month sabbatical in India, teaching three courses this semester, and already thinking about book orders for the spring. I’m teaching a section of Thinking and Writing entitled What is Nature? that explores the concept of nature. I’ve asked students to consider how definitions of nature reflect human values and beliefs, and to reflect on how these definitions organize our understanding of ourselves and our responsibilities in the world. Students have read the essays in Nadia Tazi, Keywords: Nature and Noel Castree, Nature (Key Ideas in Geography). We are also discussing parts of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, the Keene is reading Program text for the 2008-09 academic year.

I’m also teaching a section of the first course in the English department’s introductory sequence, Literary Analysis. This course invites students to read and discuss imaginative literature; become familiar with key terms, concepts, critical problems, and theoretical debates in English studies; and develop the habits of mind and skills to effectively analyze texts through the process of writing. Students also practice protocols for writing with sources, in-text citation and compiling a list of works cited. This semester I’m using Scholes Comley and Ulmer’s Text Book and we are reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. I’ve also added readings from Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.

Finally, twice each week at eight in the morning, I am teaching an interdisciplinary course, Environmental Literature, that traces the emergence of environmentalism as a social movement in relation to the rise of environmental literature as a genre. Students are considering the claims of the environmental movement in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century to the present; examining the development of the fictional and nonfiction conventions of environmental writing; thinking through the relationship between literature and social change; and considering commentaries on the environmental movement in the United States by cultural critics and environmental historians in developing countries. We are reading Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962); Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968); Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (1969); Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977); Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America (1990); Michael Pollan, Second Nature (1991); and Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (1995). My students are writing a lot and I, in turn, am reading a lot of student writing. A hard job of work. Satisfying, too.