EGO/COW Book & Bake Sale this coming Monday 29 Oct.

For those of you who haven't heard (or hadn't heard before the title of this post), this coming Monday 29 Oct. EGO and COW are hosting our annual Fall Book & Bake Sale. From roughly 10-4 on Monday EGO members will be staffing the Sale in Colson 130 and COW members will be selling baked goods at a table in front of the Mountainlair.

As many of you know, this is our main fundraiser for the year, so please try to stop in and buy some cheap lovely books and some delicious baked goods. Your grad students very much appreciate the support.

Also, on Sunday 28 Oct. we will need assistance bringing the books down and unpacking them, then help on Monday after 4 to repack them. Anyone who shows up will be much appreciated (and we will be having pizza Sunday).
The last call for assistance is to anyone with a truck. We will be getting several shoping carts from the Giant Eagle on Green Bag Road, and a truck (or van, or SUV) would be a great help in transporting them (I only have a Chevy Cobalt, so I might be able to fit two carts in there, but it will be awkward).

Many thanks in advance.

These "folk" ROCKED.

Micah, Connie, Rebecca, and Shane--no nerves here!

Congratulations to MFA students Micah Holmes, Connie Pan, Shane Stricker, and Rebecca Thomas, who put together an amazing group of presentations for a panel at the 5th annual Ohio State University/Indiana University folklore graduate student conference on February 18th.

The four were students in a special topics course on Folklore Histories, Theories, and Methodologies last spring, for which each wrote a creative project based on their own ethnographic fieldwork.  After the class, they revised their final projects into conference-length presentations that combined an overview of their projects' theoretical framework with an excerpt from the creative work. 

Micah's presentation, titled "A Coal Miner’s Son: Family Folklore As a Catalyst For Creative Writing and for the Formation and Modification of Personal Identity," was based on a nonfiction essay he wrote for the class that focused on stories about his father's 37-year career as a miner, many of which Micah had never heard before doing his fieldwork. 

Connie presented part of a short story she wrote for the class about her grandfather almost catching a mermaid one night while fishing.  In her presentation, titled "Talkin' Story: Just When I Thought I Was Nothing Like My Family," she discussed the ways that new understandings about folk belief influenced her choices about point of view and characterization.

Shane similarly focused on supernatural family folklore in his presentation, "A Cautionary Tale," which explored the ethical dilemma he faced in translating a very personal and rather disturbing family story into a piece of fiction.  He then read an excerpt from the climactic ending of the short story he wrote for the class.

Rebecca, on the other hand, talked about how she discovered she couldn't turn her grandmother's stories about growing up during World War II into fiction, but instead had to use the medium of creative nonfiction to do justice to her collected materials.  Her presentation was titled "'The Option to ‘Be Like a Guy or Something': Familial Oral History about Gender, Education, and Employment."

A colleague from Ohio State told me afterward that our students' presentations were the best prepared and best delivered of of all the panels he saw over the two days of the conference.  Kudos to these four for doing such a great job! 

Enjoying some well-deserved downtime with the awesome gold Impala after the conference.

EGO/COW Book and Bake Sale 2011

The 2011 version of the EGO/COW Book and Bake Sale is coming to Colson Hall in exactly one week. This year's sale, on Thursday, October 20 from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, may be the largest book and bake sale to date! Please let your students, friends, and even people you may not especially like know about the date and time of the sale. Thanks in advance for helping EGO and COW make this the most successful book and bake sale in recorded history. The members of EGO and COW hope to see everyone there and we look forward to feeding minds and mouths alike. See you next Thursday in Colson 130.