Next Monday: Public Talk on Mobile Storytelling

"Bringing the Art of Design to the National Park Service:  The Fort Vancouver Mobile Project"
Dr. Dene Grigar
Director and Associate Professor
The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program
Washington State University Vancouver

7-830pm Colson 130
Monday, October 17
Free Public Lecture

In the 21st century, how best to relate the history of the National Park Service's Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, the most popular historical attraction in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area and a major archaeological site, with more than 1 million visitors per year and 2 million artifacts to show?  With digital stories told via mobile devices.  This talk, given by Dr. Dene Grigar, focuses on the "Fort Vancouver Mobile," an NEH-funded project that brings together a team of 18 experts and scholars from throughout the digital humanities field -- including historians, archaeologists and academics specializing in digital media production as well as literature, rhetoric and writing -- to tell the story of the fascinating and multicultural history of the place once dubbed the "New York of the Pacific."  Specifically, she will discuss the way design and non-fiction historical writing come together when mobile devices are used for digital storytelling.

Sponsored by the Center for Literary Computing and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Sturm Week

TCH would like to welcome poet Carol Frost, this year's Sturm Writer-in-Residence, to Morgantown.

And of course we want to congratulate the poets who will be working with her:

Melissa Atkinson (MFA, 2nd year)

Lisa Beans (MFA, 3rd year)

Ben Bishop (MFA, 2nd year)

Evan Blake (MFA, 1st year)

Melissa Ferrone (undergraduate)

Micah Holmes (MFA, 3rd year)

Sara Kearns (MFA, 2nd year)

Rachel King (MFA, 3rd year)

Matthew London (MFA, 3rd year)

Christina Seymour (MFA, 1st year)

Isabelle Shepherd (undergraduate)

Jacqulyn Wilson (MA-PWE, 2nd year)

And congratulations, too, to Emily Issacs, winner of this year's Virginia Butts Sturm Creative Writing Award.

OK, poets, we expect to hear all about the workshop with Carol and to read the amazing poems you'll be writing as a result. No pressure, though.

Postdoc at CalTech's Huntington Library

The Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Research Division of the Huntington Library invites applications for a Two-Year Postdoctoral Instructorship beginning Fall 2012. Area of specialization: early American literature and print culture, or transatlantic (British and American) long eighteenth-century literature and print culture. We are particularly interested in candidates working on issues related to religion. The teaching load is three ten-week undergraduate courses per year (quarter system). The position is contingent upon completion of Ph.D.

Interested candidates should submit a letter of application, vita, dossier with at least three letters of recommendation, thesis abstract, and writing sample by email to: englishpdi@hss.caltech.edu or mailed to: English Postdoctoral Instructor Search, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, MC 101-40, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA 91125. Application deadline is November 30, 2011.

Caltech is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Women, minorities, veterans, and disabled persons are encouraged to apply.

Another Great Poet

Tomas Transtromer, the great Swedish poet, has just been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Academy cited his "condensed, translucent images" as giving us "fresh access to reality."

Sounds about right.

Here's a seasonally appropriate poem from Transtromer's 1958 collection, Secrets on the Way, and translated by Robin Fulton in 1987's Selected Poems (edited by Robert Hass):

Weather Picture

The October Sea glistens coldly

with its dorsal fin of mirages.

Nothing is left that remembers

the white dizziness of yacht races.

An amber glow over the village.

And all the sounds in slow flight.

A dog's barking is a hieroglyph

painted in the air above the garden

where the yellow fruit outwits

the tree and drops of its own accord.

And now, a word or two from Rilke

Some books can and should be read many times. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke is one such book. Have you read it? Recently? I'm reading it, again, for the creative writing capstone class tomorrow, and I'm struck, as always, by how deeply wise this book is. It's hard to choose just one passage to quote, so here are two, from the translation by Stephen Mitchell.

First, a (beautifully) humbling passage about teaching and mentoring and general advice-giving, which is what Rilke was being called on to do in response to Franz Xaver Kappus, the military student who wrote to him in 1903:

"Of course, you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and you must be indulgent with the answer, which will perhaps leave you empty-handed; for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for human being to successfully advise or help another" (14).

And then, an equally beautiful and perhaps more uplifting passage about learning:

"... have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer" (34).

Rilke certainly doesn't need my commentary, nor do you, so I'll stop here.

Even More Very Good News

The Tenants are pleased to see that Anthony Zias (Ph.D. '08) has just had an essay published in PsyArt (and in the same issue as a piece by Claire Kahane no less). Since the journal is online, you can actually read "The Repetition of Unrecognized Desire: An Analysis of the Traumatized Subject in Joyce Carol Oates’s Son of the Morning" without even leaving the house to go to that library place. Anyone who knows Anthony won't be surprised to learn that the essay is a Lacanian reading of Oates. You can get your "interpretation of the Other's desire" fix right here.  

A warm welcome to Colson Hall's newest tiny tenant!

Our heartiest congratulations and best wishes for a good night's sleep to Associate Professor Cari Carpenter, proud momma of baby Adalyn Clare Carpenter-Bowen, born on September 28 at 8:57 p.m. 

That's 8:57 p.m. Mountain Time, since--fortunately for them, unfortunately for us--Cari, Eric, and Adalyn are sabbatical-ing in charming Fort Collins, Colorado* this year, so Adalyn won't be resident in Colson for awhile yet.  This gives us lots of time, however, to plan many ways to spoil her rotten. 

Adalyn Clare Carpenter-Bowen, 8 lbs, 3 oz and 21 inches long

* A. K. A. "Fort Fun" to those of us who once upon a time lived 30 miles east in the feed-lot/slaughterhouse town of Greeley.  Good news, Cari:  you can have a Rio margarita now!

Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships

This week, the mailbox at Colson Hall has been full of fellowship announcements:

From the UCLA Center for Seventeeth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Clark Library:

ASECS/Clark Fellowships

Fellowships jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Clark Library are available to postdoctoral scholars and to ABD graduate students with projects in the Restoration or the eighteenth century. Fellowship holders must be members in good standing of ASECS. Awards are for one month of residency.

Stipend: $2,500 for one month in residence.

Application deadline: 1 February 2012

Kanner Fellowship in British Studies

These three-month fellowships, established through the generosity of Penny Kanner, support research at the Clark Library in any area pertaining to British history and culture. Fellowships are open to both postdoctoral and predoctoral scholars.

Stipend: $7,500 for three months in residence.

Application deadline: 1 February 2012

From the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation:

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships (www.woodrow.org/newcombe) support the final year of dissertation work for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences.  Eligible proposals have religious or ethical values as a central concern, and are relevant to the solution of contemporary religious, cultural or human rights questions.  The stipend for the Newcombe Fellowship is $25,000 for a twelve-month period of dissertation writing. (Deadline: November 15, 2011)

From the Very Good News department...

The Tenants are super happy to congratulate MFA alum Christina Rothenbeck ('11) on the forthcoming publication of her chapbook, Girls in Art. Dancing Girl Press will do the honors and you can get your copy in August 2012.

From her new home at the University of Southern Mississippi, Christina also reports that she misses Pat Conner (hey, who doesn't?) and that her chapbook includes "a few new bank robbery poems," which is a statement you just don't hear every day.

So congrats to you, Christina... and yes, we will give Morgantown your love.

Mark Brazaitis traveled to Washington D.C. to celebrate 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps.

Associate Professor and Creative Writing Program Coordinator Mark Brazaitis traveled to Washington, D.C., this past weekend to attend ceremonies celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. Brazaitis served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala from 1990 to 1993 and as a Peace Corps trainer in the same country from 1994 to 1995. A few notable Peace Corps authors: Paul Theroux, Maureen Orth, Bob Shacochis, Richard Wiley, Mike Tidwell, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Norman Rush, P.F. Kluge, and John Coyne. For more, see:

As part of the celebration, Brazaitis attended a ceremony at the Library of Congress honoring writers who have been Volunteers. Chris Matthews, a Volunteer in Swaziland from 1968 to 1970 and the host of Hardball with Chris Matthews, and James Billington, the long-serving head librarian of the Library of Congress, were featured speakers.

With several other former Volunteers who served in Guatemala, he attended a reception at the house of the Guatemalan ambassador to the U.S., Julio Armando Martini Herrera (see photo). Mucha amistad!