*Photo provided by Jennifer Grouling

Tyler Fields: Can you talk about what sparked your interest in Rhetoric & Composition?

Jennifer Grouling: I always wanted to teach writing, but I didn’t really realize that was a field. I was an undergraduate English education major, and I did teach high school for a little bit. But I really didn’t want to teach literature; I didn’t want to teach Romeo and Juliet for an entire quarter, which is what I was required to do. So when I went back to school for my M.A., I wasn’t exactly sure exactly where I wanted to take my interest in teaching. Once I realized that Rhetoric & Composition was an option, I thought, “that’s what I want to do. I want to teach writing.”

Did you always know that you wanted a Master’s in Rhetoric and Composition or did that come later?

I got pretty lucky when I went into my Master’s program. I went to NC State, which has a wonderful faculty in the Rhetoric & Composition program. I was really introduced to it by the faculty, and they helped guide me.

Have you always had a specific interest in composition/writing?

I’ve always felt like I was a writer, and I’ve always been interested in writing. For a while my interest was in creative writing. But there came a moment when I realized that I was really better at academic writing than creative writing. I really enjoyed the process involved in academic writing that is often missing from creative writing.

You’re the director of the Writing Center here at Ball State. Can you describe that position a little bit for me including your interest in writing centers?

An administrative background is important to me, and I got that experience in my doctoral program. I was the assistant to the Writing Program. On top of being interested in that, I was interested in curriculum development, and how to structure a program, and things of that nature. Additionally, I’ve always been interested in writing in the disciplines, which includes how to communicate with instructors who are teaching writing in biology or whatever the field might be. At NC State, writing in the disciplines was incorporated into the first year program. We did a unit on writing in the sciences, writing in the social sciences, writing in the humanities, etc. That was what we concentrated on in first-year composition. And since I’ve come to the Writing Center, I’ve realized that I could be afforded a similar opportunity to make the connections with writing in the disciplines through Writing Center work. I want to reach out to writing intensive instructors and try to offer more workshops done by tutors in writing intensive classes. I didn’t originally have as much background or training in Writing Centers, but since coming here, I’ve really come to like it.

As the director of the Writing Center, I hire new undergraduate tutors, train them, hold meetings twice a month in which we talk about our pedagogy, theory, etc. I’m doing things now like looking into how to expand our online tutoring services. One thing I really like about Ball State’s Writing Center director position is that we’re expected to create a “culture of writing.” I really like the idea of the Center not just being a place for tutorials, but rather somewhere where we can provide outreach to instructors and faculty that are teaching writing. For instance, we can have a National Day on Writing or generally just promote writing as a thing that people do for various reasons.

It sounds like the Center is a community based around writing development, not just editing and revising like some might think.

It’s a challenge that we face. There’s the stereotype that the Writing Center is the “fix-it shop” or that we’ll simply correct the papers of those whose native language is not English. And even though we offer a variety of feedback on all types of pieces, there’s a perception that the Center only caters to those students who are, say, having trouble with grammar.

When you hire undergraduate students for a tutoring position, do you take into account the various types of writing they might encounter?

I try to hire students from different disciplines. Also, during an interview process, we talk about the Writing Center philosophy or theory of writing. This way, I try to get people who really want to interact with others and provide feedback instead of someone who just wants to edit grammar and spelling.

I think that’s great. I’ve had minimal experience with tutoring, but I know that, personally, tackling the theories of tutoring is just as relevant as the hands-on experience.

I know that here, at least, aspects like philosophy and theory are built into the training for the tutors of the Writing Center. In some places, they make it a separate course outside of tutoring.

Are there overlapping elements between your position as director for the Center, and your role as instructor in the classroom? How can the two positions inform one another?

I think the two absolutely overlap. For instance, in the Fall, we’ll have the new GTAs who are going to teach their own ENG 103 or 104 classes in the Spring. There’s a lot that they can learn about conferencing with students or how to not appropriate the student’s writing; how to help them articulate their own ideas. So they can learn in practice what we talk about theoretically, which they use in their own instruction, either as a teaching assistant or a Writing Center tutor.

I understand from your CV that one of your interests is tabletop role-playing games and that you have published a book on this topic, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Can you talk a little bit about this? Especially, how do you integrate this interest into your instruction?

My interests in the topic started in my Master’s program: I took a narrative analysis class, which was more linguistic-based. In fact, it was a linguistics class. I knew I’d have to do an narrative analysis of something linguistic in nature so I thought I’d record one of my Dungeons and Dragons sessions and analyze that because it’s a form of story-telling. And my professor told me that it didn’t meet the traditional linguistic aspects of a story. In fact, there’s a huge and ongoing debate over whether or not games are narrative. And this is where my analysis started: I examined this debate over gaming narrative. Part of this is disciplinary posturing: people involved in game study view it as its own field. So they might think it can’t be clumped with English in the same way you analyze other narrative texts. However, my problem with this group is that they more often than not are concentrating on video games. And I feel like there are so many other types of games out there: role-playing, tabletop, board games, card games, etc. One of the things I argue in my book, too, is that tabletop games challenge our notion of authorship and narrative way before digital technologies ever did.

You are currently teaching a senior seminar on gaming and gaming narrative. Can you talk about this class?

We’re exploring where games fall into English Studies. We’re thinking about what we can take from our own backgrounds in order to study games. For instance, some education majors in the class developed a lesson plan which incorporates gaming into the classroom, while creative writing majors might have written a story to be told via gaming. The class has three units. The first was on game genres in which we talked about some of the problems associated with defining genres. For instance, do you categorize a game by the gaming system or by narrative? The second unit was on narrative in gaming. We talked about how to define narrative within gaming and discussed how to study narrative. And the last unit was on literacy in gaming. So we talked about gaming as a means to develop literacy or as a literacy.

Your book and a substantial amount of your recent research has been on table top role-playing games. Is this an area you hope to continue developing research on?

I began with gaming research because it was a personal interest of mine and fun to do, but I’ve recently gotten much more into the Writing Program Administrator/Writing Center mindset. Because of this, I want my new research to be practical and have influence in changing the way a program is developed or run. Lately, I’ve been interested in personal identity and looking into ways in which TAs develop into instructors and other similar aspects.

-Interview conducted by Tyler Fields

Anyone who has talked to me for more than, say, five minutes, probably knows the first book on this list: Moby-Dick.  Why?  Because it’s about everything!  Love, grief, justice, power, gender, epistemology, language, disability, anger, belief, history, responsibility, humor, awe, identity, race—and that’s just the beginning.  I’ll admit that I didn’t pick up this book by choice the first time (I had to read it in grad school), but now I pick it up regularly, and I really think you should, too.  After Moby-Dick the choices get harder, but here are a few more books I read this summer that I think are worth your time and effort:

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood: These two books are linked—two perspectives on a single set of events—and I read them side-by-side. These stories take us to a future riven by economic and genetic distinctions, and ask us to follow, and care about, the lives of characters living in different circumstances in that world.  Global warming, genetic modification, the gap between the haves and have-nots, pandemic diseases, all these subjects (and more) are Atwood’s concern.

Stuck Rubber Baby, by Howard Cruse: It tells the story of Toland Polk, growing up white and gay in a small southern town in the middle of the Civil Rights movement.  The combination of image and text creates a compelling and profoundly human narrative about the intersections of the personal and political.  Cruse’s book is a great example of the nearly unlimited potential of graphic narrative to address complex issues in more than black and white ways.

The Circus in Winter, by Cathy Day: Even if Cathy Day hadn’t just joined our English Department, I’d encourage you to read this wonderful collection of linked short stories.  Set in the fictional town of Lima, Indiana (a stand-in for Peru, Indiana), these stories center around the Great Porter Circus, which makes its winter home in Lima.  We see the lives of performers, clowns, animal trainers, and others linked to the circus by chance, desire, and heredity.  At times funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, this collection is always humane and always fascinating.

The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich: Too often American Indians are represented in American culture as artifacts of the past rather than as citizens of the present.  One of Erdrich’s most important projects as a novelist has been to challenge that myth through her beautiful and unflinching depictions of present-day indigeneity.  This book, set on an Ojibwe reservation and the nearby town of Pluto, North Dakota, reaches back to the past—the brutal murders of a white family near the reservation in 1911—but its attention is on the present as Erdrich’s signature style of multiple intersecting narratives and gorgeous detail fills in the whole story.

Awood, Margaret Eleanor. Oryx and Crake. Anchor, 2004. Print.

Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. Anchor, 2010. Print.

Cruse, Howard. Stuck Rubber Baby. Vertigo, 2010.

Day, Cathy. The Circus in Winter. Harcourt, 2004.

Erdrich, Louise. The Plague of Doves. HarperCollins, 2008.

If there’s one book you read about what it means to struggle with gender identity—or really, with any identity—make it Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There. She’s Not There is, at turns, joyful, hilarious, terrifying, poignant, and heartbreaking. It is, in a word, deeply human. Read this book if you are a fan of laughing, of wincing, of crying, of feeling.

Of course, there is absolutely no way I could be anywhere even close to objective when writing about She’s Not There. Like Boylan, I am transgender, and this book played a major role in my identity struggles. I would not be where I am without Boylan and this book. Additionally, Boylan is a Professor of English at Colby College in Maine—a state I consider as much my home as anywhere—and I had an opportunity to meet her and talk with her about She’s Not There while I studied at the University of Maine.

She’s Not There chronicles Boylan’s gender transition from male—born James Finney Boylan—to female. When Boylan began her transition, she was 40 years old, married with two children, and a published novelist. The memoir, then, revolves around her family, friendships, and professional life. In particular, her relationship with her children is a centerpiece, as they come to terms with having a parent living her life “in two genders.” Boylan’s close friend and colleague, Richard Russo, also plays a prominent role in the book, and he contributes an afterword that is crucial in tying the book together.

Parts of She’s Not There read like a guide to gender transition: what kinds of places you can shop, what kinds of questions you can expect to be asked, and so on. Thematically, though, the focus is on internal identity struggles, coming out and building a community of support, and the power of family. Like any good memoir, She’s Not There is not chronological—it jumps around in time quite frequently—but much of the early part of the book deals with Boylan’s coming to terms with her own identity. As the narrative progresses, Boylan deals with coming out to family and friends, meeting both resistance and support from various camps. The love of the people in Boylan’s life carries her through the process, and readers will find themselves lifted right along with her.

I’ve heard complaints that She’s Not There doesn’t address some of the darker and harder parts of a gender transition, and it’s absolutely true. Boylan addresses her own repression and some difficult family relationships, but the book mostly focuses on the positive side of her transition. There’s enough darkness in so many transgender narratives, though, that Boylan’s levity is a breath of fresh air. The joy of self-actualization is so often elided in favor of pain in similar memoirs, and I, for one, am buoyed by Boylan’s positivity.

Stylistically, She’s Not There reads like it was written by a novelist as much as a memoirist (Boylan published three novels as James). The frequent dialogue is casual, intelligent, even, dare I say, snappy. Chapters blend internal monologue and dialogue effectively. Perhaps most strikingly, Boylan has a deft hand when it comes to symbolism and imagery. Key moments in her life serve as motifs that she returns to consistently, weaving them into the story in consistently beautiful ways.

One line that runs through the story is the role of music in Boylan’s life. The title of the memoir is drawn from a song by The Zombies, and Boylan often connects her observations to songs that were important to her. If a memoir can be said to have a “climax,” the climax of She’s Not There comes when Boylan is being wheeled into the operation room singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” as touching a moment as you will likely ever read.

Since writing She’s Not There, Boylan has become a public figure in the transgender community. She has appeared on Oprah and The Today Show, as well as been featured in documentaries. She followed She’s Not There with another memoir I highly recommend, I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir in 2008. Her latest book, Stuck in the Middle: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders, is set to be released later this month. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of its publication, a new edition of She’s Not There with additional materials will also be released concurrently with Stuck in the Middle.

She’s Not There is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in gender identity and transition. When I came out to my parents, it was the very first book I recommended they read. Boylan was the first transgender author to reach the best-seller list, and there’s a reason why. But let me be clear: She’s Not There is not just for those with an investment in gender issues. It’s for anyone who has ever struggled with identity. In other words, it’s for all of us. It’s a beautiful book. Go read it, please. I’ll know you when I see you in the hallway with a smile on your face.

Boylan, Jennifer Finney. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. New York: Broadway, 2003. Print.

It might not be your first thought when you’re thinking about what you’ll do with a writing/English degree. But I’ve found advertising to be a constantly challenging and equally rewarding way to flex my writing muscle.

I’m a copywriter (fancy word for writer) at an ad agency in Indianapolis. It’s not exactly like what you might have seen on Mad Men. My boss doesn’t have a drink cart in her office. We don’t smoke a pack of Lucky Strikes in every brainstorm session. And it’s not the late ’60s. But other than those few minor details, it’s pretty close.

Advertising is an odd job. Half artistry, creativity, and free-spiritedness. Half results-driven, sales-focused, real business. And the key is making them seem less “half-and-half” and “more one-and-the-same:” create inspiring work that moves as many products as it does people. That’s what we are working toward every single day, and it’s quite the chase.

So, what do we do all day? First, we learn. It may seem as if all the brilliant ideas are discovered instantly (and conveniently right before the deadline)—and honestly, sometimes that does really happen—but most of the time we can only arrive at the right concept by immersing ourselves into the brand. We Google, read, pour through pictures, and talk to customers.

Then, we scribble. We toss out a lot of bad ideas on how to communicate that brand—and a few good ones. An idea can start with a phrase, a doodle, a picture we’ve seen somewhere, a song, or just seemingly divine inspiration. We keep going with the bad ideas until we have enough good ones. I often write about 100 headlines to get to 10 I really like.

We find our best ideas, polish them, and then we pitch. It’s the part you see on TV—a snazzy little presentation that makes you want to buy the [faucet, soda, or whatever product we're selling], and makes the client want to buy the work.

Our work comes in a lot of shapes and forms: logos, taglines, TV commercials, radio spots, websites, online ads, magazine and newspaper ads, brochures, posters, presentations, social media, trade show booths, billboards, and just about anything branded. By the time it reaches your eyes, it has been planned, written (that’s me), art directed, designed, approved, and placed very strategically in the place you encounter it.

When I started as a Freshman at Ball State, I knew I wanted to work in advertising. I also knew I wanted to write. At the time, I had no idea how well the two would fit together. My advertising major taught me all about target audiences, smart strategy, creative conceptualization, and media buys. And my creative writing minor taught me about character development, story arc, and voice. Put them together, and you have a skill set perfect for storytelling for a living.

What I love most about my job is that I get to think of things that move me, make me laugh, and inspire me every day. I get to make things up for a living. And I get to do it for a lot of different brands, taking on a lot of different voices. Oh, and I get to wear jeans to work.

And now to do a little advertising of my own:

The agency for which I work, Miller Brooks, is hiring Spring, Summer, and Fall semester writing interns. Go to http://www.millerbrooks.com to learn more about us and our clients.

Miller Brooks internships are fully credited and available during Spring, Summer, and Fall semesters. Internships are completed in 90-day cycles and paid at a rate of $250.00 per week. We are flexible with schedules, but do expect a minimum of 30 hours per week on the job.

To apply, email your résumé and either a PDF of or link to your portfolio of writing samples.

Uriaha Foust—Associate Creative Director (uriaha@millerbrooks.com)

Mark Willis—Senior Copywriter (mark@millerbrooks.com)

Advertising examples are preferred, but any writing will do (short or long, fiction or non-fiction). Show us a variety of projects and a variety of voices.

Environmental studies, at least in some literature departments, are often viewed as a secondary concern to the more visible or pressing issues related to the humanities. We are, after all, studying the humanities and all the interconnected complications that touch on or influence human culture. So it’s no wonder that environmental studies seem so distant to our most urgent concerns of hearing what historically have been voiceless people—women, ethnic minorities, and the LGBT communities just to name a few. Behind all of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements, even in the production of our precious books, we understand that there remains a trail, sometimes slight and sometimes enormous, of environmental destruction. It’s no wonder that we in the humanities glance at the world of environmental studies with what might be called apprehension or fear—surely not loathing. And then there are those in environmental studies who actually do proclaim a type of loathing toward human kind; we are the parasites of the earth slowly killing our motherland while fantasizing about our future intergalactic escape from an utterly ruined planet.

How can we possibly bring together a sincere dialogue between the celebration of human cultural production and the nature-desecrating criminality of human existence? Of course my hyperbolic binary is merely meant to explicate the conflict at its most extreme, but I think it is this extremity that undergirds the complexity of discussing environmental issues in literary studies. Those scholars who have been doing ecocriticism have certainly been crossing this academic chasm for over twenty years, and a recent critical study is moving the discussion in an even more productive direction by combining environmentalism with postcolonial studies.

Rob Nixon’s recent book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor opens up an extremely vital area of research for literary studies. Before Nixon’s book, which was published in 2011, few critical works had concentrated on the importance of viewing postcolonial literature through an environmental perspective. Nixon strongly argues that we can no longer afford to separate the oppression of poverty stricken communities around the world from impending concerns of environmental degradation. Nixon’s critical vantage point is primarily targeted at an American audience, and it is an essential read for anyone curious about the intersections between poverty and nature. But more importantly Slow Violence is significant for Americans who are already interested in environmental studies because Nixon’s writing helps to broaden the discussion of what it means to be environmentally aware in the United States. Often the discussion about environmental preservation and conservation overlooks or completely dismisses, with what Nixon would argue is a continued 21^st century colonialist view of, the world’s “disposable people.”

In other words, the dominant vision of American environmentalism, which harshly judges population growth and urban life over the rootedness of the individual’s right to place, severely erases the presence of voiceless people throughout the world who subsist on lands that are not the precious wild places enshrined by American writers like Thoreau. Likewise, Nixon argues that an environmental perspective will also help to enliven postcolonial discourse in the U.S. which has either become too abstruse for readers outside academia or is losing ground to a more generalized understanding of global literature.

Beyond the interests of ecocritics and postcolonialists, I would argue that Nixon’s text provides an interesting read for anyone who wants to expand their understanding of significant events throughout the world as well as the individual lives of authors and writers who are rarely found in the mainstream U.S. literary curriculum. Slow Violence is not a rehashing of what many Americans already know about logging in the Amazonian rainforest, but a more thorough investigation of less known socio-environmental destruction in Africa, India, Iraq and the Maldives that is not spectacular and does not find its way to the nightly news. Instead, Nixon brings to light the type of violence that does not seem like violence, and that may not seem like anything to those who do not live in the hidden spaces of poverty and pollution. These spaces include oil spills and endless gas flares in Nigeria that pollute fields and water so that no crops can grow; or the continual spread of deadly depleted uranium which was used on American missiles launched in Iraq and continues to cause cancer and birth deformities long after the initial strike.

Nixon’s writing does not just present incredibly pertinent information about the people and places that time and distance often renders invisible; the prose in Slow Violence is also beautiful, fluid, and entirely approachable. Nixon’s writing, even when he describes the most heart wrenching stories of suffering and death, demonstrates a striking poetic quality. Stunning sentences, like the following, open up new realities for readers unaware of some of the socio-environmental horrors that exist in the world and that are erased through the inattention of the American media: “We need to find (as Rachel Carson did some fifty years ago) new ways to tell the slow-moving stories about the long dying; about last year’s cluster bombs that turn into next year’s killers, about depleted uranium that treats its arbitrary enemy the child of a child as yet unborn” (232).

I recommend this book to everyone because we should not live our lives in ignorance of the devastation carried out by transnational companies unfettered by international regulations or the industrial military complex of the United States. Nixon provides us with the historical background to the slow violence caused by U.S. companies and military throughout the world and offers us a great reading list including Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Abdebrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s detention diary A Month and a Day, and Wangari Maathai’s memoir Unbowed. Although an eco-system cannot speak for itself, the people who subsist in these eco-systems throughout the world can open our eyes to the repercussions of slow violence.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.

The following is one student’s recent experience in the class. This post is written by BSU student, Liz Janoson.

*Cover of the 2013 Issue of the Creative Writing in the Community Anthology

On day five of visiting my community partner I could tell she wasn’t in her normal chipper mood. She shuffled her feet when she came to greet me. She had a writing notebook in her hand: the one I had given her on our second meeting. My intention was for her to bring it every week.

She chose our designated writing space for the day and read out loud something she had written while she was in school that day. Though I don’t remember exactly what was written, I knew her intended audience was geared towards the people that bully her at school. My heart broke until the uplifting end in which she said something to the tune of: why can’t we all be friends and get along?

By the time our one hour tutoring session was done, I could tell that her mood had drastically changed. She was standing up and acting things out, she got so excited to tell me stories that she would forget to take breathes in the middle of her sentences, and she was requesting to do both old and new writing assignments. My writing partner was back to her old self.

When I signed up for English 409, Creative Writing in the Community, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and, honestly, when I found out we would be working with children, I got a little nervous. Sure, I had babysat while I was in middle school, but I believe that is totally different than instilling creative writing techniques in a middle school student. My nerves were originating from the fear that I wouldn’t be an adequate teacher, tutor, or mentor.

There is something rewarding about reading work from a middle school student. Their level of imagination is something I’ve tried to cling to as I enter further into my twenties. Though I don’t want to call middle school students innocent, they still have the streak of a worldview that can be appreciated by everyone that has abandoned theirs long ago. The eagerness to learn made me eager to work hard in my other fields of study and just general life goals unassociated with academia—a kick of motivation I needed.

As I was leaving Motivate Our Minds (my partner’s after school program) one day, I told Mrs. Julie—the head of the organization—that my community partner made me look forward to my Mondays. She gave me a hug and then gave me a bag of chocolate covered pretzels and told me she would see me next week.

I am blessed that my community partner and I had an instant connection and that it resonated throughout our entire meeting process. I am more blessed that she felt a connection to me. That she felt comfortable to tell me she was being bullied, that she asked me questions about college motivated by her own desire to one day attend. One of my friends said to me that she wants nothing more than to be someone that younger girls look up to and think “I want to be like her one day.” It wasn’t until my friend said those words that I realized that was my ultimate goal.

*Cover of the 2012 Issue of the Creative Writing in the Community Anthology

There are certain things I tend to repeat so often, my students probably want to take those Little Debbie snack cakes I sometimes toss around the room and throw them back at my head.  One of those phrases (“Art should be entertaining, regardless of subject matter”) is pretty obvious, but I think that phrase can very easily get us into trouble unless it’s matched with another one: “Entertainment alone probably isn’t adequate justification.”  Put another way, it seems to me (hear that? Yeah, that’s me scrabbling up on my soapbox again) that the best art is the stuff that uses humor, creative leaps, or even shock value for some purpose beyond simply getting the reader to raise her/his eyebrow.  In other words, getting (and keeping) your audience’s attention is critical, but what’s the point of getting an audience’s attention if you don’t have anything to say?

By these admittedly vague and totally subjective standards, though, Kim Triedman is definitely on my Cool List.

Full disclosure: awhile back, as the Poetry Editor for Atticus Review, I selected Kim Triedman’s work for one of our Poetry Features. This was hardly a personal favor, though; while Triedman is no stranger to the biz, I had not heard of her yet, nor had I ever read her work before.  But I was immediately impressed.  And afterwards, when I was invited to read and “blurb” her first book-length collection, Plum(b), I couldn’t agree fast enough.

Triedman’s poems (many of them darkly funny) rather deftly navigate that tightrope between lyrical experimentation and emotional resonance.  Put more succinctly, they’re deep and fun to read!  To quote… well, me…  “What I love most about these poems is their uncanny range–their ability to be lyrical and almost pastoral one instant, darkly comedic the next. One never gets the feeling that Triedman is just engaging in meaningless acrobatics, though; these poems are sincere as sunrise or a drop of blood, full of intense and shining purpose, and to see through them is like remembering all at once that you have eyes.”

To show what I mean about range, look at these lines from “Chaos Theory”: “Sometimes there are tears, but there are / copper pennies, too, and glasses of milk…”  Or from a little later in the same poem: “I have watched men starve along the way, / half lost, and then devour themselves / like serpents. You will see.”  The imaginative and stylistic leaps exemplified in Triedman’s work remind me a little of Zen koans (maybe because I’m teaching a Zen poetry class right now) in that they seem to achieve a kind of magic by pulling the usually regimented, logical brain in two contradictory directions at the same time.

Here’s another, longer example, this time from the poem, Harbor:

Imagine the house, the light

in the window—

honeyed, pulpy, weeping

like a womb.

I am there, if you like:

I am the woman in the

broth. Stir me,

I will feel it. Take me

to your mouth. Imagine me

over and over again—

In the hands of another poet, the playful eroticism of that second quoted stanza might seem at first to clash with the more subtle tone of the previous stanza, yet Triedman manages to foreshadow her shifts (without consciously spoiling the surprise) by paying very close attention to sound.  The assonance of the first quoted stanza (all those O sounds) sets the stage while still demonstrating Triedman’s ability to shift tones without losing her reader.  In fact, it seems like her shifts—which definitely constitute a risk—end up paying off in spades through their sheer unexpectedness married to careful, artistic cohesion.

So, yeah.  Kim Triedman.  Check her out.

For more information this author, see her website here.

Triedman, Kim. Plum(b). Charlotte: Main Street Rag, 2013. Print.

-WFYI camera operator Andrew Warren, Dr. Rai Peterson, Comedian Lewis Black, student interviewer Andrew Neylon, KVML Board President Kip Tew
*Photo provided by Rai Peterson

It begins, like so many allusions in popular culture: at 4 AM. There’s an alarm I have to hit, a shower I have to take, and a suit I have to put on. This will be the most ambitious 44 hours of my life.

If this seems like hyperbole – it’s not. This is precisely what ran through my head as I woke up July 20^th to board a flight to New York City for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Immersive Learning Project. I’d been selected to helm the trip with Rai Peterson, my project director, and head to the Big Apple to visit some of Vonnegut’s close confidantes for interviews.

A brief primer on my work with the Vonnegut Library – of the four major projects that characterized the project, I worked on the Film Team. This meant collecting, editing, and displaying videos of Vonnegut and his friends on a touch-screen television in the KVML. While a good chunk of my work revolved around watching VHS tapes and collecting distributor information, there was another part of the project. To help raise the profile of the museum, it was decided that someone should travel to NY to interview Suzanne McConnell, Don Farber, and one notable celebrity – Grammy winning comedian Lewis Black.

I wasn’t thinking about Grammys or interviews when I woke up that morning, though. I just knew I was hungry and eager not to miss my flight. Dr. Peterson loaded me into her car and took off for the airport – the dream became reality.

We knew we’d be traveling with a camera-man provided for us by WFYI in Indianapolis. Still, we hadn’t met the man before, and I’d only had the briefest of conversations with their head camera-man about the guy they’d be sending. Rai and I got through (a surprisingly busy for 6 AM) airport security, and met our third teammate, Andrew Warren, at the gate. I’d spend the next forty hours with Andrew – a feat as remarkable as it was enjoyable.

Plane rides, you know, are never easy. And ours, naturally, left the gate about 30 minutes late. Still, it was ample time to settle in and get comfortable as we moved towards our connection in Washington D.C. Camera-man Andrew, it turned out, was a pretty cool guy.

Rai and I talked a lot about the expectations for the trip. To send a student on such an ambitious project, even with a faculty member at the helm, was daunting. I wanted to get good interviews and prove that the investment was sound – to say the least, I had a lot on my mind as we entered Washington, and still more as we transferred to New York City.

We snagged a very filling lunch right near the Chelsea Hotel. Sadly, we did not see Lou Reed (Rai was really hoping we might!), but the prospect of eating in a real New York City restaurant was rather tantalizing.

I had been in NYC about six months earlier, but under similarly rushed circumstances. Still, a meal at the Chelsea Hotel beats $1.50 pizza by the slice (I’m sure there are some NYers who would disagree with this assertion) any day.

Finally it was time to get down to business. We realized we’d have to book it a few streets to make sure that we made our interview with former Vonnegut student Suzanne McConnell. We had an early afternoon meeting time with her, and ended up taking a cramped service elevator to her rather spacious apartment. There we began the process of pleasantries and camera set-up that would allow us to grab our first interview.

Ms. McConnell had the interesting perspective of being taught by Kurt Vonnegut. She was his pupil, and remembered him more as a teacher than a legendary literary icon. She recalled his thoughts about the nature of literary writing – reminding us that Vonnegut had emphasized the importance of selling a story, and targeting a market. She remembered him as a kind man with a very unique sense of humor, but stressed that many of the things we come to associate with Vonnegut today (particularly his service in World War 2, and his political activism) existed beneath the surface in his daily life.

After finishing the interview, and gathering my wits about me for the remaining two, we headed out to find the apartment of Don and Annie Farber – close personal friends and professional partners of Vonnegut. Don Farber served as Vonnegut’s literary agent and lawyer during his lifetime, and as he was quick to inform me, few people knew Vonnegut like Don. They worked together every day for decades, and for Don, the Vonnegut legacy is a crucial component of American literature.

While I’m far from an experienced interviewer, I have grandparents. I know that talking to folks of a certain age, by virtue of the age gap, can be tricky. But the Farbers were very welcoming to us. They let us move furniture around, showed us their vast collection of Vonnegut memorabilia, and treated us with a grace often associated with a thoughtful sense of bygone American hospitality.

Don and Annie got married in the 1940s before Don went off to war. They’d known each other less than a month, but their relationship spanned decades. You could tell, too, as they engaged in many of those old When Harry Met Sally tropes of the married couple – playful arguments, cutting each other off to finish sentences, correcting memories. They remembered Vonnegut as a deeply private man, an Indiana boy doing his best to thrive in the critical, fast-paced world of New York high society.

The most poignant account in the interview arrived near the end, where Don Farber made his thoughts regarding Vonnegut’s activism clear. The two recalled him as a man deeply devoted to human concerns, deeply invested in bettering the world around him. Don pointed out that Vonnegut was completely in print – a feat not every major author of the 20^th century can claim – and that the Farber children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren were still reading him. Annie wasn’t so sure about the grandchildren – but point taken.

The day was exhausting, to say the least. It’s one thing to be on point for an Indana interview in a controlled studio – another to know the pressure of a whole project rests on your shoulders, in another state, with celebrities and a limited window of time.

We got a lovely dinner with a former Ball State grad at a nice Turkish restaurant a few blocks away. It was relaxing, and the sort of place you think of when you imagine NYC. Mostly I was thankful for a chance to decompress after a full day, and anxious for the showdown with Lewis Black.

A brief side-note before we address that chapter. That night, before bed, I had the chance to get coffee with Laura Pittenger – a recent Ball State grad from the Theatre Department. On such a break-neck trip, it was tremendous fun to see a friend who lived so far away, and it made me feel rather adult to meet up in the city.

The next morning, we made our way to 42nd Street where we planned to meet Lewis Black. We arrived about 45 minutes early to get everything just right, and ended up in the basement of an old coffee shop Black frequented when he was just starting out.

The daunting part? Black was about fifteen minutes late. We were, naturally, terrified. Nobody wants to fly to New York and miss their one chance to grab a once-in-a-lifetime interview.

Thankfully, Black arrived – apologetic and surprisingly friendly. The man famous for his angry rants with Jon Stewart was consummate, thoughtful, and surprisingly humble. There was no sense of ego – just a man who seemed to have genuinely read Vonnegut as a youth and discovered a deep attachment to Vonnegut’s knack for pointing out the latent hypocrisy in the world around us. Black stressed that Vonnegut found a way to make existentialism funny, and that he was the best American satirist since Twain. For Black, who found the preachy texts of the literary canon too severe, Vonnegut’s warmth and humor was a perfect antidote.

With that, Black was off, and already we had our eye on the clock to make it back to the airport for our flight to Indiana and the completion of our 44-hour NY adventure. We checked out, packed up, and grabbed a cab in just the nick of time.

Getting home was mostly smooth sailing (minus some flight delays, general hunger, and the weight of the trip finally taking its toll). But there was a moment, as I sat in my suit on the plane back to Indiana, where it became all too clear I could do this for a living. The Vonnegut Project had offered me a once-in-college-career-opportunity to talk to some tastemakers in the literary industry – and I was hooked.

In the month that followed, the footage would be transferred, edited, and presented at the Vonnegut Library in Indianapolis. The NYC interviews would end up a crowning jewel in the digital archive, and the project as a whole would help bring new life to the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library we’d come to know so well.

I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to have worked on a project that not only made me a better reader and writer – but one that made a difference in my community. And while it was only a sub-plot on the journey that was the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Immersive Learning Project – I’m thankful for my two days in New York. Ball State gave me a taste of bigger things I won’t soon forget.

As a new reader of comic books, I’ve already been confronted by some of the stigmas that accompany the genre. I’m a frequent bus rider and often read to pass the time, but I’ve noticed different reactions when I pull out a novel versus a comic book. When I read a novel, I most often get asked if I’m doing homework. When I read a comic book, I most often get asked “You like [insert comic series here]?” with a note of surprise or even of judgment.

There seems to be a disconnect between the ideas of the comic/graphic genre, its readership, and its perceived legitimacy. While comics have been gaining critical attention as a narrative medium through works such as Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun House, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, among many others, that sense of perceived literary value often doesn’t seem to transfer inside the world of criticism to superhero comics and outside the world of criticism to sequential art in general, a disconnect mirrored by the dual identity of the genre itself. Are these “graphic novels,” made with great seriousness for adult audiences, or are they “comic books,” long associated with kiddie escapism?

While not all comic books are created equal in the same way that not all novels can claim the same narrative or stylistic prowess, I would submit Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar and artists Dave Johnson and Kilian Plunkett as a recommended read. Red Son uses its fun, fan-pleasing premise—what if Superman’s spaceship landed in the Soviet Union instead of the United States—to comment on American foreign policy and the power, exceptionality, and sometimes corruption that haunt one’s status as a superpower—of the national or comic book variety.

Removing Superman from the status of default American icon allows Red Son some critical distance with which to approach Superman’s nearly limitless power and the ways and reasons that he uses it. The story is fairly simple: Superman’s spaceship, launched several seconds later than in the original version of the story, lands in Soviet-controlled Ukraine instead of crash-landing on the Kent farm in the American heartland. While Superman grows into adulthood still refusing to kill and believing in the importance of protecting all innocents, he is brought up to believe in Communism and the Soviet Way and is used in the Cold War arms race against the United States. Ultimately, Superman leads a Soviet Union that becomes the world superpower.

Slowly corrupted by his own near limitless power, Superman uses his abilities to execute an Orwellian total surveillance of the planet, protecting the security of all the world’s inhabitants at the cost of their freedom, privacy, and even free will. As Stefan Buchenberger notes in his essay “Superman and the Corruption of Power,” since 1972’s Superman #247 “Must there be a Superman,” Superman comics have frequently returned to the ethical tightrope between interfering too much in others’ affairs, and the duty to help others that accompanies greater power (192).  Even through Red Son’s Superman isn’t American, Superman is as engrained as part of the American image as football and McDonald’s, and can never be fully divorced from national association. This balance between viewing the Soviet Superman as both “us” and “not-us” allows Red Son to use Superman’s well-intentioned world domination as a cautionary commentary on the imperialist tendencies of recent American foreign policy, portraying the damage done to someone else’s “world” when outside powers attempt to police government and private life.

Also, Red Son is a lot of fun to read—and that’s okay. In keeping with the theme of the work as an alternative take on an American icon, the artwork of Red Son is often referential, alluding to past versions of the Superman story and to movements from comics and art history that have contributed to the modern Superman mythos. The Soviet setting gives occasion for panels that mimic the aesthetic style of Soviet propaganda posters from the ’50s, many of which directly reference some of the more iconic and recognizable posters.

Likewise, the artists use the opportunity of a new version of Superman to pay homage to the history of representation in the comics and superhero genre, including illustration and panel layout styles reminiscent of different artistic periods in comics history. Characters also make cameo appearances as versions of themselves outside the comics world, including a panel in which Lois Lane is drawn as Terri Hatcher from the television series Lois and Clark and Wonder Woman is drawn as Lynda Carter from the Wonder Woman television series.

Red Son offers readers the best of both worlds, remaining proud of its superhero roots by embracing and referencing the history of the genre and its role in popular culture while using its superpowered protagonists to explore the ramifications of exercising political and military power to ensure security. Red Son makes labels like “serious” graphic novel or “childish” comic book irrelevant, weaving together humor and satire to create a thought-provoking and entertaining read.

Millar, Mark, Dave Johnson, Kilian Plunkett, Andrew Robinson, and Walden Wong. Superman: Red Son. New York: DC Comics, 2004.

Buchenberger, Stefan. “Superman and the Corruption of Power.” The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times. Ed. Joseph J. Darowski. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012.

*Photo provided by Jason Gladstone

Dr. Jason Gladstone is from Philadelphia, PA. He earned his BA in English from Williams College and earned his MA and PhD in English from The Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in American Literature, Culture, and Media—primarily in the post-1945 period.

Can you tell us anything about your forthcoming book, Lines in the Dirt: American Postmodernism and the Failure of Technology?

The book is primarily concerned with revising the now-standard account of the status of “technology” in post-1945 American literature and culture. Basically, most academic studies identify this period as “postmodern,” and one of the bases for this identification is the extent to which the period is characterized by technological culture’s eradication of nature. In Lines in the Dirt, I argue that the period is, in fact, characterized by a widespread effort to salvage technology from nature. The first part of the book focuses on a set of important works of literature, art, and critical theory produced between the years 1965 and 1975—the years in which postmodernism is generally understood to have emerged.

So, that part of the book consists of three chapters: one on the earthworks art of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, one on Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and one on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Each of these chapters is organized around an analysis of a specific representation of the interaction of a manmade thing with its environment: a dirt line, a downed telephone line, a self-controlled rocket. And through the analysis of these representations of manmade things exposed to their environments—rather than, say, representations of human encounters with such things or environments—I make the argument that the set of works I am discussing do something that the now standard accounts of the postwar period don’t really register. Namely, I argue that these works break from the modernist problematic of “the machine” and reengage with the pre-modern problematic of “the artifact.” And that they do so precisely in order to mount a thoroughgoing critique of technology.

In the second part of the book, I then trace some of the post-1970s legacies of this postwar critique of technology. Mainly, I focus on some novels by North American authors such as Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Ben Marcus, and Karen Tei Yamashita. I also discuss some works of literary and cultural criticism, mostly works of “posthumanism” and “ecocriticism.” And I analyze some photographs, installations, and land projects by artists like Robert ParkeHarrison, Natalie Jeremijenko, and Julie Bargmann’s D.I.R.T. studio.

Is there any other research that you are currently working on (aside from your book project) or will be working on soon?

Well, there are a couple of things. I just finished an essay on nature, technology, and remediation in Henry David Thoreau’s late natural history manuscript, The Dispersion of Seeds. The essay is called “Low-Tech Thoreau,” and its forthcoming in the journal Criticism. Along with Daniel Worden of the University of New Mexico, I recently co-edited a special-issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature entitled “Postmodernism, Then.” The issue appeared in the fall, and it consisted of a set of scholarly essays that assessed the current state of the field of post-1945 literary studies. And now—along with Andrew Hoberek of the University Of Missouri—we are working on a related book-project called Postmodern/Postwar—And After.

Otherwise, I’ve been working on an essay-length project on informal populations and literary form. The first part of the essay is concerned with the emergence and consolidation of the now standard conception of the planet as network: the idea that the postwar globalization of economic and cultural relationships has resulted in a condition in which the fact of economic relation translates into a condition of interconnection and access. The second part of the essay then focuses on a set of contemporary novels that present a critique of this account of globalization. Basically, I look at novels such as Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, and analyze how they repurpose a set of “postmodernist” literary techniques in order to capture the ways in which the “outsides” of global systems of production and exchange consist of “populations” who cannot access the systems that intermittently incorporate them.

Is there any one topic of media that you specialize in or which particularly fascinates you?

My primary interest in media is its relation to literature. I’m interested in the way that literature interacts with other media. In other words, how non-literary, technological, media appear in works of literature: as plot devices, as formal features, as general logics, and so on. Basically, I like to track the different ways that literature reconfigures itself as a medium in order to compete with new media—from photography through contemporary digital media. So, in those regards, I’m particularly interested in the way that literature adapts aspects of different analog and digital media as it works out the particular competencies that define it as a medium at different historical junctures.

Aside from Post-1945 American Literature in general, is there a particular theme or author that pervades your work?

Well, I find myself focusing mostly on different conceptions of technology and nature, and then also on the conjunctions of literature, media, and environments. I’m also often thinking and writing about the different ways that action and perception gets conceived of and represented in works of literature—so, the different media of action or different distributions of perception. I’m interested in configurations of the relationship between human history and natural history, in how particular media or technologies appear when they are looked at from the perspective of the inorganic planet. In terms of specifically literary interests, I often end up focusing on the ways that certain nonhuman things get represented in works of literature—rocks, seeds, tools, animals, virtual environments, populations, that sort of thing.

Are there any course ideas that you have which you are waiting to get a chance to put into action?

I’d like to teach an environmental literature course in which students would actually get to interact with different types of environments (literary, built, natural, virtual) and maybe even be able to produce their own environments. It would be an immersive environmental course involving reading, viewing, travel, and interaction, and it would culminate with students getting to produce their own environmental projects.