The Creative Writing Program is off to a great start this year! Despite Irma hindering our first reading series, we had two readings this semester; one reading by Alfred Corn and a joint reading by Kerry Neville and Sandra Worsham. Both readings this fall were standing room only as students, faculty and community members joined to hear the stories shared by our visitors. Alfred Corn, who read two poems and a coming of age story about a Southern boy in Georgia, was a friend of Flannery O'Connor. During Corn's visit to Georgia College, he toured Andalusia, the home of O'Connor, and was inspired by his experience on the grounds there. Kerry Neville shared from her second collection of stories, Remember to Forget Me, and Sandra Worsham shared from her autobiography, Going to Wings. Neville is an assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction here at Georgia College and Sandra Worsham is a Milledgeville native. Our next Visiting Writers Reading will be a reading by Jonathan Blunk from his biography of the late writer, James Wright, on January 23rd, 2018 at 7pm.
The Martin Lammon Reading Series, formerly known as the Munch, met three times this fall semester to showcase the work of graduate students such as Faith Thompson, Jennifer Watkins, and Corey Cummings. The MLRS winter installment will happen February 5th, March 5th and April 4th at 8:30pm in "The Nest" at Blackbird Coffee. Readers will include Roe Sellers, Leah Kuenzi, Brittany Barron and Scarlett Peterson.
Both the Red Earth Readings and the Black Market Creative Slam were successful this semester as well, as undergraduate readers shared their work with our community in Milledgeville. The Black Market Creative Slam happens on Monday nights at 9pm on 95.3fm. It is also available online. The Red Earth Reading schedule is available on the Peacock's Feet Facebook page.
Graduate students Roe Sellers, Morgan Coyner, Abbie Lahmers, and Kristie Johnson were featured in publications this fall. Faculty member Peter Selgin won the Housatonic Book Award in Nonfiction. Hali F. Sofala-Jones's book Afakasi/Half-Cast will be published by Sundress Publications after being chosen during their open reading period.
The Literature Program congratulates Dr. Beauty Bragg on being named Interim Chair of the Department of English & Rhetoric and wishes Dr. Elaine Whitaker a happy retirement. We welcome Dr. Julian Knox as a tenure-track faculty member in Global/Postcolonial and British Literatures. Dr. Jennifer Flaherty was selected to attend a Folger Shakespeare Seminar in London.
Mentored by Dr. Jennifer Flaherty, undergraduate Emily Moore presented a paper titled "Milton's Areopagitica and Contemporary Censorship" at the Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference. Her paper was also selected for publication in the association's journal. Graduate student Kristin Rodning was accepted into the English doctoral program at Middle Tennessee State University. Recent BA graduate Sarah Beth Gilbert presented "You Beat the World or You Get Beat: Montage and World Views in Luhrmann's The Get Down" at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association and published a section of her undergraduate thesis on gender and queer issues in Doctor Who in the Interdisciplinary Online Journal.
In news from our student organizations, the Georgia College chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, Sigma Rho, will be recognized for 35 years as a member chapter. One of our members, Brittany Barron, will attend the national convention this Spring to receive the award on our behalf. Brittany will be reading a paper at the convention. Sigma Rho inducted seven new members in May and will hold its new member induction ceremony on December 14th in the Sallie Davis House. Shakespearean Circle membership is much higher than in previous semesters, and guests at our Tuesday evening readings have included current and retired faculty members from DoER, Theatre, and other departments. This semester, the group read three plays (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Titus Andronicus, and Much Ado About Nothing) and consumed 4.2 metric tons of pizza and two boxes of doughnuts. The Black Market Creative Slam Radio Show, hosted by the creative writing and literature social media interns Hallye Lee, Analyn McVay, Sophia DiCarlo, and Olivia Martin, airs every other week on the college radio station and online. Each show features undergraduates and MFA students sharing their pieces of non-fiction, poetry, or fiction; and a student musical group performed live on one show.
The Rhetoric Program will move from the Department of English and Rhetoric to the newly created Communication Department at the beginning of the Spring 2018 semester. The new department will house the Rhetoric major and the Mass Communication major. Once Terrell Hall is renovated the Communication Department will be housed there.
At the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester the program welcomed new faculty member, Dr. Jamie Downing. Dr. Downing recently completed her Ph.D. in communication from the University of Nebraska.
Under the direction of Dr. Janet Hoffmann, several of our students (Florrie McCard and Mary Helen Higgs) participated in a debate along side of the National British Debate team. The program was sponsored by the American Democracy Project that Dr. Hoffmann leads.
Callender, Craig. "Borrowing, Incomplete Lexical Diffusion, and the High German Tenues Shift." North-Western European Language Evolution 70.1 (2017): 57-72. Print.
Coyner, Morgan. [MFA Student] "Food Truck Rodeo." Lunch Ticket, June 2017. http://lunchticket.org/food-truck-rodeo/.
---. "Mother Goddesses" Allegory Ridge, May 2017. https://www.allegoryridge.com/home/2017/5/19/mother-goddesses.
---. "Vapors." The Vignette Review, Nov. 2017. http://www.thevignettereview.org/article=vapors-by-morgan-coyner&.
Dillard, Scott. Rev. of Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon by Tison Pugh. Flannery O'Connor Review 15 (2017). Print.
Friman, Alice. [Retired] "Mirage." [Poem] Prairie Schooner 91.2 (2017): 158-59. Print.
----. "The Oak Tree and the Lemon" and "Painting the Wrinkles." [Poems] I-70 Review 11 (Summer/Fall 2017): 45-46. Print. I-70 Review nominated "The
Oak Tree and the Lemon" for a Pushcart Prize.
---. "The Poet." [Reprinted poem] Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Ed. Grace Bauer and Julie Kane. Sandpoint, ID: Lost Horse, 2017. 181-83. Print.
---. Rev. of Among the Gorgons by Michelle Boisseau. The Georgia Review 71 (Spring 2017): 211-13. Print.
---. Rev. of Afterings by Deborah Tall. The Georgia Review 71 (Fall 2017): 638-40. Print.
Gentry, Marshall Bruce. "Criminal Neglect in Flannery O’Connor's Fiction." The
Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture. Routledge
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Olivia
Carr Edenfield. New York: Routledge, 2017. 185-206. Print.
---, and Charles Puckett. "In Search of Vera - as Charlotte Hock and as Hulga/Joy
Hopewell." Flannery O'Connor Review 15 (2017): 80-85. Print.
MacLachlan, Jeffrey H. "American Fantasies." [Poem] Minetta Review (Spring 2017) 16-17. Print.
---. "Contract for Visiting the Living." "Twenty-year Reunion." "Attention Retired Ghosts." "Window Prison." "Ghost Farmhouse." [Poems] White Stag (Fall 2017): 13, 51, 59, 67, 68. Print.
---. "Marnie Drinks Her First Beer." [Poems] pamplemousse (Spring 2017). Print.
---. "Metropolitan Fusion Fighting League." "Online Dating Prep Center." [Poems] Perversion Magazine (Spring 2017). Print.
---. "When Tigers Used to Smoke." [Poem] The Golden Key, March 2017. http://www.whatwonderfulthings.net/main/when-tigers-used-to-smoke-by-jeffrey-maclachlan/.
---. "Armageddon Sympathy Card." [Poem] Freshwater (2017): 72. Print.
---. "Classified Information." [Poem] Euphony Journal 17.1 (2017): 30. Print.
---. "Pledge of Allegiance." "Jeffrey Interviews His Demons." [Poems] Ricochet Review 5 (2017). Print.
---. "To Be Read at My Wake." [Poem] Toyon Literary Magazine 63.1 (2017):16-17. Print.
Neville, Kerry. Remember to Forget Me. Braddock, PA: Braddock Avenue Books, 2017. Print.
---. "Survival of the Fittest." [Essay] Epoch (Summer/Fall 2017). Print.
---. "Manifestus." [Essay] Juxtaprose 12 (Summer 2017). Print.
---. "The Assassin of Bucharest." [Essay] TriQuarterly Review 152 (Summer/Fall 2017). Print.
---. "Suicide and Surprise" The Huffington Post, 19 May 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/suicide-and-surprise-after-chris-cornell_us_591ecc61e4b07617ae4cbb09.
---. "How Not to Get a Beach Body," The Huffington Post, 3 June 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-not-to-get-a-beach-body_us_59336e11e4b062a6ac0ad083.
---. "Shame is a Treble Hook." The Rumpus, 27 June 2017. http://therumpus.net/2017/06/voices-on-addiction-shame-is-a-treble-hook.
---. "Our Marriage Was Built on Traveling Together..." The Washington Post, 4 July 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/07/04/our-marriage-was-built-on-traveling-together-then-it-was-time-to-go-my-own-way/?utm_term=.701dcd37847f.
---. "How the Furry Community Became a Safe Space for Youth." Vice, 3 Aug. 2017. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjmq9d/how-the-furry-community-became-a-safe-space-for-youth.
---. "Setting Our A-Boundaries," The Fix, 21 Aug. 2017. https://www.thefix.com/setting-our-abound-aries-dating-and-sobriety.
---. "Blessed with Bipolar." The Fix, 17 Nov. 2017. https://www.thefix.com/blessed-bipolar.
---. "Dreaming Drunk and Waking Sober." The Fix, 16 Nov. 2017. https://www.thefix.com/dreaming-drunk-and-waking-sober.
Riley, Michael O. [Retired] "Baum's Oz." The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf. New York: Routledge, 2017. 359-68. Print.
Selgin, Peter. Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them. Florham Park, NJ: Serving House Books, 2017. Print.
Tomko, Seth. "Perception of Time in Fallout 4." Hubpages.com, 6 Jun 2017. https://levelskip.com/rpgs/Perception-of-Time-in-Fallout-4. Featured in the June roundup of Critical Distance devoted to time, http://www.critical-distance.com/2017/07/03/june-roundup-time/.
---. "Denouement in Video Games." Hubpages.com, 24 July 2017. https://levelskip.com/action-adventure/Denouement-in-Video-Games . Featured in the July roundup of Critical Distance devoted to denouement, http://www.critical-distance.com/2017/08/05/july-roundup-denouement/.
Callender, Craig. "English Corpora in a History of English Class." Georgia State University Conference on Scholarly Teaching. Atlanta, GA. May 2017. Conference Presentation.
Friman, Alice. [Retired] Reading. Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. Madison, CT. 25 May 2017.
---. Reading. Upper Jay Art Center. Upper Jay, NY. 5 Aug. 2017.
---. Reading/Panel presentation. Florida Literary Arts Coalition - Other Words Conference. Tampa, FL. 13 Oct. 2017.
Gentry, Marshall Bruce. "Appreciating Astor in Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person.'" South Atlantic MLA. Atlanta, GA. 4 Nov. 2018.
---. "Goodness!: An Introduction to Flannery O'Connor." Linger Longer Lecture
Series. Eatonton, GA. 30 May 2017. Similar presentation for Georgia Writers Museum. Eatonton. 27 Aug. 2017.
---. "In Search of Vera - as Charlotte Hock and as Hulga/Joy Hopewell." Based on paper composed with Charles Puckett of GC Early College. Andalusia in
Andalucia: An International Conference on Flannery O'Connor. Seville,
Spain. 23 June 2017.
Neville, Kerry. Reading. Georgia College and State University. Nov. 2017.
---. Reading. Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA. Nov. 2017.
---. Reading. Braddock Avenue Books Reading Series, Pittsburgh, PA. Oct. 2017.
---. Reading. Tattered Corners Bookstore, Meadville, PA. Oct. 2017.
---. Reading. Bluestockings Bookstore, New York, NY. Oct. 2017.
---. Reading. Jerome Stern Distinguished Writers Series, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. Sep. 2017.
Brittany Barron [MFA Student] received the Regent Scholarship: Southern Region from Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.
Brittany Barron received the Scholarly Paper Award from Sigma Tau Delta for her essay, "'The Child I Had Been Was Gone': Critiquing Rape Culture in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina."
Sandy Dimon has been selected by the College Board to be a Reader for the 2017 AP Language exam.
Jennifer Flaherty was awarded a faculty research grant titled "The Ophelia Agenda" to attend a Folger Shakespeare Seminar and conduct research in London.
Alice Friman (retired) has taken a job as a reader of submissions (fiction, poetry, and essays) for The Georgia Review.
Jeffrey MacLachlan's poetry received Columbia Journal's Honorable Mention by Guest Editor Brian Castner.
Kerry Neville received an Artist's Residency Awardat the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
Kerry Neville's "After Divorce: Flight Path" was named as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017.
Kerry Neville was Summer Faculty at the University of Limerick/Frank McCourt Creative Writing Summer School, New York, NY, 2017.
Peter Selgin's memoir, The Inventors (Hawthorne Books, 2016) won the Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction, https://housatonicbookawards.wordpress.com/.
Peter Selgin's latest book on the craft of fiction writing, Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them (Serving House Books, 2017) has gotten very nice advance notices from, among others, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler, who wrote: "With an emphasis on the creative process itself, I have long taught the critical importance of the first few pages of any work of fiction. What a delight to find a smart, perceptive, enormously useful book that focuses on the craft and technique issues of these same make-or-break first 500 words."
Roe Sellers's [MFA Student] experimental fiction piece "Invasive Species" was chosen as a finalist for the annual genre-bending New Alchemy contest at Permafrost. The piece is available here: https://permafrostmag.uaf.edu/online-issues/permafrost-issue-38-2-cabin-of-the-words/invasive-species/.