fall M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

AT
M
INNESOTA
University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts
Vol. 5 No. 2
fall
2003
In This Issue
The Esther Freier Lectures
--Edmund White and Michael Chabon
Faculty Books
--Thomas Augst and Rebecca Krug
Alumni Stories
--Maria Bamford, Mary Relindes Ellis, and John Colburn
Graduate Studies
--Gerri Brightwell and Alex Mueller
Creative Writing
--A Year in Review
Faculty Retirements
--Calvin Kendall and Archie Leyasmeyer
2003-2004 EVENTS CALENDAR
--Don’t Miss Out on This Year’s Readings and Lectures

FROM THE CHAIR
English 1895 — 2003
KENT BALES wrote the last column in this space, and looked out at us
from a photo portrait by TOM FOLEY, the principal photographer for
the Office of University Relations. Kent has now served his third term
as chair of the department: service well beyond the call of duty, and greatly appreciated.
(I worked with him as director of graduate studies during his first two terms as
chair, in 1983-86 and 1987-88: those were the days.) Foley took the photo you see
here also—just in time, since he will retire soon, after 31 years representing the
University. As I write this I haven't seen it yet; but I know in advance, from having
seen many examples of his work, that it will show me at my best, or better.
Minnesota—a major project in civic engagement and curricular innovation, for which
they received the University of Minnesota Outstanding Community Service Award
along with ERIC DAIGRE, a lecturer in the Department of English. As I write this all
three look out from the home page of the CLA web site.*
I learned recently that the school colors of the University of Minnesota, maroon
and gold, were selected on commission from President William Folwell by Augusta
Norton Smith, in the 1870s. "A woman of excellent taste," according to Folwell,
Smith was a lecturer in the Department of English.
Foley has taken many photos of our colleagues, mostly to commemorate awards
for outstanding teaching. The Department of English surely has earned more such
awards, and such photos, than any other department in the University. The result is
a good-looking group of people, brightening our conference room. Two of the photos
there show GORDON HIRSCH and JOSEPHINE LEE, award-winning members of the
Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Gordon will be serving the department for the
next three years as associate chair. His most recent administrative service was as
director of the Honors Division in the College of Liberal Arts—a program now much
in demand, thanks to his leadership for more than a decade, as well as to the increasing
academic skills of CLA undergraduates. Josephine Lee generously extends her
service to the department by undertaking a second term as Director of Graduate
Studies. Active in undergraduate education also, Jo worked for many years to establish
the recently inaugurated undergraduate minor in Asian American Studies.
MARIA J. FITZGERALD directs our program in Creative Writing, which includes our
M.F.A. program, now attracting more national attention than ever before. PAT CRAIN
will serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies, starting spring semester 2004; and
TOM AUGST is our Director of Composition. Tom was the subject of a profile in CLA
Today, Winter 2003, and Pat in a previous issue, Summer-Fall 2001. They have
worked together before, successfully establishing the Literacy Lab at the University of
CONTENTS
Long after he retired as first president of the University, Folwell wrote an upbeat
article about Minneapolis for the New England Magazine, published in Boston, called
"Minneapolis 1890"-his effort to sell the upper Midwest to the hub of the universe.†
Teaching the introductory class for graduate students this year, I've asked the students
to read Folwell's article as a context for an account of the Department of
English written by my distant predecessor as chair, the Anglo-Saxon scholar George E.
MacLean, called "English at the University of Minnesota."‡ MacLean outlined responsibilities
of the graduate and undergraduate
programs in English in 1895, and also
included a report on the challenges that
then faced the teaching of freshman composition.
Much has changed since 1895,
but the whole enterprise is still a satisfying
challenge.
Right now, in 2003, I look forward to
Chair’s Letter continued on page 17
Michael Hancher
Professor and Chair
ENGLISH
AT
M
INNESOTA
Photo by Tom Foley
Esther Freier Lecture Airs on TPT
Faculty Books--Rebecca Krug & Thomas Augst
Alumni Stories--Maria Bamford & Mary Relindes Ellis
Gerri Brightwell’s Cold Country
The MEMRG
Creative Writing’s Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writers
Calvin Kendall & Archie Leyasmeyer Retirements
The 1954 Faculty Photo Has Been Solved!!!
Calendar & Fundraising
In Memoriam
Contribute & Subscribe
Contributing Writers
3
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
10-11
18
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ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA, VOL. 5 NO. 2. English At Minnesota is published once each academic year for the alumni, faculty,
staff, and students of the English department. Send correspondence to the editor at the address below. For further
information about English programs, visit http://english.cla.umn.edu/. Editing and design by Neil Kozlowicz. Assistant
Editor, Ann Linde.
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE | 207 Lind Hall | 207 Church Street SE | Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134
Michael Hancher, department chair | Gordon Hirsch, associate chair | Josephine Lee, director of graduate studies |
M J Fitzgerald, director of creative writing | Tom Augst, director of composition | Patricia Crain (spring 2004), director
of undergraduate studies
The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities,
and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, diability, public assistance
status, veteran status, or sexual orientation. This publication is available in alternate formats by request and online
at http://english.cla.umn.edu/. © 2003 Regents of the University of Minnesota.

P HOTO BY T ERRY F AUST
Chabon to speak to their undergraduate
English class. The rigorous requirement
for the honor of having an award-winning
writer come to your class: the class had to
her nose buried in this fat novel with a yellow
and red cartoon cover called The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,
which she claimed was the best book she
She came home from California with her nose buried in
this fat novel with a yellow and red cartoon cover called The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
TEACHING WITH MICHAEL
CHABON
By MOLLY HENNESSEY
Late in the 2002 fall semester an
email circulated asking English
instructors if they would like
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and the
spring 2003 Esther Freier lecturer Michael
meet at 9:00 am on Mondays. (The due
date of Chabon and his wife’s fourth child
required a frantic rescheduling of his
appearance from April to February, thus
the last-minute call to instructors and the
restricted time frame). Sometimes I’m
lucky. My composition class for spring fit
the bill. Michael Chabon would be coming
to my class on a Monday morning in
February.
My sister had introduced me to Michael
Chabon’s work the previous summer. She
came home from college in California with
had read in years. It became my family’s
summer book. We secured more copies
and we all read it. Because we never had a
sufficient number of books for each of us
to have our own copy (six), the books were
communal and all had multiple dog-eared
pages.
Kavalier and Clay seemed to satisfy us all.
I liked the main characters—the hero and
his sidekick—Joe and Sam. I liked the
story. I liked the worlds of the novel—especially
New York City in the 30s and 40s,
Chabon—continued on page 14
THE ESTHER
FREIERENDOWED
LECTURE SERIES IN LITERATURE
JAMAICA KINCAID February 5 2001
BARRY LOPEZ
March 15 2002
EDMUND WHITE November 22 2003
MICHAEL CHABON February 9 2003
ARNOLD RAMPERSAD October 10 2003
A. S. BYATT
April 17 2004
Esther Freier was the first woman president of the Academy of Clinical Laboratory
Physicians and Scientists. She retired from the University Medical School faculty
holding the only endowed chair in Medical Technology in the nation. Dr. Freier
loved literature and the arts. In her view, too much donated money went to science,
and not enough to the arts. Her endowment to our English Department resulted
in the creation of the Esther Freier Endowed Lecture Series. Its mission: bring significant
national and international writers to the University community.
EDMUND WHITE:
PROFILE OF A WRITER
By M. J. HENSLEY
Edmund White delivered the
Esther Freier Lecture “My
Historical Novel,” on November
22, 2002. His first historical novel, Fanny:
A Fiction—scheduled for release in October
2003—just completed, White sought to
share some of the experience gained while
writing this novel. “You must be
brave,” he told his audience, “to be
an archeologist of the past. Your
intention should be to encounter
the past, not as we would hope it
had been, but as it was.” The narrator
of the novel, Frances Trollope
(mother of Anthony Trollope), provides
an outsider’s view of
early nineteenth-century America.
White--continued on page 12
Edmund White
P HOTO BY T ERRY F AUST
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
3

FACULTY BOOKS
READING FAMILIES:
WOMEN’S LITERATE
PRACTICE IN LATE
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
Rebecca Krug
Cornell University Press
By EMILY WALTERS
GREGOR
Iwas a few minutes
early to speak with
Professor Rebecca
THE CLERK’S TALE:
YOUNG MEN AND
MORAL LIFE IN NINE-
TEENTH-CENTURY
AMERICA
Thomas Augst
University of Chicago Press
By ABIGAIL F. DAVIS
Krug about her new book, Reading Families.
As I waited outside her office, the irony of
the situation, in relation to her book’s
topic, struck me: here I was, a female student
of literature waiting to speak with a
female professor of literature about her
book that describes how, in late medieval
England, women’s interaction with the
written word was primarily familial rather
than professional or academic.
The book itself, as Krug explained, arose
from her own experiences in graduate
school. As a teaching assistant for a survey
course in early British literature, Krug says
she noticed that few of the selections were
written by women, although women were
frequently represented as reading or writing
in the assigned texts. “I suddenly realized
I didn’t know anything about
medieval women’s actual, historical situation
as readers and writers,” Krug
remarked.
Reading Families sets out to explore
women’s relationship to literary culture.
Krug—continued on page 13
I suddenly realized I didn't
know anything about
medieval women's actual, historical
situation as readers
and writers.
Rebecca
Krug
Men like these clerks represented a burgeoning category of
white-collar workers, and they helped to pioneer forms of mass
literacy which became “cultural capital.”
In his fascinating new book, The
Clerk’s Tale, Thomas Augst explores
the “particular world in which
young businessmen came of age in nineteenth-century
America,” and follows
twenty clerks as they moved “from the
boarding house to the library, the lecture
hall, the parlor, and the white-collar
office.” Augst utilizes diaries, letters, compositions,
and records of taste in fiction
and nonfiction prose to trace the development
of these young men entering adulthood.
The diary of Charles French (1834-
1904), a clerk in a Boston dry goods store,
serves as a framing device for an intricate
study of the interconnection between literacy,
personal independence, and morality.
In post-Revolutionary America, manhood
was defined as freedom from various cul
Augst--continued on page 12
Thomas
Augst
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
4

MARIA BAMFORD’S LIFE ON THE
EDGE
By DANIKA STEGEMAN
Want to hear a dirty joke
Something about pigs
and mud You’ve heard
that one already Okay, well that’s all I’ve
got. So, maybe I am not destined for a
career in comedy. However, English alum
Maria Bamford (BA 1993) boasts a rather
successful comic career.
Bamford openly discusses
her experience at the
University and her climb
from fledgling comedian to
the more lofty position she
describes as “Somewhere in a
niche—after the emcee but
before the headliner.”
Bamford got started in the
comedy business while earning
her bachelor’s degree. In fact, her studies
helped Bamford realize her true calling.
Of her work in the English department
Bamford says, “You know when you realize
you’re not cut out for something The
classes were great, but I never felt like I was
‘at home’ in terms of genre.” Only after
trying her hand at more conventional
genres such as
screenwriting and fiction did
Bamford discover that she
preferred to write in a much
shorter format. These miniature
performance pieces or
bits create the body of her act.
Bamford began performing
in Minneapolis venues such
as Stevie Ray’s Comedy
Cabaret but has since moved
on to appear on much bigger
. . . from fledgling comedian to the more lofty
position she describes as “Somewhere in a niche—
after the emcee but before the headliner.”
I not only wanted to write about where I was from but from a
woman’s perspective. Yet when I began to write seriously, I was
stunned to discover that I could not write about my own sex.
THE TURTLE WARRIOR
Mary Relindes Ellis
Viking January 2004
ABOUT THE BOOK
By Mary Relindes Ellis (BA 1986)
Department of English
Associate Administrator
When I began writing in
the early 1980s, I was in
my junior year of college.
My mother said casually in what was
a critical but unknown moment of my
development as a writer that we should
look at the diverse cultures in our own
backyard, meaning a mix that included the
stages such as The Tonight
Show with Jay Leno, Late Night
with Conan O’Brien, and
Comedy Central Presents.
Bamford—cont. on page 14
Ojibwe and other Native
American groups. It was then
I slowly became aware that I
was from a unique area of the
United States and that its history
had a definite impact on
my family.
The country of my childhood
was still filled with
working-class immigrants and
with intense populations of
Ellis--continued on page 16
Mary Relindes Ellis
ALUMNI STORIES
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
5

GRADUATE STUDIES
VACUUMS ARE
DANGEROUS: THEY
SUCK EVERYTHING
TOWARDS THEM
Gerri Brightwell
Cold Country
Gerald Duckworth and
Company
By LYNN DEARDEN
Gerri Brightwell’s
first novel, Cold
Country, opens,
appropriately, with a vacuum
metaphor. In addition to its
literary purpose, it also symbolizes
the extraordinary
attraction Brightwell’s writing
possesses. Brightwell’s
central character, Sandra,
claims that “vacuums are dangerous”
because life itself can
become a vacuum, and
Sandra warns that if “you let
the pressure in your life
. . .one is left with graduate work that is an
individual endeavor conducted on an island in
the middle of a stagnant pond.
Behind all of the attractive advertisements and beautified inns
lurk the dangers of the wilderness and natural world, and
underneath the comfortable façade of easyliving also exists
the presence of danger, deception, sickness, and betrayal.
drop…the next thing you know it’s filling
up with dumb ideas, other people’s plans,
the sort of debris that comes loose because
it’s not nailed down.” Sandra’s life is a
train wreck without any direction or focus,
but it is this “debris” and the topsy-turvy
aspect of her life that holds our interest.
Brightwell pulls you into the confused
and chaotic interior world of the indecisive
Sandra, whose uneventful but stable
lifestyle becomes dismantled when she
encounters Fleur, a woman who holds
entirely different beliefs about life, love,
friendship, and trust than Sandra. The
contrast between Sandra and Fleur is striking
from the beginning: while Sandra
champions the importance of appearances
Brightwell—continued on page 15
THE MEMRG SUBGROUP
By ALEX MUELLER
As faculty positions in the
humanities become increasingly
scarce, many graduate
students have begun to operate in survivalist
mode, hiding their research and looking
for ways to outdo their competition and
move up the academic food chain. Such
paranoia often fosters isolated and unchallenged
work that defeats the university’s
vision of collaboration and open discussion
in order to produce innovative scholarship
and social change. Combine this
with students working to reduce the scope
of their study to achieve a specialized mastery
and remain safely within the agreedupon
disciplinary boundaries of their subjects
and one is left with graduate work
that is an individual endeavor conducted
on an island in the middle of a stagnant
pond.
In response, English graduate students
of the Medieval and Early Modern
Research Group (MEMRG) are working to
combine expertise with innovative work
that crosses geographic, periodic, and linguistic
boundaries in order to cooperatively
conduct research. They strive to make
arguments that transcend the safe haven of
“English literature and history” and traditional
studies of early English focused solely
on the well-known heavyweights such as
Geoffrey Chaucer and William
Shakespeare, within historical contexts
limited to the British Isles, and genre categories
such as Arthurian romance, tragedy,
and epic. In doing so, they have joined
recent movements in their field that recognize
the peripheral and previously ignored
elements that have shaped the English language.
In 1995, graduate students Candace
Lines and Eric Daigre branched off from
the Renaissance Subfield to create what
MEMRG--continued on page 16
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
6

about, at least according to Pulitzer Prize-nominee
Colson Whitehead. The author of John Henry Days
and The Intuitionist was happy just to be able to buy a
proper chair and writing desk after his
success…..British wild card Zoe Fairbairns delivered a
scintillating lecture/reading in April at the Weisman
Art Museum, touching on everything from the bat-
CW--continued on page 16
Stephanie Johnson (MFA Student)
THEEDELSTEIN-KELLER VISITING WRITER SERIES
Zoe Fairbairns
Gretel Ehrlich launched Spring 2003’s
Edelstein-Keller creative writing series
in February with a reading in the A.I.
Johnson Great Room. Ehrlich held the audience
spellbound with tales of her worldwide
adventures and lightning-strike
mishaps…..March: Fame Fortune The respect
of esteemed colleagues Nah, that's not what it's
Last Year’s Visiting Writers
Maxine Kumin Lawrence Ferlinghetti Li-Young Lee Kimiko
Hahn Forrest Gander Pura Lopez-Colome Helen Epstein Rick
Barot Tom Barbash Jill Christman Katie Ford Mary Winstead
Gretel Ehrlich Colson Whitehead Zoe Fairbairns Wang Ping
John Minczeski Stephen Burt Connie Wanek Richard Robbins
Wang Ping
JANE HIRSHFIELD
&
CHARLES SIMIC
LORRIE MOORE
VERLYN KLINKENBORG
ANDREA BARRETT
JUDY BLUNT
03-2004
OCT 3-4
Nov 11-12
feb 16-17
April 18-21
March 9-10
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
Colson Whitehead
VISITING WRITERS
Joe Laizure
(MFA Student)
CREATIVE WRITING
7

FACULTY RETIREMENT
Calvin Kendall &
Archie Leyasmeyer
By Professor Kent Bales
Diversity is rightly sought
and praised these days, mostly
for good reasons although
sometimes without due
acknowledgment of the
diversity that already exists,
especially in good English
departments, or so many of
us like to think. The retirements
of Calvin Kendall and
Archibald Leyasmeyer are
cases in point of diversities
that were acknowledged—
indeed celebrated—on a
warm May evening in the
Campus Club. For, while
these colleagues share a love
of teaching and great skill at
it (virtues attributed to them
both in the praise of many
students and colleagues),
their useful careers otherwise
diverged. We have been
made the richer by their difference,
and so too have the
“worlds” of scholarship and
service to the arts that Cal
and Archie occupied and,
both being the best of citizens,
bettered.
Cal’s scholarship concerns
three central interests: Old
English literature (especially
Beowulf), Middle English literature
(especially Chaucer),
and Medieval Latin. He first
A r c h i e L e y a s m e y e r
contributed an edition of the Venerable
Bede’s De Arte Metrica et De Schematibus et
Tropis to the modern edition of Bede’s
works—which he also co-edited. He then
wrote the introduction and notes to a
translation of his earlier work: Bede’s Art of
Poetry and Rhetoric: The Latin Text with an
English Translation, Introduction, and Notes.
But a student’s after-class question turned
his attention to The Metrical Grammar of
Beowulf, the book that emerged from much
study and careful inferential thought about
the question that he, in this way and eventually,
answered. The Allegory of the Church:
Romanesque Portals and Their Verse
Inscriptions, Cal’s most recent book,
The retirements of Calvin Kendall and Archibald
Leyasmeyer are cases in point of diversities that
were acknowledged—indeed celebrated—on a
warm May evening in the Campus Club.
C a l v i n K e n d a l l
answers another question, this one asked
of himself and requiring years of mostly
summer research trips to answer—trips that
he thoroughly enjoyed and lectured on,
also with great pleasure. Praised by literary
scholars and art historians alike, The
Allegory of the Church and the study of the
metrical grammar of Beowulf deliver the
“new knowledge” so prized by scholars and
scientists alike, however different their
concepts of knowledge may be!
Archie and Cal have the
distinction of being Morse-
Alumni Distinguished Teaching
Professors of English; they
are members of University of
Minnesota Academy of
Distinguished Teachers.
Because both Archie and Cal have the
distinction of being Morse-Alumni
Distinguished Teaching Professors of
English, they, together with their counterparts
in other departments, are members
of University of Minnesota Academy of
Distinguished Teachers—the creation of
former president Mark Yudof to encourage
faculty leadership in improving the quality
of teaching and learning at Minnesota.
Cal also has been a Scholar of the College
in the College of Liberal Arts and received
a McKnight Research Award, both as aids
to his scholarly research. Archie has
received the Gordon L. Starr award for
outstanding service to students and the
English department’s own Ruth Christie
Teaching Award, both awards given wholly
by students. He also was one of the first to
receive a College of Continuing Education
award for distinguished teaching, some of
it done in his courses on “The Plays at the
Party--continued on page 15
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
8

The Final Installment of the
1954 Faculty Photo!
This third and final installment of the Spring 1954 faculty photo still leaves us about eight
people short of complete identification. We have enjoyed the search, especially your letters
of assistance. Now, imagine all of the people below raising their hands and waving
goodbye as they disperse from the steps of Folwell Hall.
HAVE YOU
PUBLISHED
A BOOK
RECENTLY
Or have you published one not so
recently that you would like us to
know about In either case, please
send details to Michael Hancher at
mh@umn.edu. We will regularly
publish information about books by
alumni/ae in English at Minnesota,
and also online.
GEORGE T. WRIGHT
Professor Emeritus of English
Hearing the Measures:
Shakespearean and Other Inflections
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)
ON THE COVER
Front row (l-r) Theodore (Ted) Hornberger, Jack Levinson (), Clyde Enroth, Martin (Bud) Steinman,
John Sweetser, Hans Arsleff, Frances K. del Plaine, Mary Turpie.
Row two (l-r) Leonard Unger or Clell Peterson, Franz Montgomery or Julian Markels, Robert (Bud)
Rathburn, Leo Marx, Bernard (Barnie) Bowron, unidentified, Tremaine McDowell, Robert Stange.
Row three (l-r) Unidentified, Allen Tate (), Roland Dille, Julian Markels (), unidentified, unidentified,
Murry Krieger, James T. Hillhouse, Lowell Plinke (), Elizabeth Jackson.
Back row (l-r) Unidentified, Robert R. Owens, John Dudley Moylan, John W. Clark, Huntington
Brown, John H. Randall, Robert E. Moore, unidentified, Samuel Holt Monk, Frank Bliss (), Frank
Buckley.
Other 1953-1954 professors and instructors: James Gray, Harold B. Allen, William V. O’Connor,
Louis Coxe, Elizabeth Atkins, David Erdman, Ruth Christie, Ledru O. Guthrie, David R. Weimer,
Anne Gillette, Marjorie Kaufman, Robert Miller, Danforth Ross, Clifford Haga, Douglas Stenerson,
James V. Lill, George Hemphill, Elaine Perry Hulbert, John B. Orr, Samson O.A. Ullman, Raymand
McClure, Paul Ramsey, John D. Kendall, Donald J. Hogan, Richard Scanlan, Mark Harris.
Wood engraving by Edward Burne
Jones from The Works of Geoffrey
Chaucer (William Morris, 1896),
part of the Kelmscott Press books,
Special Collections and Rare Books,
University of Minnesota Libraries.
Reproduced by permission.
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
9

ENGLISH
AT
MINNESOTA
2003-2004
EVENTS CALENDAR
ESTHER FREIER LECTURES
f R E E A N D O P E N T O T H E P U B L I C
Arnold Rampersad
OCTOBER 10 2003
WEISMAN ART MUSEUM
7:30 P.M. Lecture
8:30 p.m. reception
A.S. Byatt
APRIL 17 2004
TED MANN CONCERT HALL
7:30 P.M. Lecture
8:30 p.m. reception
Arnold Rampersad brings to the complex art of biography such meticulous scholarship, political
intelligence, and elegant writing that his books have become required reading on his subjects.
W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Arthur Ashe, and Jackie Robinson are the disparate but distinguished
figures of his four major works. Rampersad’s signal achievement not only reveals the
life of each individual but also illuminates the larger cultural life of this country. A discerning
editor, he has compiled and introduced a new collection of the works of Langston Hughes and
critical essays on Richard Wright. Rampersad is also one of the editors of the monumental
Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
Born in Trinidad, Rampersad received a BA and MA from Bowling Green and an MA and PhD
from Harvard University. At the start of his academic career he was a Melville specialist. He has
taught at Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton Universities, and since 1998 he has been the Sara
Hart Kimball Professor of English at Stanford University. The recipient of many honors,
Rampersad was appointed a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1991 and was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.
A.S. Byatt could be the patron saint of bookworms. She describes her often-bedridden child self
as having been “kept alive by fictions” — mostly the novels of Dickens, Austen and Scott. She has
always been a “greedy reader,” who weaves her many interests — biology, history, philosophy
among them — into her work. The results are novels with, as she has often stated, “the whole
world in them,” books that teem with characters and ideas, books in which reading and writing
usually prove a matter of life, death and freedom.Byatt achieved best-seller status in the United
States in 1990 with her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance, a story about a clandestine
love affair between two Victorian writers and the two modern-day academics who
unearth their secret; the novel was made into a film in 2002. Her novella Morpho Eugenia, in
which she examines the similarities between anthills and 19th century manor households, was
made into the film Angels and Insects. Byatt’s other fiction includes The Biographer’s Tale, The
Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, The Matisse Stories and the recently completed quartet of novels
about the 1950s and 1960s (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling
Woman).
The department of English partners with Twin Cities Public Television’s Minnesota Channel 17 to tape and broadcast the Esther Freier lectures. Each lecture will be shown at least three
times on TPT channel 17’s Minnesota Channel. Please note that the lectures will NOT be broadcast live on the above dates. The only way to see the lectures live is at the events.

EDELSTEIN-KELLER V I S I T I N G W R I T E R S
f R E E A N D O P E N T O T H E P U B L I C
Minnesota Poetry Festival
OCTOBER 3-4 2003
Jane Hirshfield & Charles Simic with with Juan Felipe Herrera, Angela
Shannon, Anna Meek & Greg Hewett.
CMU THEATRE
Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota, East Bank
Reading Friday Oct. 3 at 7:30 p.m.
Reception & Book Signing 9:00 p.m.
Reading Sat., Oct. 4 at 7:30 p.m.
Reception & Book Signing 9:00 p.m
CHARLES BAXTER
OCTOBER 28 2003
The Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing,
Charles Baxter, will deliver a lecture titled “GREAT FACES.”
A.I. JOHNSON GREAT ROOM
McNamara Alumni Center
7:30 p.m. Lecture
8:30 p.m. Reception, Book Signing
LORRIE MOORE
November 11 2003
Lorrie Moore is the author of the best-selling collection of stories, Birds of
America. Her other books include Like Life, Self-Help, Anagrams, and Who
Will Run the Frog Hospital
CMU THEATRE
Coffman Memorial Union
7:30 p.m. Reading
8:30 p.m. Reception, Book Signing
HTTP://ENGLISH.CLA.UMN.EDU
612.625.6366
CREAWRIT@UMN.EDU
verlyn klinkenborg
february 16-17 2004
Verlyn Klinkenborg comes from a family of Iowa farmers and is the author
of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time. A member of the editorial board of
the New York Times, he has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire,
National Geographic, Mother Jones, and the New York Times Magazine, among
others. His essays on rural life are a beloved regular feature in the New York
Times. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York.
VENUE AND TIME TBA
aNDREA BARRETT
MARCH 10 2004
Andrea Barrett combines, as the critic Michiko Kakutani put it, "a naturalist's
eye with a novelist's imagination." For the award-winning novelist and
short-story writer, natural science, particularly nineteenth-century natural
history, is a central preoccupation, and scientists and naturalists such as
Linnaeus, Darwin, and Mendel frequently figure in her work.
WEISMAN ART MUSEUM
7:30 p.m. Reading
8:30p.m. Reception & Book Signing
judy blunt
april 20 2004
Raised on a Montana ranch four hours from the nearest cities of
any size (Great Falls and Billings), offered in marriage at age eighteen
by her father to a neighboring rancher twelve years her senior,
Judy Blunt spent the first thirty years of her life circumscribed by
traditions and responsibilities handed down by the generations of
homesteaders who worked the land before her.
MCNAMARA ALUMNI CTR./A.I. JOHNSON GREAT ROOM
7:30 p.m. Reading
8:30 p.m. Reception & Book Signing

WHITE—continued from page 3
Edmund White’s writing career began
in 1973 with his first novel, Forgetting
Elena. While not a bestseller, critics gave it
serious attention. Upon reading it,
Vladimir Nabokov added White to his list
of favorite American authors, along with
J. D. Salinger and John Updike.
The autobiographical novel that finally
thrust Edmund into literary prominence
(his fifth book, and third novel), A Boy’s
Own Story (1983), is set in the Midwest of
the 1950s. The story reveals the politics,
values, and esthetics of that time—the
“smug certainty that the way things were
was the way they always had been; and the
way that they always would be.” For the
young protagonist, growing up gay in this
environment created guilt, denial, and an
inability to understand or express his sexuality.
The poignancy of the story shows
how a culture can deny the reality of an
individual.
White’s writing has continued nonstop,
even though he considers himself “lazy
AUGST--continued from page 4
tural, economic and social strictures, and
also as freedom to act on behalf of the
public good. In the three decades before
the Civil War which Augst investigates,
the “comparative independence” Charles
French anticipated by leaving home and
landing his first job “had to be earned by
cultivating the moral virtues of manhood—industry,
piety, temperance, and
other traits that defined character in his
times.”
French’s diary is both a record of his
emerging autonomy and a performative
act through which he becomes the author
of his own life. In this, it echoes a “lesson
of Franklin’s Autobiography, about the role
of writing in self-creation.” However,
French is not the famous Franklin, and
one of the unique values of this study is its
searching look into ordinary lives.
Augst states that by exploring the landscape
of literary practices, the book has a
and disorganized.” The genres have included
fiction, essays, plays, and biography—
including Genet: A Biography (1993), which
won the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
He writes fiction by hand in a notebook,
often at a coffeehouse where he can slip
into reverie as he writes. Genet, written by
hand, with over 700 pages and hundreds
of endnotes—was a “nightmare.”
Nonfiction work is now done on a computer.
“A literary icon comes to Edinburgh,”
announce the program notes for
Edmund’s appearance at the Edinburgh
International Book Festival on Sunday,
August 24, 2003. Early release of Fanny: A
Fiction in Scotland, and White’s command
performance, celebrate Frances Wright,
the Scottish reformer. Wright’s work as
abolitionist, suffragist, and economic
i
e.
reformer in America are important aspects
of the story.
For thirty years Edmund White has written
with grace about both graceful and
non-graceful subjects. He has exposed the
dangerous, often unspoken rules of cultures—dangerous
to gays, to women, to
people of color, and everyone else.
Especially those who lack the words to
express their oppression. This motivates
White’s teaching writers to become “cultural
archeologists,” not just purveyors of
sentiment.
Asked how he balances the many aspects
of his life, Edmund answers with a story.
The American composer Virgil
Thompson, who was then in his nineties,
gave the young writer a warning. “You can
have two of these three,” Thompson counseled,
“lovers, friends, artistic life; but you
cannot have all three.” Edmund White
refuses to deny his sexuality, never closes
his door to friends, and continues to write
and teach. “So,” he laughs, “my life is
emergency and chaos.”
second purpose: to interpret the meaning
and form of moral life for an emerging
middle class. The twenty largely unremarkable
clerks he employs as subjects had “no
large inheritance to look forward to, no
plot of land to call their own, no college
education to secure their status as gentlemen.”
Their futures were in their own
hands. Men like these clerks represented a
burgeoning category of white-collar workers,
and they helped to pioneer forms of
mass literacy which became “cultural capital.”
Augst writes,
Their lives matter in part, then, because
they represent larger historical trends in
the standardization of moral knowledge
and the spread of advanced literacy. But
they are important for another reason as
well, which remains in tension, if not at
odds, with my efforts to place them in a
social context: they are representative of
the ways that people claim a moral standing
for themselves as individuals, as having
lives that matter. This book seeks to move
our thinking about moral life toward practical
techniques and material contexts of
conduct—to pre-Enlightenment ethical traditions
concerned with the social virtues—
and away from the abstractions in which it
has been mired since Kant.”
This highly readable and exhaustively
researched study provides a singular view
of nineteenth-century American life.
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
12

ALUMNI PROFILE: JOHN COLBURN
By ANN LINDE
Adebate broke out some years
ago in a class led by the late lecturer
John Engman: What is a
poem Some classmates of John Colburn,
then an MFA candidate, questioned
whether his latest piece could be called a
poem—it didn’t fit neatly into the genre, it
was too different from poems-as-usual.
John recalls Prof. Engman's emphatic declaration:
“This is a poem.”
Moments like that, as well as contact
with an array of visiting and resident writers,
whose different styles and suggestions
helped John see writing in new ways,
inspired him to experiment. His work,
published in a variety of magazines, has
been recognized by the Academy of
American Poets and the Minnesota State
Arts Board.
The MFA program provided “the perfect
atmosphere for writing,” John says. It
was “liberating” to have the time to write
and read intensively. The program's flexibility
allowed each writer to make his or
her own way, but John also found a strong
community. A writers’ group that began
during his first term continued for three
years.
John gained teaching experience and
learned how to give writers feedback, “how
to talk about writing.” One of his students
recommended him for a job teaching writing
at the public Arts High School, part of
the Perpich Center for Arts Education. He
was hired as soon as he graduated in ‘96
and now heads the literary arts department.
John’s experiences with teachers
and mentors in the English department
informed his own teaching. He learned
from Engman, for instance, that “the most
important thing you can do is take students’
writing seriously.”
As co-editor of Spout, reportedly the
longest-running literary journal in the
Twin Cities, and co-publisher of Spout
Press, John proves that he does take the
work of young writers seriously. In an
effort to “foster the next generation of
artists in the city,” the press will publish a
chapbook series of writers age 25 or
younger. John also anticipates future
anthologies of local authors, following
blink: sudden fiction by Minnesota writers,
which he co-edited.
John is a populist: “I’m very conscious
that I don't want to write poems that are
just for other poets. There’s a lot of room
for literary writers to connect with just the
average reader or listener in a surprising
way, and the writing and publishing I do
works toward that goal.” He sees promise
in multigenre performance as a way of conveying
complex works. Recently Spout
Press recruited local filmmakers to create
short films based on five poems in Jeffrey
Little’s new collection. The films will be
screened at the book-release party later this
summer (check the Spout website, spoutpress.com).
KRUG—continued from page 4
In medieval England, Krug notes,
women’s lives were bound by their domestic
and especially familial situations, and
their experiences with the written word
were shaped by these situations. The culture
of the time discouraged women from
gaining formal education, and it was more
difficult for women to acquire literate abilities
than it was for men to do so. In noting
this, however, Krug refutes the common
notion that medieval women who did
participate in literate culture were necessarily
acting in dissent against a literate
world under strict male control. Rather,
she points out, despite prevailing cultural
values, individual women were often
encouraged to take part in literate culture
and were often expected to acquire literate
skills without formal education. In her
book, Krug chooses several women as representative
case studies in an effort to reexamine
common conceptions about
. . . despite the differences
between medieval and modern
culture, the written word, then
as now, makes it possible to
examine our emotional and
social environs in ways that no
other medium can.
women’s involvement with the literate
world.
The women in Krug’s book, including
Margaret Paston, Margaret Beaufort, the
Norwich Lollards, and the Bridgettines at
Syon Abbey, all recognized the power that
the written word had. Sometimes that
power was practical. Writing, for example,
allowed them to keep legal records and to
prove that their families’ lineage was legiti-
mate. But the written word also helped
women to communicate the intricacies of
their emotional, spiritual, and social
worlds in different ways than they might
simply by speaking. Writing and reading
allowed women to portray their worlds in
certain ways and to explain and justify
their beliefs and emotions.
Thus, the women that Krug studies
show us that despite the differences
between medieval and modern culture, the
written word, then as now, makes it possible
to examine our emotional and social
environs in ways that no other medium
can. Krug’s book tells us not just how the
women in this period used literature but
can also tell us much about the powers of
the written word in any situation and at
any time.
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
13

CHABON—continued from page 3
where cultural icons like Orson Welles and
Salvador Dali make memorable appearances.
But what I really loved was
Chabon’s language—his stunning vocabulary
and his ability to strike the perfect
final note in each sentence, in each paragraph,
in each chapter. It took me a long
time to finish Kavalier and Clay, but it
didn’t matter. I could pick it up, reread the
chapter where I had left off and I would be
back in the story.
After this reading experience, if I could
have chosen a contemporary writer to
meet, I would have picked Michael
Chabon. (Like I said, sometimes I’m
lucky.) I started telling my students about
Chabon and his visit on the first day of
class. In preparation, we read some of his
short stories, his wonderful essay called
“Maps and Legends,” and I encouraged
the students (that is, I gave them extra
credit) to read his novels and attend his lecture.
Still, on the morning of his visit, I
was nervous.
Meeting Michael helped calm my nerves
a little. He was soft-spoken, sweet, and
grounded. But I still spilled my coffee on
the table while introducing him to the
class. After that, I sat down and let him
take over. He, too, had taught composition
in graduate school, so he was comfortable
and funny with students. He talked about
how and why he writes:
He thinks reading is the key to good
writing and says “just like you can’t trust a
thin chef, don’t trust a writer who doesn’t
read.” Unlike his wife who is a “monogamous”
reader, he reads from three to seven
books at once.
He loves libraries. He called the fact that
there are quiet places with free books
“miraculous.”
He loves to do research, including online
research. He finds it difficult to stop
researching a book and concentrate on
writing.
He believes that narrative, not themes or
ideas, drive a book. He thinks that themes
grow up unconsciously. As an example he
claimed that when he was writing Kavalier
and Clay (which has an obvious theme of
escapism), he did not realize that his book
was about escaping until he read about a
real-life magician called The Escapist.
This is how he describes his writing
process: he writes a paragraph, then goes
back to the beginning, reads it over and
revises. He writes the second paragraph,
then goes back to the very beginning, reads
it over and revises. And so on through the
book.
I’m still not sure if I believe that description
of his writing process—how could you
do that with a 600 page book But I know
that my students and I were all struck by
his sincerity, intelligence, and kindness.
One student said, “It’s good to know that
not all writers are weirdos.” Another
enthused, “Michael Chabon was the first
Pulitzer Prize-winner I have ever met—and
I hope not my last!”
I take with me the note that he wrote in
one of my family’s summer copies of
Kavalier and Clay, which he said was “really
beat-up”: “Molly, I really enjoyed teaching
with you—Michael Chabon.”
BAMFORD—continued from page 5
Movies and television have also become
part of Bamford’s resume: she appeared in
the films Stuart Little 2 and Lucky Numbers,
and lends her voice regularly on the
Nickelodeon cartoon Catdog. Currently
Maria is starring in an independent film
called Stella’s Search for Sanity and is scheduled
to appear in a new game show called
National Lampoon’s Funny Money on the
Game Show Network in early June. In her
success, however, this funny lady from
Duluth has not forgotten her Minnesota
roots. Bamford’s favorite stage to perform
on is still in Minneapolis, at the Southern
Theatre on Washington Avenue. Every
Saturday at midnight the theatre puts on a
sort of creative art free-for-all called BALLS
and Bamford said she enjoys partaking
because “you can do anything you want
and it’s just lovely.”
Still keeping things local, Bamford also
cites fellow Minnesotan Garrison Keillor
as one of the comedians who influenced
her career most, along with Steve Martin,
Roseanne Barr, and Ellen Degeneres. In
fact, Keillor’s having studied at the U of M
is one of the features which originally
attracted Bamford to creative writing. She
said she admires Keillor for “creating his
own genre—his own show to do and present
exactly what he loves” and for “always
putting things out there.” Bamford, who
has since written and performed for
Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio program
on MPR, carries on that spark of creativity
and originality in her own work.
The most rewarding part of her job, said
Bamford, is “performing new bits—creating
them and performing them—when new
ideas come up on stage.” Her material is
full of the same passion that shows when
she speaks about her career. Of her comedy
subjects Bamford exclaimed, “the more
strongly I feel about it the more time I put
into enjoying the process of finding the
words I want to use and the inflections—
the more I want to say it and practice it
and perform it.” In light of all her recent
successes, this angle seems to be working.
Bamford’s career did not unfurl immediately
from Minneapolis clubs to stardom,
however. Her income this year was
respectable, but Bamford didn’t really start
making money in comedy until about 3
years ago. Bamford says that before then
she had to learn “to take care of herself as
a business person and artist” and that
“there is no shame in having a day job.”
Now she says her only real challenges are
the limitations she puts on herself. She
marks coping with and understanding
imperfection as the best learning experience
she took with her after graduating
from the U of M. “I get really down on
myself if I’m not the best at something,”
remarked Bamford, “I just did my best and
handed things in. And that’s how I graduated.
That’s how I do my work today. Just
keep showing up, even if you’re in zebracontinued—next
page
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
14

PARTY—contined from page 8
Guthrie” in which students studied and
performed what they also saw enacted
on the Guthrie’s main and laboratory
stages. Then in 1999, in a defining, clarifying
moment, University College (as CCE
was then called) gave him its Outstanding
Service Award and the University honored
him for his Outstanding Community
Service. For while he had taught well,
served our students well, he has served
equally well the arts community of the
Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota—
just as the University, as a whole, is chartered
to do.
For over the past quarter of a century
Archie has been board member, officer, or
founder of over a dozen arts organizations.
He served for years on the Guthrie board
in numerous capacities, as vice president,
search-team member, chair of the steering
committee for what is now the Guthrie
Lab, and planner and participant in various
educational activities sponsored or
provided by the Guthrie. As board mem-
continued from page 14
striped weightlifting pants and a tube top
and a poor attitude. That usually gets the
job done.”
From zebra-striped pants and
Minneapolis cabarets in the early 90s to a
classy hairstyle and upscale Hollywood
platforms in 2003, Bamford has come a
long way. In comedy and in life, Bamford
still carries with her the good and bad
experiences she encountered in
Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the U of M
English department. Now, after her journey
to comedic success, she offers this
advice to any aspiring comedians: “Keep
doing it and do what you think is funny. If
you think it is, then that’s one person and
that’s a pretty good percentage of the audience.”
Ha! I think the two-pigs-fell-in-themud
joke is hilarious. Too bad I didn’t
write it. For more information on
Bamford, contact www.mariabamford.com.
ber and then president of the board of the
Playwrights’ Center, he led it to the solvency
that provided better endowed support
of the creation of new plays. His four
years’ membership on the Theater
Trustees of America was one consequence
of this important local service to theater.
As Vice Chairman of the board of the
Jerome Foundation he helped to shape,
through grants, the course of theater arts
in the upper Midwest, as he did more
broadly (albeit locally) in his time on the
executive committee of the Minnesota
Humanities Commission. While consulting
for over a dozen arts organizations,
including the Twin Cities Drama Critics
Circle and the Northwest Area
Foundation, he has devoted much of the
recent past to helping with the development
of the Frederick R. Wesiman Art
Museum that glistens in the sun not far
from his Department of English home.
Lyndel King, the director of the
Weisman (as well as its creator—a story for
another time), coordinated the testimony
given to Archie that May evening.
BRIGHTWELL—cont from page 6
and feminine beauty in relationships,
Fleur believes that a more personal element
is required for love and friendship.
Fleur says “You can’t be fashionable out
here. . . It’s who you are that matters, and
how you treat people.”
Fleur and Sandra’s relationship illustrates
Brightwell’s extraordinary gift for
weaving together original, dramatic dialogue
with powerful characters that remain
indelible. Brightwell’s characters derive
from people whom she has met in her own
life. “Many years ago I met a very tomboy
woman called Fleur,” Brightwell explains.
“The thought of her stuck with me and
grew into the Fleur of the book. That sort
of process happens often, to me at least—I
get interested in one aspect of a person,
and a character grows who may have very
little to do with the person the idea sprang
from.”
While the plot of the budding friend-
Katherine Ryerson, Professor of History
and colleague in the Center for Medieval
Studies, did the same for Cal, whose students
and colleagues, several of them present
that night, have planned the conference
to be held in his honor, Text and
Image in Medieval England, to be held in
Coffman Union, October 23-25, 2003.
We celebrated that night the productive
lives and careers of two of our most
esteemed teachers, colleagues, and friends.
We also took much pleasure in this happy
demonstration of how diverse we already
are and have been.
l i s h
ship between Sandra and Fleur evolves,
Brightwell masterfully juxtaposes a tale
about how an artist begins to view and
understand a commercialized and “cold”
society. Brightwell’s Cold Country is laden
with dual meanings; first, the literally
frigid environment of the Alaskan terrain,
then, an artificial and unfeeling America
emerges. Sandra’s original impression of
Alaska as “The Last Frontier” transforms
itself into one of a stable home; the coldness
of her commercial artwork remains
unresolved at the end of the novel.
For Sandra, the mood of American society
is reflected in the coldness of its commercial
art. In Brightwell’s Alaska, behind
all of the attractive advertisements and
beautified inns lurk the dangers of the
wilderness and natural world, and underneath
the comfortable façade of easy living
also exists danger, deception, sickness, and
betrayal, even within Fleur’s family. Fleur’s
sister, Miriam, the seeming epitome of
continued on page 17
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
15

CW—continued from page 7
tle of the sexes to the aging
process…..Minnesota Writer of
Distinction Wang Ping was the featured
reader at “Minnesota Poets.” The late
April offering at the Weisman showcased
some of Minnesota’s finest poets: Connie
Wanek, John Minczeski, Richard Robbins,
and Stephen Burt… In the bullpen for Fall
2003: Another Minnesota Poetry Festival,
October 3-4, 7:30 p.m., at the bright and
shiny new Coffman Memorial Theatre.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic will
headline with Jane Hirshfield. Up and
coming local poets Anna Meek, Angela
Shannon, and Greg Hewett will also participate.
And Juan Felipe Herrera will
bring his unique brand of fiery performance
poetry all the way from Fresno. Not
to be missed!…..Charles Baxter will deliver
the Edelstein-Keller Creative Writing
Lecture on October 28 at 7:30 p.m. His
new book, Saul and Patsy, will be out in
September…..Last but certainly not least:
Lorrie Moore will cross a state line for
what promises to be a witty and insightful
reading on November 11, 7:30 p.m. at
Coffman Memorial Theatre. “I'm just a
boring, not very funny person,” she once
said. Um-not.
MEMRG—continued from page 6
was then the infant form of MEMRG, the
Early Modern Research Group. They envisioned
a graduate led group that focused
on peer support and the exchange of ideas
for works in progress, conference papers,
and even formal presentations. The group
began with Lines and Daigre as its sole
members but eventually developed into a
healthy cadre that gained momentum in
the subsequent years as much from newly
enrolled early modernists as from interested
medievalists.
Professor John Watkins kicked off the
group’s first major event by presenting a
section from his recent book on Queen
Elizabeth. This sharing of papers evolved
into annual colloquia that now afford
graduate students the opportunity to present
work in a supportive atmosphere. The
camaraderie from the group fosters free
dialogue on topics such as the social role of
texts, representations of Jews in
Shakespeare, vernacular education,
romance, sexuality, homoerotic desire, science
and medicine, rhetoric, visual
imagery, and Anglo Saxon wills. Even
more recently, students have been recognizing
the importance of a more global or
at least a more European perspective of
English studies: they are studying the performance
of Shakespeare in the Czech
Republic, scandal chronicles and the development
of the novel from France to
England, and Latin as the “universal” language
of the medieval Christian church in
the context of English vernacular movements.
Since 1995, the group has worked to
bring to the Twin Cities practicing scholars
ranging from renowned early modernists
like Columbia University’s Jean
Howard to young Chaucerians such as
Susie Phillips from the University of Iowa.
The agenda of such visits has included uni-
ELLIS—contunued from page
Finns, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Croatians,
Czechs, Slavs, some French, and the
Ojibwe. These groups mixed only when
absolutely necessary, maintaining, for
many decades, their own pockets of ethnicity
and race.
Home for me was a small farm in a small
town in northern Wisconsin. It is an area
with a history of isolation. Wide scale cutting
of enormous white pine at the end of
the 1800s and into the early 1900s by lumber
companies so decimated this northern
landscape that when later asked about it,
veterans from WWI could only describe it
in terms of what they’d seen in France and
Germany—land cratered and burned by
bombs and generally ravaged of all its
beauty.
As a beginning writer I became aware
that the women I grew up with told stories
in a way that did not conform to the “classic”
literature I had been exposed to; stories
that were never simple but layered with
sediments of experience and a language
filled with nuance. These stories were like
anthills in that they had many entrances,
passages, and exits.
I not only wanted to write about where I
was from but from a woman’s perspective.
Yet when I began to write seriously, I was
stunned to discover that I could not write
about my own sex. Something blocked me.
It nagged me on my walks to and from my
secretarial jobs, work that I detested but
needed so that I could write. The nagging
feeling gradually metamorphosed so that it
literally tagged after me everyday.
That feeling eventually took the form of
a little boy.
So visceral was his presence that I often
imagined him in my apartment with me,
walking with me, eating with me but never
talking. His presence was quiet and
painful.
Every writer knows that worldly events
grow from seeds in very small places, some
of which are ignored. If I have, at times,
felt silenced as a woman, I have felt equally
silenced as a child born in a region of
the United States cynically referred to as
“flyover land” because it is dwarfed by the
urban sophistication from the East and
West Coasts. The Turtle Warrior is a work of
fiction created from the layers of real life in
that isolated region so full of amazing stories,
and of women and children in that
landscape who have been burned but who
“are the light at the tip of the candle.” I
sought to illuminate some of what has
remained with me since being a girl: that
children, like animals, in an effort to survive,
instinctively seek from their physical
environment and from other beings what
their own families cannot provide; that we
can stop violence at the very beginning if
we choose to; and that, as the traditional
Ojibwe have always known, wisdom and
clarity can come from a turtle.
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
16

versity lectures open to the public and
Chinese dinners in Dinkytown, where the
group has the opportunity to hear words of
encouragement and caution regarding
their work in an informal environment.
The group has also nurtured subbgroups
such as summer reading and dissertation
support groups, in which students meet to
discuss material they are reading for preliminary
examinations, critique chapter
drafts, share teaching materials, collaborate
on fellowship or grant proposals, or
even conduct mock interviews and oral
examinations. Because of these circles of
support, the students have been able to
secure sufficient funding for incoming
speakers and student projects, acquire
competitive dissertation fellowships, and
receive teaching assistantship awards.
Although graduate students have always
determined the direction of the group,
they maintain strong ties and relationships
with English faculty. For instance, this fall,
the Department of English and the Center
for Medieval Studies will honor its retiring
Calvin Kendall with a conference entitled,
“Text and Image in Medieval England.”
Not only have two of his former students
organized the conference, but also active
members of MEMRG, Jennifer Young,
Mary Louise Fellows, and Karolyn Kinane,
will present papers in their former professor’s
honor on topics ranging from visual
imagery in Anglo-Saxon texts to death and
power in saints’ lives. Such a strong presence
at the conference highlights the
exceptional scholarship produced by
MEMRG as well as the degree of commitment
to their respective fields.
Looking back upon the growth of the
group and the role it played in securing her
faculty position at Howard University,
Lines can proudly say that it has “succeeded
beyond my wildest dreams.” It has
become a principal factor in attracting students
to pursue graduate English studies at
Minnesota, such as Karolyn Kinane and
Gabriel Gryffyn, who credit the group for
much or their academic growth and sustenance
at the university. Gryffyn claims
that the group “was a big part of what
made me decide on the University of
Minnesota rather than another grad program.
The fact that so many medieval and
early modernists got together for the purpose
of sharing ideas and helping one
another really appealed to me. I guess, for
me, it highlights the cooperative rather
than competitive atmosphere that I see at
the U.” Kinane tells a similar story: “The
enthusiasm and friendliness of the graduate
students as well as the unique kinds of
research they were doing both comforted
and inspired me.”
Given MEMRG’s record for attracting
graduate students and preparing them for
faculty positions, it’s clear that by quelling
competition among themselves, they have
succeeded in producing innovative work
and scholars who will continue to transcend
the boundaries of medieval and
early modern studies.
BRIGHTWELL—continued from page 15
financial and material success, leeches off
her siblings’ incomes and livelihoods in
order to maintain her luxurious lifestyle.
The tensions in Fleur’s family that have
remained for years are broken down by the
presence of Sandra. Sandra exposes the
false and superficial relationsships in
Fleur’s family; however, Sandra herself is
often blind to the implications of her own
world view. She mistakenly pictures the
cabins in Alaska as safe, pleasant, and
warm, and she immediately conjures up an
artistic rendition of a comfortable log
cabin. In reality, Sandra encounters a
barely tolerable shack with poor heating:
“The thing was, when [Fleur] said cabin I’d
imagined something quite different:…the
sort of place you see on maple syrup labels
that’s so sugary you just know the illustrator
was told, ‘Think cozy, think warm pancakes
on snowy mornings.’”
CHAIR’S LETTER— cont.from page 2
working with my colleagues in
English—those who are named
above, and the many other faculty and
staff members who contribute, day by
day and semester by semester, to our
joint enterprise. I also look forward to
hearing from those who enlarged their
education in the Department of English
and now bring it to bear in the world
at large. A sidebar specifically invites
reports of recent publications; but I'd
be glad to receive any news, formal or
informal. My e-mail address is easy
enough: mh@umn.edu. Please write.
P.S. A notice on p.19 of this issue
draws attention to a philanthropic
opportunity for a creative writing fellowship,
which I very much recommend.
It would involve a substantial
matching endowment, partly funded
by the Graduate School, and enabled
by a generous personal gift that has already been made. I've spoken
with the donor, who has been imaginative in initiating this fellowship
fund: it will enable MFA students to travel to conferences, to summer
workshops and to writers' retreats. This is an excellent opportunity to
establish writers who deserve an audience. I hope you can give this
initiative your support. --Michael Hancher
Notes
_____
*Check out these URLs:
http://www2.cla.umn.edu/clatoday/W2003/augst.html
http://www2.cla.umn.edu/clatoday/Sum-Fall-01/Crain.html
http://www2.cla.umn.edu/outreach/literacylab.html
http://www2.cla.umn.edu
http://www2.cla.umn.edu/prospective/faculty/morse03/j-lee.html
† William A. Folwell, "Minneapolis in 1890," New England
Magazine 9 (1890): 86-110. Available online at:
http://english.cla.umn.edu/Folwell.pdf.
‡ George E. MacLean, "English at the University of Minnesota,"
English in American Universities by Professors in the English
Departments of Twenty Representative Institutions, ed. W. M. Payne
(Boston: Heath, 1895), 155-61. Available online at:
http://english.cla.umn.edu/MacLean.pdf.
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
17

IN MEMORIAM
ROBERT WELLISCH
By Gregory J. Scott
On the morning of
Sunday, May 25th, anxious
glances and tense faces dotted
the crowd of Hmong families
that gathered around the
locked doors of St. Vincent
de Paul Church in St. Paul.
Usually at this time, their
beloved pastor Robert
Wellisch would be standing
on the church’s steps, welcoming
his congregation with
vivacious handshakes and
warm greetings in their native
tongue. Fewer than half of
the members at St. Vincent
de Paul speak fluent English,
and many Hmong in the
Twin Cities area relished the
chance to hear Wellisch’s
famously eloquent sermons
in their own language.
Some even drove as far as
fifty miles to take part in
these translated masses.
Wellisch, however, never
made it to church that morning.
According to the State
Patrol, Father Wellisch had
died at 10 p.m. the night
before in a car accident on
highway 169 in LeSueur
County after his vehicle
struck a stray horse and slid
into a ditch. He had just
hosted a pre-confirmation
retreat for the parish youth in
Mankato, and was returning
to St. Paul that night to say
Mass the next morning.
In addition to serving as
the Roman Catholic chaplain
to the Twin Cities
Hmong community for 19
years, Wellisch worked as a
full time associate professor
at the University of St.
Thomas after earning both
his masters and PhD in English from the
University of Minnesota. The man who
adored Victorian literature and wrote intelligently
about the work of Walter Pater
exhibited a warm respect for both his classmates
and his students. He served on a
committee that organized the first reunion
of graduates from the PhD program, and
his contribution in this role mirrored the
fatherly benevolence he displayed both in
the classroom and in the pulpit.
WENDELL GLICK
Wendell Glick died in his home
Saturday, July 19, 2003. He was 87. A professor
of literature at the Duluth campus,
he championed Thoreau scholarship
before it was fashionable, defending himself
and Thoreau in the pages of the
Minneapolis Tribune and editing the
Thoreau Quarterly. Glick retired from
UMD in 1986. He continued to teach in
its University for Seniors until shortly
before his death.
JOSEF ALTHOLZ
Josef Altholz, one of the longest-serving
history professors at the University of
Minnesota, died Aug. 2 in a traffic accident.
Altholz, 69, had retired in May and
had been suffering from cancer for about a
year. “He was an excellent teacher in the
classical sense of the word,” said Theofanis
Stavrou, a friend and colleague for 43
years. Lecturing, not interactive dialogue,
was the style of their generation, and
Altholz was always well-prepared and
extremely precise in his delivery, Stavrou
said. Ann Waltner, associate chair of the
Department of History, described his
courses in British and Irish history as wildly
popular, enrolling about 12,000 students
in 40 years. But Altholz didn't expect
all students to like his work. “Indeed, I
would deplore uniformly excellent student
ratings,” he wrote in 1998. “A willingness
to fail is the condition of success.”
Survivors include a brother, Arthur
Altholz of New York.
L U N A , a journal of poetry and translation
Individual issues $10.00
One year (2 issues) $18.00
Two years (4 issues) $30.00
Send subscriptions to:
LUNA
Ray Gonzalez, Editor
Department of English
University of Minnesota
207 Church Street S.E., 207 Lind Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
18

C O N T R I B U T E T O Y O U R E N G L I S H D E P A R T M E N T
We welcome your tax deductible contribution made payable to the University of
Minnesota Foundation. If you have a preference for the use of your contribution,
please indicate your choice below:
General department support, including reference library, journal subscriptions,
video, and slide library
Undergraduate scholarships and awards
please specify which undergraduate scholarship or award
you would like to contribute to:
Beverly Atkinson Scholarship
Mark David Clawson Award
Donald V. Hawkins Scholarship
Jessie M. Comstock Scholarship
Graduate Fellowships and awards
please specify which graduate fellowship scholarship or award
you would like to contribute to:
Faculty/Alumni Graduate Fellowships in English
Samuel Holt Monk Prize
Charles Christensen English Library Acquisition Prize
Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship
Marcella DeBourg Fellowship
English Graduate Student Research Fund
Send your contributions, along with this form, to:
Office of External Relations
101 Pleasant Street S.E.
Room 225, Johnston Hall
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134
We wish to thank the many donors whose generous gifts have made this newsletter and
many department activities and awards possible. We appreciate your continued support.
E N G L I S H A T M I N N E S O T A C A P I T A L C A M P A I G N
Although the University’s Capital Campaign officially closed on June 30,
2003 and the Department of English has been the recipient of many gifts
that are most helpful, for which we are deeply grateful, we still need several
“major” gifts to support undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships,*
and endowed professorships. To learn how you can be a part of this major
gift effort that will help assure the department’s continued excellence going
forward, please contact Bruce Forstein, Major Gifts Development Officer, for
the College of Liberal Arts. Bruce may be reached at:
University of Minnesota
College of Liberal Arts
225 Johnston Hall
101 Pleasant Street S.E.
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134
forst006@umn.edu 612-624-2848
* For graduate-fellowship endowments of $25,000 and over, the Graduate
School matches dollar-for-dollar the payout of the endowment, thus doubling
the benefit of the donor’s gift.
P H I L A N T H R O P I C O P P O R T U N I T Y F O R C R E A T I V E W R I T I N G F E L L O W S H I P
The Creative Writing Program has recently received gifts totaling $15,000 from donors who would like the funds to benefit MFA students in the form of small
fellowship grants. These grants would offer assistance for travel to conferences, to summer workshops, or to writer’s retreats.
We have an opportunity to increase the benefit of this gift. If we can raise an additional $10,000, the Graduate School will match the payout on $25,000,
thus doubling the annual fellowship grant. In other words, the original $25,000 donated to the Creative Writing Program will yield a payout equivalent to that
of a $50,000 endowment.
If you want to learn more about this exciting opprotunity, or would like to make a donation, please contact Bruce Forstein at forst006@umn.edu. Or you may
send a contribution (made out to Creative Writing Fellowship Fund #6561) to the following address:
Bruce Forstein—Major Gifts Development Officer
University of Minnesota—College of Liberal Arts
225 Johnston Hall
101 Pleasant Street S.E.
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134
CONTRIBUTE & SUBSCRIBE
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
19

ENGLISH
AT
M
INNESOTA
Thank you for taking the time to read this
redesigned issue of English at Minnesota.
You may have noticed that this issue does
not include all student, alumni, and faculty
news. This does not mean that we do
not want to hear from you. Because the
great successes of our readers have led to a
space issue in the magazine, we are in the
process of deciding when and where is the
best time and place to include those
notices.
Also, for the first time, we have involved
undergraduate students in the production
of English at Minnesota as writers and
assistant editor. I would like to thank them
for their work and I hope you enjoyed their
stories.—ed.
CONTRIBUTORS
UNDERGRADUATE
Lynn Dearden
Emily Walters Gregor
M.J. Hensley
Ann Linde
Gregory J. Scott
Danika Stegeman
GRADUATE
Abigail F. Davis
Molly Hennessey
Alex Mueller
Minnesota State Fair
Photo by Tom Foley
© 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Department of English Language & Literature
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