fall M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

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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
Page 1 and 2: AT M INNESOTA University of Minneso
Page 3 and 4: P HOTO BY T ERRY F AUST Chabon to s
Page 5: MARIA BAMFORD’S LIFE ON THE EDGE
Page 9 and 10: The Final Installment of the 1954 F
Page 11 and 12: EDELSTEIN-KELLER V I S I T I N G W
Page 13 and 14: ALUMNI PROFILE: JOHN COLBURN By ANN
Page 15 and 16: PARTY—contined from page 8 Guthri
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Page 19 and 20: C O N T R I B U T E T O Y O U R E N

fall M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

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