Newsletter Fall 2012 - English Department

Transcription

S
croll
c r i& b e
creen
Summer/Fall 2012
Written and produced by students in FSU’s Department of English
the
english
network
Alums use their degrees
in traditional paths and
new media pursuits
Cathy Areu waits in a Fox News
studio for an appearance on
“The O’Reilly Factor”
From top left to bottom right: Marlee Haynes, Garrett Johnson, Sandra Castillo, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, and Jeannie Long and
Michele Alexander (with Matthew McConaughey).
I
Letter from the chair
write the day before a presidential election that marches
to a drumbeat of Jobs! In the Florida system, academic
departments are now on alert that we will be graded on how
many jobs our graduates obtain and how well those jobs pay.
English departments have long been allergic to such simplistic
vocationalism because we define our mission as education for
a lifetime, not as a narrow pipeline to the first of many lifetime
jobs. I like to tell my students that William Wordsworth drew
his first paycheck when he was 43. Jane Austen cashed her first
royalty check when she was 36. They would have dragged our
statistics down.
Our graduates are in fact extremely successful in the
workplace, and we celebrate their remarkable achievements.
This issue of Scroll, Scribe, & Screen offers profiles of
writers Jeannie Long and Michele Alexander in Hollywood,
entrepreneur Garrett Johnson in Silicon Valley, the poet Sandra
Castillo at Miami Dade College, Cathy Areu’s high-profile
journalism in Washington and New York, Gwyn Hyman
Rubio’s selection for Oprah’s Book Club, and Marlee Haynes’s
experiences breaking into the world of television journalism.
We also create jobs here in the department, and three of our
current faculty hold degrees from FSU English. I invite you to
catch up with Deborah Coxwell-Teague, who directs our FirstYear Writing Composition; with Diane Roberts, who teaches
Southern literature and calls the bluffs of the many flimflam
artists who still slither all over Florida; and with Barbara
Hamby, who travels the world but always brings poetry back to
Tallahassee and the Williams Building.
The indispensable work in Williams is of course performed
day by day by our remarkable staff, and this issue also profiles
the work of two of our award-winning student advisors,
Brandy Haddock and Sean Hawkeswood, and of the steady
hand on the graduate program tiller, Janet Atwater.
As you read through these pages, please join me in expressing
our sincere thanks for many jobs well done by our faculty, staff,
and alums. We are very grateful.
Table of contents
4
12
Beyond
the classroom — alums in the spotlight
Dynamic duo8
Summer/Fall 2012
Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long prove that success can
be found with a good friend and a good sense of humor.
By Abbey Cory
Faces of the faculty
Change at the top
4
Eric Walker becomes the new department chair.
By Mollye Harper
Beyond the text
6
Deborah Coxwell-Teague encourages students to learn about
themselves when it comes to reading and writing.
By Samantha Fuchs
Just cause10
Robin Goodman fights for faculty rights and pushes her
students to be better thinkers and writers.
By Alexandria Wallace
Word warrior
11
Diane Roberts eagerly enters the battle to protect Florida’s
environmental quality.
By Eric Fisher
Barbara Hamby
14
Q&A with poet and author Barbara Hamby, who
incorporates her zest for life in everything she does.
By Marybeth McConnell
Free versing12
Sandra Castillo, a Cuban refugee, reinvigorates her sense of
identity through poetry.
By Samantha Schaum
Journalistic joy16
Cathy Areu loves being a journalist and TV pundit.
By Scroll, Scribe & Screen staff
Reluctant writer18
Gwyn Hyman Rubio discusses her path to become an author.
By Marlene Baldeweg-Rau
21
Department
in action
National recognition
22
Professors reap the benefits of their National Endowment
for the Humanites fellowships.
By Drea Fetchik
Reading series24
High-profile writers come out at night to read from their
newest works at the Warehouse.
By Alexandra Sclafani
Bound for success
27
Two Ph.D. students publish anthology.
Guiding lights
28, 30, and 31
Advisors help students get on the right track.
By Taylor Callahan, Carlos Lloreda, and Maya Schuller
In the classroom
Narrative connections
Sending a message
20
Garrett Johnson is making major moves in the field of
technology and text messaging.
By Josh Davis and Scroll, Scribe & Screen staff
23
Classes show that lit and film cover similar creative ground.
By Amanda Diehl
Big-city success21
Marlee Haynes gets a taste of editing in the Big Apple.
By Jessica Reich
26
Paul Fyfe embraces the technology of e-readers.
By Kathryn Cole
Trends in technology
Teaching e-volution?
Scroll, Scribe & Screen mission statement
The purpose of Scroll, Scribe & Screen is to foster a sense of
community among alumni, students, faculty, and friends of the
Department of English at The Florida State University. Our
goal is to showcase the achievements and events within the
department to connect with our Seminole audience.
Photo credits for cover photos: Cathy Areu by El Moses; Garrett Johnson by Scroll,
Scribe & Screen staff; all other photos courtesy of profile subjects.
2
Summer/Fall 2012
SCROLL, SCRIBE & SCREEN
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16
22
Summer/Fall 2012
3
Walking tall
Eric Walker takes over as department chair
as Ralph Berry’s term comes to an end
By Mollye Harper
“I know [Dr. Walker’s] administrative
experience will stand him in good stead
as our incoming department chair.”
— Associate Professor Leigh Edwards
Photo by Mollye Harper
Eric Walker has been a professor in the English department since 1984 and
brings valuable leadership to the position, including his roles as Faculty Senate
president and assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
W
ith a $7 million budget and
more than 2,000 degree-seeking students, the Florida State
English department is like a small university
of its own. Managing the department is no
easy task and ultimately falls on a faculty
member serving as chair.
Fall 2012 marks a transition in department
leadership with Professor Eric Walker taking
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Summer/Fall 2012
over the responsibility of the chair position
from Professor Ralph Berry.
“I know [Walker’s] administrative
experience will stand him in good stead
as our incoming department chair,”
Associate Professor Leigh Edwards says.
“His knowledge and understanding of
institutional history at FSU is superb, and his
ability to put current events into perspective
in this broader context is extremely helpful.”
Walker has held several leadership roles
throughout the department and university
since arriving at Florida State in 1984,
including his most recent position as
president of the Faculty Senate and member
of the FSU Board of Trustees from 2009 to
2011. Previously, Walker served two terms
as associate chair of the English department
and was also an assistant dean in the College
of Art and Sciences from 2004 to 2006.
The chair position is a homecoming
for Walker, who has previously won an
Outstanding Teaching Award for his work
in the department. Although he taught a
few classes while serving the university as
president of the Faculty Senate, the position
helped prepare him to become chair, as
administrative duties were his primary focus.
“This is where my heart is,” says Walker of
the English department. “It is where I came
30 years ago, and I cannot imagine a more
exciting place in the whole university to be.”
In his new role, Walker is responsible to
the dean and the provost for everything
that happens in the department, as well as
for overseeing everyone in the department,
including 50 plus faculty and staff and 145
teaching assistants. He also manages the
“Ralph [performed] very, very well in what has been one of the most important
and toughest jobs in the university.”
— Eric Walker
promotion and tenure of current faculty and
the hiring of new faculty.
Carolyn Hall, assistant to the chair, praises
Walker as a leader and role model who
knows the in and outs of FSU’s policies,
as well as the duties of the chair. “He is an
abundant source of knowledge,” says Hall.
These qualities, along with his good-natured
personality, make Walker a great fit for the
position.
Another big ticket item on Walker’s
agenda is managing the entire departmental
budget, which is no easy task during the
current budget crisis. Over the past four
years, the university budget has decreased by
25 percent, leaving a smaller amount for the
English department. During that time, the
department was forced to shrink its staff by
10 percent, halt salary increases for faculty,
and cut its expense budget in half.
“Suddenly you discover that you are
going to be working on
multimillion-dollar budgets,”
Walker says as he grabs the
university budget manual
to illustrate the tremendous
amount of material required
to understand the budget.
“This is the kind of thing
you never thought you would
be doing when you go to
graduate school for English
and get a Ph.D. in English.”
Walker plans to continue
the good work that his
predecessors have done,
which includes working on
the cooperation of the three
undergraduate degree tracks
(creative writing; literature; and editing,
writing, and media [EWM]), and addressing
the enrollment pressures by recruiting and
hiring new faculty. He also intends to set
a standard of diversity and inclusiveness
for the university. This will be achieved by
matching the management structure with the
faculty members in terms of gender and race
and incorporating diversity in administrative
positions.
Ralph Berry—who served as chair from
2006 to 2012, except for 2009-10 when
Professor Kathleen Yancey served as interim
chair—has returned to the calling that
brought him to the department years ago:
teaching and writing. “I am really looking
forward to Eric Walker being chair,” Berry
says. “He knows the university better than
I do, and I look forward to being a faculty
member in his English department.”
During his term, Berry was responsible
for many improvements that aided in
the success of the department, including
instituting the EWM degree program,
restructuring the graduate admission
process, and hiring 13 new faculty members
despite dwindling finances. His funding of
the Graduate Conference Travel Awards
encouraged scholarship and professionalism
among graduate students. Not only was he
a mentor to the junior faculty, he also made
the department stronger by promoting
department, I am grateful to Dr. Berry for all
his hard work as chair.”
Since he joined the English department in
1985, Berry has produced numerous written
materials and critical works, including six
books. In 1998, his book Leonardo’s Horse
was even listed as a New York Times “notable
book.” From 1999 to 2007, he was the
publisher of Fiction Collective Two, a nonprofit
online publication of artistically adventurous
and non-traditional fiction. Berry has
received an Outstanding Undergraduate
Teaching Award, a Teaching Incentive
Program Award, and numerous grants as
well.
Berry’s success in the chair position has
helped pave the way for Walker. “Ralph
[performed] very, very well in what has been
one of the most important and toughest
jobs in the university,” Walker says. “We are
very grateful.”
Ralph Berry says he
is looking forward
to his return to
teaching and
writing as a faculty
member.
Photo courtesy of Ruth Flemming
creative activity among faculty and
graduate students, says Professor
Helen Burke. It was even his idea
to create Scroll, Scribe & Screen as a
way to increase contact with alumni
and thus widen the department
community.
“Dr. Berry has been a strong and
tireless advocate for English at the
college and university level,” says
Burke. “Like everyone else in the
Photo by Mollye Harper
Summer/Fall 2012
5
Photo by Sammi Fuchs
Coxwell-Teague makes her classes enjoyable largely
by sharing stories from her own personal life and
encouraging her students to do the same. Teague
intentionally cultivates a relaxing atmosphere
where students feel palpably that she cares about
them not just as students, but as people.
Leading by example
Deborah Coxwell-Teague inspires excellence in the First-Year Composition Program
through her caring brand of teaching, scholarship, and administration
By Sammi Fuchs
in which students feel comfortable enough
to take risks with their writing, allowing them
just like students—I really do,” says
to put more of themselves on paper than
Deborah Coxwell-Teague, her eyes
they normally would. In addition to fostering
crinkling in a smile, intimating the
a comfortable classroom, Coxwell-Teague
honesty of her words.
strives to make the class itself enjoyable.
Though the sentiment may sound requi“My attitude is that you’ll enjoy the class
site for a professor in a university, Coxwella lot more, you’ll learn a lot more, if I can
Teague doesn’t just like her students—she
make it enjoyable,” says Coxwell-Teague. “I
cares about them deeply, as writwant the class to be challenging.
ers and as people. She works hard “I want students to learn and I want to I want you to have to work…. I
to create a classroom environ- learn, but I want to create an environment don’t want to go to a class where
not going to have fun. I
ment that encourages students
where people don’t dread coming to class.” I’m
want to have a good time. I want
to go from good writing to great
— Deborah Coxwell-Teague students to learn and I want to
writing.
learn, but I want to create an en“I feel like you can make a difference in people’s lives when you’re respond- to writing in such a way that you make sure vironment where people don’t dread coming
ing to their writing,” says Coxwell-Teague, di- that you let your writer know… not so much to class.”
Coxwell-Teague makes her classes enjoyrector of the First-Year Composition (FYC) what they’re not doing well, but the places
able largely by sharing stories from her own
Program in Florida State University’s English where you’re confused.”
department. “The way a reader responds can
Coxwell-Teague strives to provide classes personal life and encouraging her students to
I
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Summer/Fall 2012
make a huge difference. Writing is scary for
many of us because we are exposing ourselves when we put our thoughts on paper or
on the screen. It’s as if we are allowing readers to look inside our brains.
“And when you respond to what someone’s written and you do so in a harsh way,
I know it can really, really hurt,” she continues. “So I think there’s an art to responding
do the same. Students taking classes with her
quickly learn more about her life than they
will about most other instructors’ lives. They
will know she thinks that the most interesting
thing about herself is that she has a daughter who is younger than her grandson. They
will know that she married right out of high
school, had two children, divorced 18 years
later, then remarried on her 40th birthday and
had two more children. They will know that
she enjoys walking for hours, especially on
the beach. Teague intentionally cultivates a
relaxing atmosphere where students feel palpably that she cares about them not just as
students, but as people.
Though Coxwell-Teague emphasizes that
teaching is her first love, she has served as
director of the FYC program for 15 years.
Amid answering upwards of 100 emails a
day from TAs, students, and colleagues, she
is responsible for making sure that the program runs smoothly, implementing necessary changes, and training and supervising
graduate student teaching assistants who
teach the FYC classes.
She teaches Pedagogy Workshop for all of
the FYC TAs, as well as Advanced Article
and Essay, and every few years makes sure
to teach a First-Year Composition class to
experience the program from the classroom
rather than just from behind her desk. In
addition to directing the program, CoxwellTeague is the chair of the First-Year Composition Committee, which is responsible for
choosing FYC textbooks, designing writing
assignments, and putting together the program’s curriculum.
Coxwell-Teague’s academic prowess was
shaped early in life. Her father was
a Southern Baptist minister, and
her mother was a stay-at-home
mom. Her brother, Sammy, was
five years older than she was and
had Down Syndrome. Just before
she was about to start kindergarten, her father said, “Sammy can’t
go to school. Sammy can’t learn.
You’re a smart girl, and I want
you to do well in school.” Her father’s words were the catalyst for
her love of learning.
“School became my passion,”
says Coxwell-Teague. “I was always good at it; I always loved it.
That’s why I earned every degree
I could earn, and I think that’s
why I’ve always wanted to be a
teacher.”
Coxwell-Teague’s love of academics has inspired her to write
with teachers of freshman composition classes in mind. Currently, she is working with Professor
Ron Lunsford of the University of North
Carolina Charlotte on a book to be released
in March 2013 that will be a compendium of
articles penned by some of the top people
in rhetoric and composition. The experts will
be responding to the prompt: “If I had the
opportunity to teach a section of frst-year
composition at my university, and I knew that
this would be the only college composition
course that students would take at my university, here’s what I would teach and why.”
Previous to her current writing project,
Coxwell-Teague spent four years co-writing
Photos courtesy of Deborah Coxwell-Teague
Deborah Coxwell-Teague enjoys a
recent vacation in the New England
area. In the bottom photo, she and
two close friends, Melinda Young (l)
and Diane Price (r), are in Hyannis,
Mass., waiting for the ferry to Nantucket.
the first-year composition textbook Everything’s a Text with Dan Melzer, one of her
former TAs. She has also edited custom ediSee COXWELL-TEAGUE, page 32
Summer/Fall 2012
7
Lucy & Ethel, Ben & Jerry…
Jeannie Long & Michele Alexander:
Another dynamo of a duo
o-authors and FSU
English department
alumnae Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long have
been best friends since the
ninth-grade. After having five
classes together on the first
day of school at Lincoln High
School in Tallahassee, that was
it. “BFF!” Alexander says of
their relationship.
Not much has changed since
then, except maybe their résumés and portfolios, which boast
a witty comedy book that was
adapted to film in 2003: How to
All photos courtesy of Jeannie Long and Michele Alexander
Lose a Guy in Ten Days, featurFrom left, Jeannie Long and Michele Alexander wrote the comedy upon which the hit movie
ing stars Kate Hudson and MatHow to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was based.
thew McConaughey.
Both the book and the film bring hilarity buying a significant other a plant or any oth- of the entertainment industry.
to the common mistakes that can end a rela- er living thing to symbolize the strength of
“When I was in school, my dream job was
tionship before it begins. For example, want- the relationship, the authors say. Leave the to write for Spin Magazine, but that would
ing a relationship to “grow,” does not justify metaphors to creative pros Alexander and have meant moving to New York, which
Long, who, while being I did not want to do,” Long says during a
experts on the short- phone interview.
Alexander’s dream job was to win the lotcomings of daters, have
managed to make their tery, enjoy life, and “write silly things like
own friendship a lasting How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”
When the writers made the move to Los
and fruitful one.
While students in the Angeles, they were both able to claim a spot
FSU English depart- in the entertainment industry, while also
ment, Alexander and finding time to write.
By day, Long freelances in entertainment
Long were able to lay
a foundation for their marketing, working with anything from
writing and creative movies to music to video games, while Alabilities. Alexander even exander is in the music industry, working in
put her writing skills to the international department at Hollywood
use by writing skits for Records. It just so happens that “by night”
events with her sorority, was exactly when the idea for How to Lose a
Long and Alexander (front) show their FSU spirit before
Guy in 10 Days was born.
Kappa Alpha Theta.
a football game. Clockwise from top left, Jay Hansli,
The beginnings of the project were writFrom early on, the
Cassy Alexander, Keith Alexander, Brian Alexander, and
pair wanted to be part ten on cocktail napkins while the two were at
Judy Alexander.
a bar, talking about a popular book that
gave dating advice.
“We were talking about … how it
only works if you don’t really like the
guy, so then we thought, if you like the
guy, it becomes, How to Lose a Guy in 10
Days,” Alexander says.
A lot of the book’s inspiration came
from Alexander’s and Long’s own dating experiences.
“Sadly, yes, a lot of those things were
pulled from real life and from the headlines of our diary,” Alexander says.
Clearly, they were not the only ones
to commit some of those dating faux
pas, as women readers approached them
after the book had been published, admitting to committing even the most
exaggerated dating mistakes featured in
the book
When it came to working together Jeannie Long, left, and Michele Alexander pose with Matthew McConaughey, who
on the project, co-authoring was some- starred in the 2003 film, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
thing that came naturally to Alexander
and Long.
good enough explanation—things get cut.
were able to hone their screenwriting skills,
“We both kind of come to the table with
“When you write by yourself, the hard- furthering their education with classes at
our different ideas, and we both have very est part is that you don’t have someone to UCLA. The writers agree that, for them, losimilar senses bounce the ideas off of and you think all cating themselves in California opened many
of
humor,” your ideas are great and you leave all that doors. One such opportunity presented itLong says.
stuff in,” Alexander says. “So it’s kind of self when, before the writers were going to
The writers good to have someone.”
meet their book editor for How to Lose a Guy
balance each
With so many years of shared history, they in 10 Days, they were on a show called Fashion
other out with are more than just co-authors and friends. Emergency getting a makeover for the occatheir different “She’s like my sister,” Alexander says.
sion.
writing styles.
Professionally, it’s a successful sisterhood.
“An agent at ICM saw us and thought we
While Alex- They sold film rights for the production were funny and liked the book and everyander says she of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and were thing, so he met with us and wanted us to
has to take very happy with the
some time to movie. The writers
herself
and also got to meet the
find the right film’s stars, includwords,
she ing Matthew McCosays Long is naughey and Kate
“quick on her Hudson, at the prefeet with one- miere.
liners and is
After How to Lose
really funny.”
a Guy in 10 Days, Alexander and Long wrote start writing,” Alexander says.
This, how- another book called How to Get Over a Guy
By networking through opportunities
ever, doesn’t in 10 Days, which will be used as the ba- like that one, and also through Alexander’s
mean that co- sis to film a sequel to the first movie. The brother, Brian Alexander (also an FSU alum),
authoring is production’s screenwriter, Kirsten Smith, who was an acting agent at the time, the two
always easy. is responsible for other hit films, includ- were able to find their success.
If one person ing Legally Blonde and 10 Things I Hate About
“I think it’s location, location, location,”
Long and Alexander
doesn’t
like
You.
Alexander
and
Long
are
also
hoping
to
Long
says. “It’s not even about how good
published their
s
o
m
e
t
h
i
n
g
,
turn
another
one
of
their
books,
365
Reasons
it
is—it
could be the greatest thing ever
comedic dating guide
it
means
the
Why
I’m
Still
Single,
into
a
half-hour
sitcom.
written,
but
it’s hard to get the right eyes to
(above) in 1998. They
other
has
to
Whether
it’s
a
book
or
a
script,
humor
and
look
at
it.”
hope the 365 Reasons
defend it. If sarcasm have become their trademarks.
guidebook is turned
there’s not a
See DUO, page 32
It was in LA that Alexander and Long
into a sitcom.
FSU English alums
write for Hollywood
By Abbey Cory
C
8
Summer/Fall 2012
“Don’t get discouraged. Just keep
writing and have faith in what you
are doing, and eventually someone
will notice.”
—Jeannie Long
Summer/Fall 2012
9
S
Fighting
the
good fight
Photo courtesy of Robin Goodman
Robin Goodman (with bullhorn) led a 2009 march for college students to the
Capitol in Tallahassee to protest cuts to higher education funding.
By Alexandria Wallace
Robin Goodman
takes a bold
approach to
literature and to life
Robin Goodman
and her dog Mona
H
er office is filled with books. Words “She combines serious
on their spines show that the material within is not light reading. Even analysis with a delightful
so, she loves to read. She reads in sense of humor in ways that
the mornings and the evenings and, whenever she help to make activism for a
can get a chance, in the middle.
It’s surprising, however, that Professor Robin good cause more enjoyable.”
Goodman has any time to
read at all: She is director
— Jack Fiorito
of the literature program
president UFF-FSU chapter
in Florida State University’s
English department and is
the secretary and a senator in the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). Moreover,
as a professor and scholar, she is passionate about helping her graduate students succeed and—even though she has already written five books—is always
thinking about her next one.
Goodman, a Bostonian, completed her undergraduate degree in
English at the University of Pennsylvania and then earned her
Ph.D. at New York University in comparative literature. She’s studied Spanish and French, and is able to read Portuguese. Goodman
has always been active in politics and the feminist movement. She
has participated in marches and has defended Roe v. Wade. She has
the news playing in her house constantly, and her books are heavily focused on the problems of today and what should be done.
“Politics became part of the family dynamic,” Goodman says.
“My parents were political in the electoral sense. We talked politics
at the dinner table. My dad was a Republican and my mother, a
Democrat. They used to try to get the other one to think that they
weren’t going to vote, and then they’d both sneak out to do it.
They’re both Democrats now though, so they don’t argue about
it anymore.”
See GOODMAN, page 33
Photo by Alexandria Wallace
10 Summer/Fall 2012
he’s an essayist, a satirist,
and an activist—as well as
an editor, a writer, and a
fighter.
She is FSU English Professor Diane Roberts. And she’s also a riot.
There are two sides to Roberts
that shine through when you hear
her speak—one driven to combat
apathy, one irresistibly humorous.
These two sides coexist in a way that
makes Roberts uniquely engaging as
an activist and a writer.
When asked what motivates her,
the response is straightforward, with
the twist of a smile.
“Rage. I am angry a lot. I am an
angry human,” she says, her wry
tone softening the pointed words.
In the past, the wrath of Roberts
has primarily dealt with Florida politics, but these days she is also fighting threats to Florida’s water, wildlife, and environment.
The Tallahassee native has been
successful and productive over the
course of her career as a writer and
an academic, but she continues to
seek new challenges and opportunities, fueled by that rage and satirical
wit. Roberts, who earned her Ph.D.
at Oxford University where she was
a Marshall Scholar, can already brag
It is worth noting that, because of
her gender-neutral byline (D.K. Roberts) on the Das Kapital columns,
she could go to the legislative parties without being recognized, given
that many of the legislators assumed
D.K. Roberts was a man.
A statewide voice
In the late 1980s, in part due to her
work for the Flambeau, the St. Petersburg Times gave her a freelance position, and that, she says, is when her
writing became more serious.
“They could put up with a certain
amount of my childish humor, but
not too much—[my writing] needed
to be about something,” Roberts
says.
A former colleague from the Times,
Martin Dyckman, notes that Roberts’s intrepid style when it comes to
critiquing those in power has always
drawn the ire of government. By the
early 2000s, Roberts had moved to
radio and was providing commentaries for Florida Public Radio’s Capitol
Report. Dyckman recalls a decision
in early 2003 by WFSU-FM to ban
on-air local commentators, which he
says was mostly aimed at muzzling
Roberts’s opinions.
“She had a [feature] scathing the
Always an active voice
of a stint on the editorial board of the St. Petersburg Times, a series of columns published
by The Guardian, and a role with National
Public Radio since the mid-1990s as a commentator on Weekend Edition Sunday.
Despite those impressive achievements, as
well as a long and successful career as a professor at the University of Alabama and at
FSU, Roberts has never been one to sit back
and bask in her accomplishments. Rather,
she has found that there is always another
fight to take on.
“The attitudes that people have—if you’re
paying attention, you’re gonna be angry,”
Roberts says.
As a journalist, Roberts is known for her
no-holds-barred approach to political and
social commentary. She both speaks loudly
and carries a big stick when it comes to addressing politicians and the powers that be,
blending an acerbic humor with a biting tone.
Photo courtesy of Diane Roberts
Diane Roberts adds a new
target to the focus of her
pointed commentaries
By Eric Fisher
For example, in the 1980s and early 1990s,
while writing for the Florida Flambeau, she
created her Das Kapital column, which focused on the Florida Legislature. At first, her
observations were “silly, [what] was funny to
me,” she says.
“I was writing about what they were wearing, what people said—not the official side,
the other side,” she says. Roberts would go
to the legislative parties and eavesdrop on
conversations (“and hear them breaking
Sunshine Laws, discussing business but not
in a public forum,” she points out), which
would become the topics for her columns.
Legislature for some things and concluded
with the line, ‘Democracy is alive and well
in Georgia,’” Dyckman says. “The highly political staff of the House of Representatives
got involved—as I discovered from an e-mail
search—and apparently put enough pressure
on WFSU that it folded [i.e., stopped airing
political commentaries].”
Losing the WFSU gig didn’t mean that
Roberts was all of sudden idle. She has enjoyed a prominent career as a professor that
includes a stretch at the University of Alabama from 1990 until 2006, when she came
back to FSU. She has also produced three
books.
Her first two books, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood and The Myth of Aunt Jemima,
were focused on Southern culture, an area of
specialty for Roberts. Her third book, Dream
See ROBERTS, page 35
Summer/Fall 2012 11
Castillo visits
family in Cuba
with her greatgrandfather’s
brother, Jose
Antonio Donate
and her mother,
Maria Luisa
(2005).
All photos courtesy of Sandra Castillo
By Samantha Schaum
W
e had left behind
everything,”
Florida
State alumna and writer
Sandra Castillo says.
“You literally were not
allowed to bring anything when you left. We
came with the clothes we had on.”
Forced as a child to leave her home in
Havana, Cuba, Castillo and her family
immigrated to Miami as political exiles in
1970 on one of the “Freedom Flights”
that took place during the Johnson and
Nixon administrations. Though she left her
possessions, the next time Castillo returned
to her homeland—more than two decades
later—she would realize there was even
more of Cuba that she had never left behind.
Growing up, Castillo was never without
pen in hand, and over the years of her
youth she had accumulated an anthology of
journals, filled with the thoughts and ideas
of her childhood world. While scribbling
away in her notebook was simply instinctive
self-expression, it would be the prelude to
her successful career as a professional writer.
12 Summer/Fall 2012
Pilgrimage
through poetry
Writer and FSU alum Sandra Castillo reconnects
with her Cuban heritage
By Samantha Schaum
“If I could put language to something,
then it was real,” Castillo says.
Castillo transferred to Florida State
from Miami Dade College (where she now
teaches) in the fall of 1983 with dreams of
majoring in theater, but everything changed
with a crumpled-up attendance sheet pulled
out of the back pocket of her first professor.
The morning of her very first class at Florida
State, her theater professor read aloud a few
names, none of which was “Castillo,” and
bluntly ordered the rest of the students to
leave. Shocked and short a class, Castillo
dashed out of the nightmarish lecture hall,
and wound up in the Williams Building,
desperate to fill the void in her schedule.
The moment she set foot in Williams, she
felt surrounded by kindness and guidance
from the English department.
“I felt like I belonged there in a really
strange way,” Castillo recalls.
Right away, she changed her major to
English and decided to minor in theater.
Castillo wound up taking poetry with
Professor David Kirby, whose dedicated but
relaxed approach to teaching and welcoming
office bursting with stacks of poetry books
helped inspire a passion for creative writing.
Castillo recalls that what she initially wrote for
his class was “maudlin” and “melodramatic,”
but when Kirby suggested that she write
about herself, everything changed.
“He got me telling him all these stories
that I had never really told anyone outside
the family, and he said, ‘Well, I want you
to go home and write about that instead,’”
Castillo says.
Born in one world and exiled to another,
Castillo was often haunted by strange
distortions of a distant land she once knew.
All of the dreams and memories of Cuba
that had lain dormant in the deepest recesses
of her mind for most of her life finally began
to swell to the surface and flow onto paper in
the form of poetry.
It had always been there: the desire and the
need to express, to create, to write. After a
simple conversation as part of Kirby’s poetry
class, Castillo embraced the idea of writing
about her homeland, the essence of who she
was. She began to write about loss, history,
gender, language, and memories of Cuba.
This idea enabled Castillo to find a
writing voice that allowed her to tap into
her experiences and shape them: to create
a narrative about place, about Cuba—the
Cuba that she knew. She began to weave a
tapestry of those experiences, and she has
been writing about them ever since.
“Sandra is a wonderful poet, and I count
myself lucky just for being there at the
beginning,” Kirby says. “Once she found
her voice, there was no looking back. I’m
not surprised that she’s a gifted teacher as
well, because, as far as I can tell, her personal
warmth and enthusiasm have no end.”
In 1994, after 10 years of contemplating
a visit to their homeland, Castillo and her
mother finally made the trip back to Cuba,
where they had the most emotional voyage
of their lives.
When she returned to the place of her
childhood, Castillo was moved by the feeling
that time had stood still. She recalls seeing
1950s cars being driven down the streets and
neighborhoods where she used to play still
strewn with the houses she remembered as
a child, untouched by renovations or time.
Whoever had not escaped still lived in the
same houses they had been in 20 years earlier.
After the surreal trip, Castillo came back
from her pilgrimage with a more concrete
grasp of Cuba as an essential part of who she
is. With revitalized memories and a deeper
understanding of where she had come from,
Castillo’s poetry flourished. She was able
to write more lucidly about the place that
she had been writing about based on mere
dreams and recollections.
Castillo feels a profound connection to
Jack Kerouac, who once said, “I am made
of loss.”
“It’s why I go back,” she says. “I keep
thinking whatever it is that’s there is still
there and if I go back, I’ll find it, whatever
it is.”
Although Cuban culture was always
deeply rooted within her sense of self,
Castillo was immersed in American culture
at a very young age and was often burdened
by conflicting cultural identities.
Fragments of Spanish, words and phrases
of her home, often intertwine with English
words throughout her poetry. While she
writes mostly in English, she says there are
some things that simply cannot be translated
from the original Spanish vernacular. There
are just some pieces of herself that she can
only express with Spanish: “cubanisms,” she
calls them. For her, Spanish is the language
of home.
Castillo considers the Florida State
Creative Writing Program a large contributor
to her success. During her time as a student
at FSU, Tallahassee was a smaller place, but
still home to a thriving creative community.
There were all kinds of opportunities for
aspiring writers, including a local venue near
the Capitol called The Alley. Every Tuesday
night at 8:00 p.m., readings at The Alley
gave people like Castillo an opportunity
to establish a community of like-minded
people, something she had never had before.
Haven to writers and poets alike, The
Alley was a place to read, to collaborate,
to inspire, and to be inspired.
Castillo was first officially asked to
read her poetry in 1985 as an opening
for John Bensko, a Ph.D. student and
winner of the Yale Series of Younger
Poetry Award. She had read his work,
and even owned his book.so the very
“ ”
idea of reading for someone as renowned as
Bensko was terrifying. After her reading, she
was introduced to Bensko and was pleasantly
surprised at how humble the auspicious
young talent was.
“He was just another writer who probably
had the same thoughts about reading, even
though he didn’t seem like it,” Castillo says.
In addition to her involvement at The
Alley, Castillo contributed works to the
English department’s literary magazine, at
the time called Sun Dog. A small, universitybased publication, the magazine gave
students the first-hand experience of
working on an editorial board, sending
out work for publication, and even getting
rejection letters.
“It gave us the courage to go beyond the
literary magazine at Florida State and send
work out for publication to other literary
magazines across the country,” Castillo says.
Around 1987, Castillo was asked to read
again at The Alley. She read with Janisse Ray,
writer of several memoirs, among them,
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. After stepping
off the stage, Castillo was approached by the
Apalachee Press editor, Barbara Hamby, who
asked her to send in her work for publication.
Humbled and exhilarated, Castillo sent
Hamby her collection of poetry and, as
See CASTILLO, page 37
I always think, ‘Here’s
a story I can tell’
— Sandra Castillo
Summer/Fall 2012 13
Poetic advice
Q&A with
Barbara Hamby
Barbara Hamby talks about
her work, her success, her
favorite way to relax, and
her love of teaching
Interview conducted
by Marybeth McConnell
Q
In 2010 you were honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry. The
award allows recipients time to focus on
their creative endeavors. What project(s) did
you work on?
B
By Marybeth McConnell
arbara Hamby’s creative
interests are not limited
to the literary world. The
Florida State University
writer-in-residence also
displays creativity through gardening
and photography, and travels to Italy renewed her interests in cooking.
“I loved the food there—its simplicity and the importance of fresh ingredients,” she says. “I came back a bornagain cook. I especially love the Italian
antipasti table with its dozens of delicious plates.
“And I love soup. I’ve always made
a vegetable soup, and I usually make a
huge pot at the beginning of every semester and freeze, so we have something
nourishing to eat when life gets hectic.”
The fall 2012 semester began Hamby’s
fifteenth year of teaching in FSU’s English department. She is the author of
several books, she had a poem chosen
for the anthology “Best American Poetry,” in consecutive years – 2009 and 2010
– and she has won numerous awards,
capped by a Guggenheim Fellowship
for her poetry in April 2010, when she
also was named an FSU Distinguished
Scholar.
It should come as no surprise that
Hamby’s ability to communicate transfers to the classroom, and she says
“working with students is exhilarating.
Unlike a lot of relationships, they are
there for what you love best. I never get
tired of teaching.”
Andrew Epstein, an associate professor who specializes in twentieth-century
American literature with an emphasis
on poetry, says “Barbara Hamby’s many
fans know how wonderful a poet she is,
but we at FSU also have the pleasure of
14 Summer/Fall 2012
A
knowing what a great teacher, mentor,
and colleague she is too.
She has a terrific knack for turning
students on to poetry—which, unfortunately, is not always easy. Her abundant
passion for poetry and language comes
across in the classroom in a way that is
simply contagious,” he says. “She is an
indispensable teacher, not only to undergraduate creative writing students but
to many poets in our graduate program,
who come to rely on her constructive,
incisive criticism.”
Leigh Edwards, an associate professor
who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature and popular
culture, says Hamby is “a wonderful interlocutor and her voracious creativity
and insight are truly inspiring.
“I have seen her give amazing, rigorous training to her graduate students,
and I have loved teaching her poetry in
my classes,” Edwards adds. “She’s one
of my absolutely favorite people and we
are lucky to have her here.”
Hamby recently answered several
questions for Scroll, Scribe & Screen, covering topics that range from her writing
process to her TransSiberian railroad trip
from St. Petersburg to Beijing.
‘‘
Photo courtesy of Al Hall
Students and all
human beings want
to impose order.
That’s good up to
a point, but you
can get too carried
away with it, be too
in love with your
own intelligence.
You have to
have a balance of
discipline and chaos
to be a writer.
’’
The Guggenheim is for a specific project, which was putting together my next
book of poetry—new poems and a selection of poems from my previous books. I
finished a rough draft of that manuscript
during my year off, but I’m still polishing the
poems and sending them to magazines.
I’m also planning a new book of poetry
that is centered on journeys. With my Guggenheim money I went on a trip that I’d
been fantasizing about forever—taking the
TransSiberian railroad from St. Petersburg to
Beijing. I love Russian literature—poetry and
fiction—so this was a dream trip for me. I
took tons of notes, and on our two-day trip
across Siberia from Ekaterinburg to Irkutsk I
actually organized my notes and started writing poems. One of the highlights of the trip
for me was taking a Master and Margarita tour
of Moscow. I love that novel, and I wanted
to see Moscow through Bulgakov’s eyes. Siberia was amazing, as was Mongolia.
My Kindle was essential to preparing for and taking the trip. I re-read
all of Dostoevsky’s major novels,
Isaac Babel, Gogol, Tolstoy’s stories,
lots of Bulgakov, and lots of poetry.
I finished Crime and Punishment
on the plane to St. Petersburg and
then followed Raskolnikov though
the city. Plus, I had all those books
and more to read on the train across
Russia.
Q
Adding to a long list of previous
literary awards, and prior to being recognized for the Guggenheim
Fellowship, you were also recognized
with a Distinguished Scholar Award
at Florida State University as well as
the Iowa Short Fiction Award. With
an obvious gift for various types of
writing what is your favorite genre?
Barbara Hamby says, “I take photos of
Someone asked Margaret Atthings that interest me and see where they
wood that question when she was
will take me.” The two photos on this page
here, and she said, “When I’m writing
are from her railroad trip: “The cat graffiti is
poetry, it’s my favorite. When I write
from the stairway to Bulgakov’s apartment
fiction, I like that the best.” I’d have
in Moscow. The kitchen [below left] is the
to agree with her. She also said that
communal kitchen in the apartment in St.
fiction and poetry come from different places in the brain. I’d been
Petersburg that Akhmatova shared with
saying the same thing for years but
her lover and his wife and daughter—talk
without the words “in the brain.” She
about an odd menage.”
said that she thinks that fiction comes
from a place in the brain that is near to where
I don’t really remember living in New
conversation is created but that poetry is creOrleans, but Hawaii is an inner light for
ated near to where music is made. Isn’t that
me always. My book of stories that won the
beautiful—and true, I think.
Iowa Prize, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, is really a love letter to Honolulu. I worked on it
Who are your favorite authors?
for so long, and I’m still surprised that it is a
Who inspires you?
book. I never thought I’d publish it.
A
A
Q
A
I have so many favorites. I could go
on for days. Like most poets I love
Shakespeare because of his music, and
I love his best pupil—John Keats. His
odes are some of the most beautiful
poems written in English. I love John
Donne, Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca,
Rilke, Rimbaud, Walt Whitman and his
acolyte Alan Ginsberg, Emily Dickinson, and I could go on and on. I’m trying to memorize little pieces of Hamlet
now just for the music of those lines. I
have to say, I’m pretty terrible at it.
Q
You were born in New Orleans and
raised in Hawaii. How have your experiences influenced your writing?
Q
A
What is the main element about writing
that motivates you?
At this point it’s all I know how to do. I
sit at my desk every day and work on a
poem or a story or a letter. I think we talk to
ourselves constantly, and for me poetry is a
way to put that internal conversation on the
page. Sometimes a poem comes easily and
sometimes it’s a tough nut to crack, but I always love to see where an image will lead me.
With fiction I rely on voice and image. That’s
a journey as well. I never know how a poem
or a story will end.
See HAMBY, page 36
Summer/Fall 2012 15
Rosie Rios), former Secretary of State James
Baker, and civil rights activist and TV talk
show host Al Sharpton. But she especially
remembers meeting former First Lady Laura
Bush at the White House, which Areu refers
to as “one of the most exciting and funniest
experiences” in her career.
The news
is all good
for Cathy Areu
W
When Cathy Areu moved to Tallahassee from Miami in 1988 to attend Florida State University, the change to living in a small city after
growing up in a big city was invigorating to her. Florida’s capital, with
about one-third the population of the South Florida city, was a different world.
“Tallahassee seemed to revolve around us students,” Areu says. “I
immediately felt like a proud Nole, eager to make my mark where I
could.”
She made her presence known to the area by writing in the early
1990s for the Florida Flambeau, an independent newspaper that focused on higher education as well as offering coverage of the Big
Bend area.
“Living and breathing FSU twenty-four/seven and being part of
the community by writing for the paper really molded me to become
who I am today,” Areu says.
She remembers in particular an interview she had with Charlie
Ward, which led to a feature story in the Flambeau. Ward was the
university’s “big man on campus” of the time, as an athlete and a
student. He was quarterback for the football team and won the Heisman Trophy while guiding the Seminoles to their first national championship. He also played four years of basketball for FSU, and he
served as vice president of student government in his senior year.
Even today, the word “legend” is liable to come up when alumni and
longtime residents talk about Ward.
For Areu, Ward would be the first of countless high-profile figures
that she has interviewed—some probably better known than Ward,
at least outside of Tallahassee.
Media presence
Since Areu graduated in 1992 with an English degree, she has certainly made her mark in journalism and writing. She is the founding
publisher of Catalina magazine, she is a contributing editor for The
Washington Post Magazine, she has a book published, and she can be
seen regularly as a TV pundit on cable TV channels such as Fox,
CNN, HLN, MSNBC, and even Al Jazeera.
When the subject of other memorable Q&A encounters comes
up, she mentions current Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, two U.S. Treasurers (Rosario Marin and
16 Summer/Fall 2012
Photo by El Moses, Fox News producer
Cathy Areu waits in the green room for an appearance on
Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show.
Photo courtesy of Cathy Areu
Cathy Areu and NBC News journalist Natalie Morales on
location for a Catalina magazine photo shoot, with Areu’s
rescued bulldog, Riggins.
story that has never been told to another reporter. They can’t just give me talking points.
They have to be real,” she says. “In some
ways, I’m a therapist and they’re my patients,
opening up about personal experiences. Interviewing is a true art, and I love it.”
Her interview with Newt Gingrich surprised her the most. She ad“Cathy is a supremely talented intermits that she thought it would
viewer. She gets people to reveal them- be difficult to get the former
Speaker of the U.S. House
selves in the most intimate way, and
and former 2012 Republican
she can often pull that off in 15 minpresidential candidate to open
utes. Whether it’s the First Lady or the
up, but he did so right away,
telling her interesting stories
treasurer or a dental technician, Cathy
can coax out not just a story they have about his childhood.
“And, what I loved the most
to tell about themselves, but the story.” is that he said he was a book— David Rowell, deputy editor worm, often reading many
Washington Post Magazine books at once,” she says. “At
that moment, he wasn’t a poli“After the interview, Laura Bush stood tician to me. He was a fellow literature nut.”
up, straightened up her suit, and just stood
there,” she says, recalling the incident. “I had Book lover
no idea what she was doing.”
The literature program is where Areu setThe young reporter eventually turned tled when she decided to major in English at
around and saw a White House photogra- FSU. She had heard the line about needing
pher behind her, waiting for Areu to stand to be an avid reader in order to become a
next to the First Lady and smile for an of- strong writer, and Areu chose “to learn how
ficial White House photo.
to write and communicate directly from the
“It was very funny that I had made it best: Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, Sylvia
through the hard part and had almost blown
it at the end by missing an awesome photo
op,” Areu says, adding that weeks later she
received an autographed copy of the photo
in the mail.
David Rowell, deputy editor for Washington
Post Magazine, has worked with Areu for 10
years and says he relies on her completely to
create engaging and comprehensive articles
for the paper’s “First Person Singular” column.
“Cathy is a supremely talented interviewer,” Rowell says. “She gets people to reveal
themselves in the most intimate way, and
she can often pull that off in 15 minutes.
Whether it’s the First Lady or the treasurer
or a dental technician, Cathy can coax out
not just a story they have to tell about themselves, but the story. And she works remark- (Above) Cathy Areu poses
ably hard. She’s tireless—very focused, very with former First Lady Laura
excited, very dependable.” Bush and former President
Areu’s process for securing the Post in- George Bush during a White
terviews is standard, she says – submit a re- House Christmas party;
quest, offer clips of previous work, and wait (right) Wheel of Fortune cofor a “yes.” Once in front of the interviewee, host Vanna White, after Areu
however, Areu begins digging for a story that interviewed her for a profile
goes beyond the ordinary.
for the Florida Flambeau.
“In about 30 minutes, I have to capture a
Photos courtesy of Cathy Areu
Plath, William Faulkner, to name a few.”
“English literature taught me more than
words on a page,” she says. “It taught me
about life through lessons in history, sociology, psychology—told by the brightest minds
who captured it all on paper for all of us to
read and absorb. Being an English major
meant that I was a student of life.”
Areu’s days as a writer for the Flambeau
taught her the tools needed for good newswriting, but she emphasizes that without her
education in the English department there
would be no depth to her craft or to her understanding of how writing works. The way
everything comes together not just on paper
but also in one’s head.
“I really wanted to be as smart as my professors. I respected their minds so much—
the way they could analyze a great piece of
literature and see the world from another
perspective,” she says. “My professors did
not teach in black and white. They looked
at the stuff in between. Plus, they taught me
to look at all writing—from literature to the
front page of The New York Times—with a
critical eye. I look for angles. I analyze the
protagonists. I question everything.”
Believer in education
Areu stayed busy in between her departure
from Tallahassee and her current endeavors,
furthering her own education with
an M.S. degree in English Education
from Nova Southeastern University,
and teaching high school English
and journalism for Palm Beach
County in South Florida.
“Getting kids excited about writing and Shakespeare was one of the
best experiences of my life,” Areu
says. While teaching, she also was a
contributor for the local newspaper,
the Sun-Sentinel. “My students loved
See AREU, page 38
Summer/Fall 2012 17
Because of her father’s success, highly regarded writers, editors, and academics
such as Duke University’s William Blackburn frequently walked in and out of her
home, so Rubio witnessed first-hand the positives and negatives of a writing career.
“I wanted no part of a writer’s life,” she says.
Alumna Gwyn Hyman Rubio
recalls rich life, career as author
By Marlene Baldeweg-Rau
T
he sun was out and the flowers were
starting to come up on that Thursday in early March 2001, but instead
of being able to enjoy the outdoors, author
and Florida State alumna Gwyn Hyman Rubio waited inside for a phone call.
“I didn’t really want to do it,” Rubio says.
“I wanted to go on a walk because we were
in Berea, Ky. at the time. Berea is in the hills
of the Appalachi, and it was beautiful and I
wanted to take a walk.”
But Rubio’s editor had told her that a reporter from The New York Times wanted to
do an interview so she should be near the
phone at 6 p.m.
“I said yes because I’m Southern and because I’m a polite person,” Rubio says. Yet
she wondered why someone wanted to do an
interview, since she hadn’t published a book
in three years.
Just as the clock struck 6, the phone rang.
Rubio picked up the phone, and the voice
on the other line said, “This is Ms. Oprah
Winfrey, and I want to tell you that I love
your book, my staff loves your book, and
Icy Sparks is going to be my new book club
choice.”
“No you are not,” Rubio said. “You are
not Oprah Winfrey.” Then as both women
began to talk—and after what seemed to be
a very long time to Rubio but was only five
to six minutes—Rubio said, “Well, you know,
you kinda sound like Oprah Winfrey.”
“Well, girl, that’s because I am
Oprah Winfrey,” Winfrey said.
At that point, it dawned
on Rubio that this might be
for real. Until getting that
phone call, Rubio had never guessed that her writing
would grab the attention
of Oprah Winfrey. In fact,
for decades, Rubio had
been afraid to make a
career out of writing. After all, she
believed it had
killed her father.
A small-town girl with a famous father
Rubio was born in Macon, Ga. but grew
up in the small town of Cordele, Ga. When
she was a child, her father, Mac Hyman,
wrote a comedic satire, No Time for Sergeants,
based on his time in the military. To his surprise, the novel took off and was later adapted into a Broadway play, a film starring Andy
Griffith, and a short-lived television series.
The novel was translated into at least 15
different languages. Because of her father’s
success, highly regarded writers, editors, and
academics such as Duke University’s William
Blackburn frequently walked in and out of
her home, so Rubio witnessed first-hand the
positives and negatives of a writing career.
some anonymity, which I liked,” Rubio says.
“I also liked the feel of the place.”
“I wanted no part of a writer’s life,” she
says.
At age 31, Mac Hyman was too young to
cope with the spectacular success of No Time
for Sergeants, which led to writer’s block and
severe stress. He began to doubt the value of
his writing, and he died of a heart attack at
age 39. “I blamed writing for the cause of his
death,” says Rubio, who was 13 at the time.
After graduating from high school—in
hopes of breaking out of her shy, secluded
teen self—Rubio decided to attend Florida
State University. She did not want to venture
too far away from Georgia and her family, so
Florida State seemed perfect.
“At the time, Tallahassee was small but
Florida State was a big school and it gave me
Good memories of Florida State
Rubio took advantage of what FSU had to
offer in the arts—attending plays, operas, art
shows, dances, and music ensembles. “It was
an enlightening experience because I came
from a small town in South Georgia and
then entered FSU in Tallahassee and loved
it,” Rubio says.
“My time at FSU was a very happy time,”
she says. “I had to work hard.” She explains
that back then, academic years were divided
into quarters, not semesters, meaning that a
semester’s worth of schoolwork had to be
accomplished in one quarter.
While at FSU, Rubio was able to study with
Michael Shaara, an English professor who
went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction
in 1975 for The Killer Angels, a novel about
the Battle of Gettysburg. It was also at FSU
where Gwyn Hyman met fellow student Angel Rubio, a sociology major and mass communications minor, to whom she has been
married since 1971.
Angel Rubio recalls meeting his future
wife. “I lived across the street in some hippie ghetto apartment, but she was in some
nice apartments,” he says. “I watched her
for many days. It was summertime and she
would wear cutoff jeans and tank tops. She
was beautiful and mysterious—she still is.”
From then on, they have been in each other’s lives. “We have fond memories of FSU,”
Gwyn Rubio says. “Many of my professors
were absolutely wonderful. I was very lucky
at FSU—I had very good teachers. It was a
very lively time, an exciting time.”
Seeing the world
But it would be many years before Gwyn
Hyman Rubio would embrace a writing career.
After graduating from Florida State University in 1971 with a B.A. in English education, Gwyn Hyman joined Angel Rubio
in Costa Rica to work for the Peace Corps,
where they married in December of that
year. When she was a little girl, Rubio’s father
emphasized what a wonderful organization
the Peace Corps was and the ability it had to
make people’s lives better. With this in mind,
she signed on and settled into her assignment in a small village with no running water
and no electricity.
Costa Rica, which Rubio describes as a
Third World country at the time, did not
have formal preschool education, so she
helped establish a preschool and taught kindergarten as well. Rubio has fond memories
of the children she worked with, including
the time she took a group of kindergartners
to the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
Factory. For many of the children, it was the
first movie they had ever seen.
“After the movie, one of the little boys
turned to me and said, ‘Mrs. Rubio, tonight
it’s as if the stars have fallen from the heavens,” she says.
During their three years in Latin America,
the Rubios backpacked to Peru, the Andes,
and other destinations. After their work in
Costa Rica, they traveled throughout Europe and then to North Africa. When they
returned to the United States, they wanted
to live off the land. The most affordable and
beautiful land they could find was in Kentucky, where they tried to live off the land
for a while but then began to work a variety
See RUBIO, page 37
From left to right:
Gwyn and Angel enjoying the
sunshine in Costa Rica on Feb. 6, 1972.
Gwyn in Costa Rica working for the
Peace Corps.
Angel and Gwyn relaxing on a porch
with a friend in Costa Rica.
Gwyn and Angel enjoying each other’s
company in Costa Rica.
All photos courtesy of Gwyn Hyman Rubio
18 Summer/Fall 2012
Summer/Fall 2012 19
An EWM success story
Former student-athlete
sends message that higher
education is road to success
Hard work and chance meetings
provide FSU grad Marlee Haynes
with big-city opportunities
E
nglish department alum and 2006
Rhodes Scholar Garrett Johnson was
back on the FSU campus on June 30,
2012, to lead a trivia challenge and
hand out free T-shirts as part of a kickoff
event for the university’s Summer Bridge
Program.
It was a homecoming of sorts for
Johnson, who in 2002 was a Summer Bridge
student himself. The program is part of the
university’s Center for Academic Retention &
Enhancement (CARE) office. Designed for
first-generation college students or those who
are disadvantaged by economic or educational
reasons, the Summer Bridge Program aims to
help smooth students’ transition from high
school to college by introducing them to
advisors, classes, and campus services more
gradually than might be allowed than if they arrived at the beginning of
the fall semester.
Just 10 years after being a student in the Summer Bridge Program,
Johnson was back on campus as a corporate sponsor through SendHub,
the technology company he founded in 2011 with his college friends
John Fallone of FSU and Ash Rust of Oxford. SendHub allows users of
cell phones to send text messages to lots of people at once rather than
one at a time.
By Jessica Reich
M
Garrett Johnson
is hub of activity
By Joshua Davis
and Scroll, Scribe & Screen staff
Originally, Johnson got the basic idea for SendHub when he learned
that his 14-year-old nephew was not regularly getting email messages
and reminders from his school because, when he was staying with his
grandmother, he did not have Internet access. Lack of Internet access
is a problem among some African-American and low-income homes,
Johnson says, whereas many of these same households do in fact have
mobile phones, which is the beauty of using SendHub.
“We are trying to help teachers and professors in a university as well as
K-12 communicate more effectively with their students,” Johnson says.
Currently, the FSU CARE program, as well as Johnson’s nephew’s
teachers, are using SendHub free of charge, as are many teachers and
coaches nationwide. In addition to its free services, SendHub, which
See JOHNSON, page 39
20 Summer/Fall 2012
Photos by Scroll, Scribe & Screen staff
(Top) Students gather around Garrett Johnson as he
greets them and hands out free T-shirts during a 2012
kickoff event for the FSU’s Summer Bridge program,
which is part of the Center for Academic Retention
& Enhancement office. Johnson’s company SendHub
sponsored the event. (Bottom) Johnson and Jasymn
Pollock, an assistant coordinator for the Summer
Bridge program and FSU graduate student, check out
some of the answers for the event’s trivia challenge.
arlee Haynes discovered her passion for film editing
during a visit to New York City while on her way
home from a study-abroad program in Italy.
It was just after the Spring 2010 semester, and
Haynes was in New York at the invitation of her sister. While
there, however, her sister convinced
their parents to let Haynes stay
longer, assuring them that because
she had connections, she could get
Marlee an internship. Haynes’s
sister had previously worked for
television broadcaster George
Whipple, so she called him and
invited him to dinner. The result was Haynes landing a summer internship with him at New
York 1, a 24-hour cable news
station in New York City.
She went to work right away,
and on her first night began
learning the editing software,
Dalet. She stayed up all night
teaching herself the program,
while her new boss—a broadcaster by night and an attorney
by day—slept in a chair in the
corner of the office. From that
point on, Haynes knew her life
had changed.
“When I got back to Tallahassee, I could not imagine doing anything else,” Haynes says. “I had to get into editing.”
Haynes, whose first semester on campus was the fall of 2007, had followed her brother
and sister to FSU. Her initial reason for applying was that FSU was the state university
farthest away from her home in Fort Lauderdale; but when she got to FSU, she liked the
English department so much that she declared a major in creative writing. During her
junior year, however, she changed her major to the brand-new concentration in editing,
writing, and media (EWM) because she wanted to get into publishing.
“The editing was the real reason [I switched to EWM], but I loved the writing and the
media, too,” says Haynes.
During Haynes’s senior year she became very involved in her co-ed community service
fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, and she joined the English honor society Lambda Iota
Tau. During her senior year she also became very close with rhetoric and composition
See HAYNES, page 39
Marlee Haynes, a 2011
English department
graduate, stands on
the Brooklyn Bridge.
In summer of 2011,
she attended the
premiere of Harry
Potter and the
Deathly Hallows—
Part 2 as part of
her job at New
York 1. At the
movie’s premiere,
Haynes observes
the media mob
around Daniel
Radcliffe.
Photos courtesy of Marlee Haynes
Summer/Fall 2012 21
By Amanda Diehl
By Drea Fetchik
C
F
inding time for scholarly research and
publishing is difficult for professors
who teach full time and commit to
other academic responsibilities. So,
when a professor is awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a
break from his or her teaching and administrative schedule is granted along with the
monetary prize and other accolades.
Professor Elizabeth Spiller is one of five
current English faculty members with fellowships on their list of achievements, and
she is the most recent recipient, winning in
early 2012. About 5
percent of the approximately 1,200
applicants in 2012
won the award, and
both Florida winners in 2012 were
from Florida State
University.
The
other winner was Randolph Clarke of the
philosophy department.
Professor Anne Coldiron, awarded the
honor in 2010, commented then that scholars in the humanities “must have extended,
uninterrupted time with books for the slow,
deep thinking and the exploration of objects
in their full historical and social contexts that
makes the best humanities research.”
“Fortunately, time is the very gift bestowed
by an award from the National Endowment
for the Humanities,” she added.
The other three current English professors with their name on the award are Helen
Burke, David Gants, and Gary Taylor. Joseph
McElrath, who was an English professor and
an administrator in the College of Arts and
Sciences before retiring in June 2011, was
awarded a fellowship during his tenure in the
department.
Spiller says that all grants and awards
earned by professors in the English department “testify to the research strengths in our
department and they continue to enhance
and raise our national research profile.” Spiller is a member and former director of FSU’s
History of Text Technologies program, an
interdisciplinary certificate program that
combines studies in the history of the book
and media cultures.
“Since its inception five years ago, the
HoTT program has been awarded fully 25
percent of the NEH Fellowships in the entire state of Florida,” she says, referring to
Time on their side
National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships
support research, writing processes for five professors
22 Summer/Fall 2012
selves are interpretations.”
In a time when everything is
lueless. 10 Things I Hate
becoming increasingly digitized,
About You. Monty Python
movies can be a bigger source
and the Holy Grail: These
of routine entertainment for
three films all have at least one
some people than reading. By
thing in common at Florida
watching films on their own time
State University. They all make
for fun, students may be develan appearance in curriculum
oping certain critical thinking
within FSU’s English departskills without even realizing it.
ment because of their basis in
When they are discussing films
literature—with the first two
with friends—and maybe even
stemming from Shakespeare’s
blogging about films—they are
Taming of the Shrew and Jane
thinking analytically.
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and
Perhaps by enrolling in courses
the third deeply rooted in Arthat combine film and literature,
thurian legend.
students can take their critical
Many instructors are finding
thinking skills to the next level.
ways to marry literature and
“Students realize that you can
film for a more enriching course
analyze almost anything, that
experience for students.
it’s important to think critically
“We had no idea it was a meabout the culture you’re condieval lit course!” say sophosuming even if it’s just a movie,”
mores Trevor Todd and Mary
graduate teaching assistant VicShannon Crawford as they
toria Farmer says.
exit Professor David JohnThere are definitely some
son’s course Spring 2012 Film
tradeoffs for instructors when
Genres: Adaptations and Movie
it comes to tackling this type
Photo courtesy of David Johnson of course, though the most noMedievalism. “But we’re enjoyProfessor David Johnson (right) brings lit to life with student table issues are either technical
ing it so far.”
Because students can be in- Angel Cano.
snags—such as a video clip not
timidated by the thought of
loading in a compatible format
reading Shakespeare or other clasor a projector that doesn’t work—
sics, professors sometimes look
or time-related issues, such as how
to film to help make the material
to fit the film or even part of it
more enjoyable and accessible for
into a class period. After all, most
students. In addition, writing about
films range from 90-120 minutes in
and discussing films can help stulength, longer than a typical class
dents build upon analytical tools
session. Moreover, it can be tough
they already possess.
for instructors to add film clips,
One thing that many students
not to mention entire films, to an
and people may not realize when
already packed syllabus.
they dish out $10 for a movie ticket
But many instructors feel the
and other ways to combine literature, film
is that the world of film simply
tradeoffs are worth it.
represents just another text.
By using film clips or whole films
The department offers classes designed to help
“The perspective of a historian
along with rather daunting forms
is to use film to teach medieval
of literature such as Shakespeare
students improve their critical thinking skills
history, and you sift it and point
and medieval literature, they aim to
out what’s wrong with it,” Johnmake the content more accessible
son says. “But I’m more interested
and enjoyable for their students.
in reading these films as narratives, as adap- structing narratives,” instructor Christina
Johnson says that having knowledge of
tations, as fictions.”
anterior literary sources makes a cinematic
Parker says.
While there is an obvious link between a
Professor Eric Walker is another instruc- experience richer for the audience, while
novel and its film adaptation, even films that tor who likes to harness the power of film in Parker sees film as a way to expand areas of
did not originate as books can still have a his literature classes.
literary studies.
place within literature courses.
“I didn’t want to necessarily reinvent
“Films can be primary texts in addition to
“Many films, like Citizen Kane, which has novels within the course,” Walker says. “I’m the wheel,” Farmer says with a laugh. “We
been labeled as the greatest film of the 20th not attempting to set up any sort of contest.
See FILM, page 38
century, are all about storytelling and con- It’s a different medium, and the films them-
Clockwise from top left:
Professors Helen Burke, Anne Coldiron,
Elizabeth Spiller, Gary Taylor, David Gants.
Knight at the movies...
herself and her HoTT colleagues Coldiron
and Wayne Wiegand. “This is a remarkable
achievement and I feel honored and humbled to be a part of this remarkable scholarly community.”
Spiller, who also was awarded a fellowship in 2006, is working on a book titled The
Sense of Matter: Science, Aesthetics and Literary
Creation. The project analyzes the works of
Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, John Hutchinson, and
John Milton, “showing that how the question ‘What is matter?’ determines how you
answer such questions as ‘What is a poem
made of ?’ and ‘What does it do to you?’”
The National Endowment for the Humanities was created in 1965 and operates as
an independent federal agency. According to
the agency’s website, in the 47 years of existence, the NEH has funded countless projects, including the research for and writing
of 7,000 books.
Burke, who won her fellowship in 2000,
is currently the department’s director of
graduate studies. For her project, she traveled
to Dublin, where she spent a semester
See NEH, page 40
Summer/Fall 2012 23
“
Students, faculty,
and members of the
Tallahassee community,
Florida State’s Creative
Writing Program would
like to welcome to The
Warehouse stage for
tonight’s reading . . .
”
W
Visiting Writers Reading Series attracts
authors from all over the country, who bring a
diverse range of genres and backgrounds
By Alexandra Sclafani
hen the speaker walks
onstage, it is clear that
he is not what anyone expected. At well over
6 feet, James Hannaham dwarfs the wooden
podium in front of him and towers over
everyone seated below it. As he introduces
his book, audience members straighten in
their seats and peer reverently up at him. A
sense of surprise and admiration permeates
the air.
Then, a brief belch from the main stage
cuts through the silence.
A laugh erupts from the stage, and the
speaker relays how comfortable he feels. The
crowd laughs along, knowing full well that
the feeling is mutual.
The Visiting Writers Reading Series at
Florida State University sponsors readings
from talented writers of all genres of
literature. English majors and fiction fanatics
from all over the city file into The Warehouse,
a bar and pool hall on Gaines Street, and
turn an eager ear to the main stage.
Associate Professor Erin Belieu, former
director of the FSU Creative Writing
Program, has been orchestrating the
successes of the visiting writers series for a
few years.
“As long as we have air in our bodies, the
series will go on, because we really believe
it is important to our students and to the
community,” Belieu says.
Nearly every Tuesday night of the fall
and spring semesters, locals can come to
“As long as we have air in our bodies, [the]
series will go on, because we really believe
it is important to our students and to the
community.”
Erin Belieu, creative writing professor
and former program director
24 Summer/Fall 2012
the Warehouse and have a beer or a glass
of wine while they listen to nationally and
internationally recognized authors.
But famous writers are not the only ones
who get a shot on the floor. According to
Belieu, there are spaces for FSU graduate
students to introduce the main speakers or
give readings of their own.
Christopher Mink is one such student.
Before reading series host Mink had even
finalized his graduate application to FSU,
while he was still living in Austin, Texas, he
had already heard of the FSU Creative Writing Program and the Warehouse.
“[It’s] a great venue with great writers, and
the crowds are always gracious,” Mink says.
“It promotes a sense of community among
the graduate students, many of whom are
far away from family, friends, and familiar
haunts.” During nights set aside for readings,
students flock to the Warehouse, practicing
their oration skills and networking with FSU
faculty members.
In such a quirky atmosphere as the
Warehouse, the series has become a beloved
Tallahassee tradition and a one-of-a-kind
venue for readings.
“We’re able to keep it free and open
to the public, so I think that’s one of the
things that makes our series unique and
interesting,” Belieu says. “We’re part of this
community, and I think that we feel really
connected to it.”
The writers who have appeared in the
series throughout the past six years are
not cookie-cutter authors; the English
department makes it a point to honor a
variety of styles each year.
“The department has always been a very
creative place where people don’t get stuck
in one discipline, but range far and wide,”
Professor Diane Roberts says.
Among those writers invited by Belieu and
Roberts to read at the Warehouse are Andrei
Codrescu, Ron Lewinski, Tobias Wolfe, and
Kathryn Starbuck.
This variety pays tribute to what FSU’s
Creative Writing Program is all about, and it
also honors the man who helped make the
Creative Writing Program what it is today:
Professor Jerome Stern, who died in 1996.
Renowned for his devotion to teaching and
writing, Stern found his way to the FSU
English Department in 1966.
As a contributor to—and eventually the
director of—the Creative Writing Program
and a leader of fiction workshops, Stern’s
perspective on stimulating academic thought
was anything but ordinary.
An award-winning instructor fascinated
by pop culture, Stern was also a book
columnist for a local newspaper, a witty
radio commentator, and the author of
Making Shapely Fiction, a writing textbook
that includes short essays by Florida State
students.
One of those students is now a renowned
author, broadcaster, and professor herself.
She is Diane Roberts, who remembers her
mentor like it was just yesterday.
“He was a wonderful teacher, scholar, and
writer,” Roberts says. “He was much loved in
Tallahassee.”
As a student, Roberts undoubtedly had a
flair for writing, but she credits Stern with
helping her understand that writing is a craft.
In fact, when she proudly plopped her
honors thesis on his desk during her senior
year, she was unprepared for his lack of
enthusiasm. Puzzled at his criticisms, he
handed her a copy of Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style and asked her to read it
and report back. After returning to his office
the following week, Stern went through
Roberts’s thesis sentence by sentence, until
they had broken down and revised the entire
first 10 pages together.
“He then said that he was doing this for
me because nobody ever did it for him, and
he wished that someone had,” Roberts says.
“That is teaching.”
By that time, Stern had become one of the
founders of FSU’s Creative Writing Program
and, with the help of fellow faculty members
such as David Kirby, organized the first
annual Spring Festival of Writers in 1995.
Their hope of bringing notable and littleknown authors together for the sake of
scholarly supposition has ultimately become
the legacy that the Visiting Writers Reading
Series is today.
As it turned out, the series would be one
of Stern’s final legacies to the department.
After battling lymphoma for several years,
Stern died in March 1996 at age 57.
Another legacy he left was a fund for
creative writing students. Later named the
“Jerry Stern Creative Writing Fund,” this
memorial fund is now administered by the
FSU Foundation and coordinated by the
English department. Currently, it helps to
cover the running costs of the writers series
and beefs up creative writing activities for
See VWRS, page 40
Diane Roberts and Jerry Stern
put on their OED thinking caps
before her FSU graduation
ceremony in 1980.
Photos courtersy of Diane Roberts
Summer/Fall 2012 25
Graduate students’ book offers ‘fresh’ perspectives
The ‘zombification’
of literature
By Kathryn Cole
Paul Fyfe explores the
use of e-readers in the
classroom
A
s a literature scholar, Assistant Professor Paul Fyfe has one foot in the
Victorian era and the other foot in
the Digital Age.
It’s no surprise then that he would teach
the classic Great Expectations through a 21st
century reworking titled Pip and the Zombies.
And as a foray into an ever-increasing technology-centered classroom, in Spring 2012
Fyfe began encouraging students to read the
electronic version in lieu of the paper version.
“Institutionally, there is this kind of inertia that quality adheres in print, or that print
is more credible,” he says, referring to one of
the main suspicions of e-books in the scholarly community, especially among professors.
Fyfe is a perfect fit to lead this experiment because of his academic background
straddling old and new.
26 Summer/Fall 2012
Fyfe, who received his Ph.D. in 2009
from the University of Virginia, worked on
the Rossetti Archive, an online database that
catalogs and archives the works of 19th century English poet and painter Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. Fyfe says he happened to be in the
right place at the right time when UVA began
its pathbreaking work with digital humanities. An editorial assistant at first, he soon
became the project manager training
others and collaborating on the maintenance and direction of the archive in
its late stages.
“I got really interested in how
our contemporary media change
can be a useful way of thinking
about major media changes
in the 19th century, which is
what I have been doing [at
FSU] with the History of
Text Technology program,” Fyfe says. “It’s
thinking about the
industrialization of
the book, the emergence of
Photo by Katie Cole
Photo and photo illustration by Kathryn Cole
telecommunications and photographic technologies, and how people were experiencing
these changes.”
Speaking of change, not all scholars are
wild about e-readers.
Skeptics point to the technology’s
See E-READERS, page 41
The co-editors for Perspectives on the Short Story
are familiar to most people in the English
department. Caitlin Newcomer and Scott
Ortolano, who are both doctoral students in
the Literature Program, teamed up to design
and take the volume through the publishing
process, steps that included analyzing syllabi
used in a short fiction course and surveying
approximately 40 other anthologies so they
could identify a niche for their text. Things
moved quickly once Pearson Learning Solutions approved their proposal, and the book
appeared in August 2012.
“We had a lot of fun, and one of the greatest benefits of the project was how much we
learned,” Newcomer and Ortolano say. “Not
only did we have the opportunity to take a
book from the point of conception all the
way through the publication process and
learn a lot about the world of publishing, but
we also learned quite a bit about the depth
of the genre.”
Perspectives comprises 139 stories, although
Newcomer and Ortolano say the first version had twice that many and the two “seriously considered five to six stories for every work that is currently listed.” The initial
decision-making process involved research
on authors, time periods, and genres after
soliciting input from faculty members and
graduate students on what stories to include.
“Our book takes an open, inclusive, and
fresh perspective on the genre,” Newcomer
and Ortolano say. “While we retain more
traditional categorizations, we simultaneously destabilized
them by showing how
authors exist within
multiple, overlapping conceptual spaces.
“For example, Percival Everett is
listed in the African-American, comedy,
and post-modern sections,” they continue. “To help provide critical reconsiderations of canonical authors and
genres, we use underrepresented works
from canonical authors, such as Margaret Atwood’s ‘Loulou; or, the Domestic
Life of the Language,’ alongside stories
from underexplored writers, such as
Edna Ferber. We also embrace nontraditional and experimental forms,
including the graphic literature of Art
Spiegelman and the avant-garde fiction
of Kathy Acker.
“Furthermore, we explore unconventional geographies by providing stories
from authors like Mahasweta Devi and
Ghassan Kanafani, who offer glimpses
of a world to which Western readers
have little access.”
While their names are on the book’s
cover, Newcomer and Ortolano point out
that many others in the department contributed a great amount of time and support to
help the book get published.
“The faculty and our peers were unbelievably generous and their advice constantly
pushed us to explore new, innovative perspectives,” the co-editors say. In particular,
they valued the guidance that Robin Goodman, Literature program director, offered
during the process. “She constantly provided
us with feedback and helped us locate materials and sources of information for each
portion of the text—whether these sources
were knowledgeable individuals or research
materials.”
Other faculty members—Barry Faulk,
Ralph Berry, Elizabeth Spiller, Daniel Vitkus,
“We had a lot of fun, and one of the
greatest benefits of the project was how
much we learned. Not only did we have
the opportunity to take a book from the
point of conception all the way through the
publication process and learn a lot about
the world of publishing, but we also learned
quite a bit about the depth of the genre.”
— Caitlin Newcomer and Scott Ortolano
Co-editors of Perspectives on the Short Story
and Robert Olen Butler—contributed critical
feedback along with other suggestions and
support. Butler also wrote an endorsement
that is on the collection’s back cover.
Newcomer and Ortolano also received
help and support from their fellow graduate students in the department, and the two
say Michael Barach, Katie Cortese, Brandi
George, and Christopher Higgs “were superhuman in their assistance over the summer as we worked through the book’s initial
page proofs.” Katie Burgess, whose artwork
is featured on the book’s cover, won a contest that was open to all students, including
those who specialize in the visual arts. “The
fact that her artwork came out on top is a
testament to the great range of talents present in our department,” Newcomer and Ortolano say.
The English department’s office staff
helped with details that are usually overlooked once a publication appears—such
as acquiring and scanning materials for the
project—but the co-editors say “the book
would not have made it to press on time
without their assistance.”
Newcomer and Ortolano are already
working on a revised edition of Perspectives on
the Short Story, and like the first one, the next
publication, they say, will be a group effort
as well.
Summer/Fall 2012 27
Forward march
By Taylor Callahan
Brandy Haddock is in tune
with students seeking advice
B
randy Haddock—one of only three fanatic—in fact, her
people to win a 2011-2012 univer- original major was
sity-wide Undergraduate Advising music, which she
Award—comes to work every day later changed to huknowing full well that her day will be anything manities. During her
but relaxing.
life as an undergrad
The English department academic advisor at Florida State, Hadand FSU alumna’s job includes taking care of dock was a member
a whole department full of students, making of the Marching Chiefs.
schedules, answering emails, attending meet- Originally, she wanted to
ings, overseeing committees, on top of other be a band direcdaily responsibilities. Mainly an advisor to se- tor.
niors, she has the important task of making
sure these students are on track to graduate.
Haddock’s students at Florida State only
know so much about her. Students will go to
Haddock when they have a question about
a class they want to take, need help making
their schedule, or are concerned about what
to do after graduating. Many do not realize how much she actually does behind the
scenes.
“Students only see the advising work I
do, and they often don’t realize that advising is 20% of my
job but it takes up Brandy Haddock played
80% of my time,”
the French horn in the
Haddock says.
She gets to work Marching Chiefs, and she
around 8:00 a.m. still attends football games,
and starts seeing
walk-ins at 9:00 always enjoying the prea.m. She then an- game, half-time and postswers emails from game performances
12:00 p.m. to 2:00
p.m., some days
receiving a new email every three minutes.
She also performs tasks such as working with
“I was a
other administrators to build the department huge
band
course schedule, overseeing the submission geek,” Hadof grades and rosters, approving transient dock says.
student forms, attending meetings, working “In high
with committees, giving input to the admin- school I
istration on how students are doing, serving was
in
as the staff advisor for Literati and Scribbles, m a r c h and taking care of more behind-the-scenes ing band,
Photo courtesy of Brandy Haddock
responsibilities.
concert
Despite her many roles in the English de- b a n d , Haddock in the Marching Chiefs as an undergraduate student.
partment, Haddock did not major in English jazz band
28 Summer/Fall 2012
Photo by Taylor Callahan
Brandy Haddock meets with a student in her office. Haddock won a 2011-12
Undergraduate Advising Award.
and played saxophone, French horn, and piano. I was very into music, and so I thought I
wanted to be a band director when I grew up.
So, I auditioned for the College of Music, and
FSU was the only place I applied.”
Once accepted to FSU, Haddock made
lasting memories as a member of the Marching Chiefs.
“[It] was probably the best experience of
my life,” Haddock says. “It’s where I met [my
boyfriend] Jeremy, where all of my closest
friendships were made. It’s truly an amazing
organization.”
During her time with the Marching Chiefs,
Haddock played the French horn. She still
attends football games and enjoys watching
the Marching Chiefs’s pre-game, half-time
and post-game performances.
Although Haddock enjoyed her time as a
student in the music program, she realized
that being a band director wasn’t for her. But
she knew she wanted to be involved in the
educational setting, so she took some inspiration from her own academic advisor, the
College of Music’s Karey Fowler.
“I remember thinking what a cool job she
had, and how neat it must be to work on
campus and get to help students while contributing to the FSU community at the same
time,” Haddock says.
After graduating with her BA in Humani-
Ultima Rogers, an editing, writing, and media (EWM) senior, says Haddock helped her
become confident in her future in the field.
“Brandy relates to me and makes me feel
special every time I go see her,” Rogers says.
“She knows how to make her students feel
that they matter and that there is a light at the
end of the tunnel.”
It is obvious to any student or faculty
member that Haddock has a passion for
helping others.
“You would never know that she does
[so much] because she is soft-spoken. [She
is] always willing to go the extra step to help
students, patiently answering all their questions,” says Associate Professor Linda Saladin-Adams, who directs the department’s
internship program, “I pass by her office,
especially during enrollment, and though the
line to her door seems endless, she is always
upbeat and good natured, something that
truly amazes me.”
Haddock gets satisfaction from her job, as
crazy as it may get. She enjoys providing help
and guidance to her students.
“My favorite part is definitely [helping] students who come in feeling that their situation
is hopeless, that they’ve dug themselves a
hole that’s impossible to get out of, and then
I show them with just a few steps how to deal
with it, how to correct it, and them leaving
so much more relieved, so light-hearted, optimistic,” Haddock says. “That’s really what
makes me smile at the end of the day.”
Haddock’s students appreciate the time
and dedication that she puts into her advising.
“During the first week of classes, when
she was clearly very busy, Brandy took the
time needed and gave me her full attention,”
says Sarah-Jean Shelton, an EWM senior. “I
always feel that she makes it her priority for
me to leave her office feeling optimistic and
that everything will be OK.”
ties in 2007, Haddock stayed in Tallahassee,
immediately taking a job at Florida State.
“I worked in [the Division of] Undergraduate Studies for a year and a half with Dean
[Greg] Beaumont, and he was a phenomenal
mentor for me,” she says. “I realized it was
truly a great fit and I wanted to pursue a career in college administration.”
While working at Florida State, Haddock
realized that FSU offered a master’s degree
program in higher-education administration.
She entered the program and was working
as well as taking classes, graduating with her
master’s degree in April 2012.
Working with students every day, Haddock
has become popular throughout the English
department. For someone who deals with as
See HADDOCK, page 41
many as 100 students a day, she somehow
makes the students feel as if they
are each unique.
“[Haddock] relates to me and
“I try to approach every admakes me feel special every
vising session from the student’s
time I see her. She knows how
perspective,” Haddock says. “It’s
so easy, especially during dropto make her students feel that
add mass chaos, to get into a
they matter and that there is a
repetitive machine mode, but I
light at the end of the tunnel.” have to realize that while I may
be seeing 100 students a day,
they’re only seeing me, and I
— Ultima Rogers
strive to make that time unique
EWM senior
for each student.”
Summer/Fall 2012 29
Graduate
students’
guardian
By Carlos Lloreda
F
or many students, Janet Atwater
is not only the first person they
communicate with when they
consider applying to one of the
English department’s graduate programs but
also the last person they deal with as they dot
their i’s and cross their t’s before
graduating with their master’s or
doctoral degree.
A jack-of-all-trades as far as
meeting the needs of the department’s graduate students
and their professors, Atwater
handles applications, registration, residency requirements, fee
waivers, course adds and drops,
grade changes, proctoring of
prelim exams, organization of
thesis and dissertation defenses,
and filing of final manuscripts,
just to name a few duties.
And she does it with an almost Zen-like calmness.
“She was super-helpful to
me when I was finishing up
my M.F.A.,” creative writing
grad student Allen Keller says.
“Things had gotten complicated
with my graduation, but she was
persistent throughout the whole
thing, and she was always nice.
She never acted like I was getting on her
nerves or anything.”
Graduate student Scott Ortolano also attests to Atwater’s overall helpfulness.
“Janet is always willing to go the extra
mile,” Ortolano says. “One time, during
our annual departmental welcome party for
incoming graduate students and faculty, we
decided that it would be a good idea to create
name tags for everyone after we had already
arrived at the party location and called to see
30 Summer/Fall 2012
if someone could
bring the materials.
Janet was the only
one left in the office and stayed after
work running around
the office finding the
name tags and markers even though she
wasn’t attending the
party. She then sent
them with another
person to make sure
that they got there
OK and had another
person follow up to
make sure they arrived. This gives you
a sense of the kind of
selfless, hardworking
person that Janet is.”
When she’s not
busy “fighting fires,”
a
h
a
H
Sean Hawkeswood
Award-winning advisor
blends humor, intelligence,
and compassion on the job
By Maya Schuller
F
Janet Atwater has worked in
the English department since
July 2010, helping graduate
students navigate the process
from application to graduation.
Neary, left, is in the creative
writing program.
Photos by Carlos Lloreda
Atwater, whose title is graduate program assistant, will meet with students both by appointment and on a walk-in basis, all while
handling 70 to 80 emails in a typical day.
During the admission process, however,
the email gets even more hectic. “I read
through 150 to 200 emails a day then,” Atwater says. “To me, it seems like there is always
work to be done.”
The department, which has about 180
active graduate students, houses graduate
programs in literature, creative writing, the
history of text technology, and rhetoric and
composition, with Atwater handling the bulk
of the applications. She explains that the majority of the applications are usually for the
Creative Writing Program due to its national
recognition. Her other duties include proctoring exams, assigning graduate classes for
summer and fall, helping select candidates
See ATWATER, page 42
or most college students, their
four undergraduate years are a
time of adventure, self-discovery,
and, often, mistakes made without the guidance of one’s family. Though
these ups and downs might be part of the
experience, one does not want to make too
many mistakes, especially of a costly academic nature.
This is where an academic advisor as
knowledgeable as Sean Hawkeswood plays
a critical role. Hawkeswood is an expert at
helping students cut through the red tape of
university policies and avoiding such costly
mistakes. As a matter of fact, Hawkeswood
is such a good advisor that he was one of just
three people at FSU to win a 2011-2012 university-wide Undergraduate Advisory Award.
Unfortunately, however, for the English
department, the popular and well-respected
advisor left FSU in the summer of 2012 for
Arizona.
“Without [Hawkeswood] my first year at
FSU would’ve been a disaster,” says English
major Jacob Belligner. “He always steered
Photo by Maya Schuller
Hawkeswood, hamming it up in his advising office.
problems and balancing school work and my
social life, his advice has always paid off. He is
during his years here. As an undergrad, he
worked in the Peer Advising office, an experience he described as similar, albeit
“Without [Hawkeswood] my first year at FSU would’ve been far less in-depth, to his role as an advisor. Besides serving as a peer advisor,
a disaster. He always steered me in the right direction, never a resident assistant, and a Freshman
doubting my capabilities as a writer and pushing me to take Interest Group leader during his student years at FSU, the 2008 psycholclasses that tested my talent.”
ogy graduate wrote an “honors-in-the— Jacob Bellinger major” thesis.
For his thesis, Hawkeswood worked
me in the right direction, never doubting my a great big brother just as much an advisor.”
with then-graduate student April Smith uncapabilities as a writer and pushing me to
It is only fitting that Hawkeswood was der the direction of FSU’s Thomas Joiner, a
take classes that tested my talent. Even when able to further FSU students’ success, conit comes to personal problems like financial sidering the amount he himself experienced
See HAWKESWOOD, page 43
Summer/Fall 2012 31
“Deborah Coxwell-Teague is a tireless advocate for students and teachers within
the First-Year Composition Program.”
Michael Neal, associate professor of English at FSU
Coxwell-Teague from page 7
tions of On Writing and Beyond Words, both of
which are used in the FYC curriculum at FSU.
“She’s a prolific writer and is always seeking to improve upon our textbooks and program as a whole,” says Claire Smith, a program assistant in the FYC program.
The trajectory that led Coxwell-Teague to
her position as director of the FYC program
begins in the Tallahassee area. After graduating as salutatorian from her high school in
Crawfordville, Fla., Coxwell-Teague attended
Tallahassee Community College for two years
and then transferred to FSU, majoring in
English education and journalism, at a time
when FSU still had a journalism program.
After graduating from FSU, CoxwellTeague taught high school English and
was the yearbook sponsor at Wakulla High
School for eight years, and was made chair
of the English department after teaching for
only one year. While teaching at the highschool level, Coxwell-Teague earned her
master’s degree in reading and language arts
from FSU. She returned to school full-time
as an FSU Ph.D. student, intending to earn
a doctoral degree in literature. However, after taking a class in rhetoric and composition
only because she needed another three-credit
class, she fell in love with the subject area and
ultimately earned the first Ph.D. in rhetoric
and composition ever awarded at FSU.
“It was more of a passion of mine than
literature is,” says Coxwell-Teague. “I love
literature, but I love literature for selfish reasons. I just enjoy it; it’s an escape for me.”
Only a year into her graduate studies,
Coxwell-Teague was asked to be coordinator
Duo from page 9
Networking is a challenging piece of the
puzzle, but being part of the Florida State
community is something that Alexander and
Long say will help aspiring writers, especially
when it comes to those looking to network
in the film and entertainment industry. Alexander points out that since most FSU Film
School alumni end up in New York or LA,
making connections might be easier for FSU
graduates.
32 Summer/Fall 2012
of the Reading and Writing Center (RWC),
and upon completion of her Ph.D., CoxwellTeague was immediately asked to be the director of the RWC in 1990.
Coxwell-Teague found herself leaving
FSU when she gave birth to her two younger
children but received a call two years later
from the then-director of the FYC program,
asking her to be the assistant director. Coxwell-Teague agreed, and in less than a year
was made director of the program.
Her dedication to constantly improving
the FYC program, combined with her caring
disposition and genuine love of people, contributes to her success as both an administrator and professor.
“Deborah Coxwell-Teague is a tireless advocate for students and teachers within the
First-Year Composition Program,” says Michael Neal, associate professor of English at
FSU. “She graciously balances a heavy load
of administrative tasks, provides a vision for
writing in the program, and supports new
and experienced teachers. We’re fortunate on
many levels to have Deborah as a member of
the department and university communities,
not the least of which is how well liked and
respected she is across campus.”
Smith echoes Neal’s assessment of Coxwell-Teague.
“Dr. Teague is the perfect fit for our
English department because she truly cares
about her task: She loves educating our grad
students on freshman composition,” says
Smith. “She makes it her top priority to prepare them and make them comfortable with
instructing our incoming classes. Not only
that, but she does it all with confidence and
poise. Dr. Teague is always willing to meet
with students and answer questions or even
just talk about teaching or student woes. I
think the thing I always appreciate about her
is that she doesn’t ever make you feel like
you’re inconveniencing her, and at the same
time she makes you feel like your concerns
are valid.”
Beyond her academic pursuits, CoxwellTeague enjoys exercising, spending time with
her family, traveling, occasionally indulging
in Stella Artois, and of course, reading. Her
favorite book is Beloved by Toni Morrison.
“It’s so rich,” Coxwell-Teague says. “There
are so many levels to that book. It’s the only
book I have ever read through once, gotten
to the last page, and immediately turned back
to the first page.”
Coxwell-Teague maintains that the most
important parts of her job are helping her
students grow as writers and individuals and
helping TAs grow as teachers—both tasks
she accomplishes easily with her caring style
of teaching and mentoring.
“For many graduate students and me,
she is the first representative of the department we meet, and her first impression is
welcoming, encouraging, and friendly,” says
FSU English graduate student Pete Kunze.
“As a professor, she is knowledgeable of the
material, sensitive to students’ issues, and
enthusiastic about their ideas. As an administrator, she is simply the best boss I’ve ever
had: caring, insightful, and genuinely interested in her teachers.... She is a mentor, a
leader, and a friend. I am very lucky to have
worked for Dr. Coxwell-Teague, and I am a
better teacher for knowing her. Few people
are as respected, valued, and beloved as Dr.
Coxwell-Teague; she certainly has made my
experience at FSU an enriching and rewarding one.”
Regardless of networking, the best advice
for aspiring writers is to just keep writing.
“Write and write a lot—that’s the most
important thing,” Long says. “Don’t get discouraged—just keep writing and have faith
in what you’re doing, and eventually someone will notice.”
Alexander agrees, and then adds some advice of her own.
“When you start writing a script, finish
it, and even if it’s something that you throw
away, at least you’ve finished it,” Alexander
says. “It’s such an achievement and you feel
so good that you’ve finished something—
even if you don’t use it, you learn when you
go on to the next script.”
And what dating advice do the experts on
“what not to do” have to give?
“Don’t listen to me,” Alexander says.
“Don’t be a stalker,” Long says to the
Facebook and web junkies out there. “[Facebook stalking] cultivates your obsessiveness.”
Alexander’s and Long’s success proves
that it’s more effective to learn “how to lose”
those bad habits and to obsess over something more worthwhile—like writing.
Goodman from page 10
“At the time when I was growing up in
the ’70s,” Goodman continues, “Jewish
children in the U.S. were being taught that
they were part of a large, global community
of afflicted Jewish people who suffered. We
were being taught that, as part of that community, we were responsible towards that
community. I remember once, when we organized a letter-writing campaign for Soviet
dissidents who were in jail, we were told
that the letters we were writing were making a difference. That was important—that
we had a sense that the things we did could
make a difference.”
Standing up for what she believes in
Goodman took her politics to the street
when she successfully ran a march in 2009
to protest the state government-proposed
plan to cut Florida State’s funding by 10%.
It started when she and other members of
the English department put together a list
of 10 points on how the budget cut would
affect students in an everyday setting and
then dispersed copies to students. The next
thing Goodman knew, they were planning
a protest. Florida A&M University (FAMU)
also got involved.
“About a thousand people showed up,”
Goodman says. “We had a folk singer, and
we marched from Westcott all the way to
the Capitol chanting ‘Charlie Crist, we are
pissed.’ We had some speakers. Some people
were from the Legislature and some from
the university. Professors spoke, the union
president spoke, the students spoke. The
president of the FAMU student government
spoke, and the president of our graduate student union spoke. It was very exciting. I had
a bullhorn. They didn’t cut us by 10% that
year. They cut us like 5% or something, so
we felt like it was somewhat of a victory.”
When Goodman is not leading marches,
or hanging out with her beautiful chocolate
labrador-beagle mix, Mona, she is fighting
for faculty rights through the UFF. Goodman has been working for the union for six
years and believes it connects to her academic work in a very productive way, as her focus
is mostly on feminism and labor.
Jack Fiorito, president of the UFF-FSU
chapter and professor of management in
the College of Business, says that Goodman
is a solid contributor to the faculty bargaining team and in other roles to advance and
protect faculty interests through the UFF-
FSU chapter.
“She combines serious analysis with a delightful sense of humor in ways that help
to make activism for a good cause more
enjoyable,” Fiorito says. “I have also called
on Robin as a referee for a leading journal
on employment relations for which I am an
associate editor and was impressed with her
analysis. We, and I mean the faculty and journal editors, need more like her.”
The UFF-FSU branch, which has been
around since the late ’70s, “advocates for and
protects the rights of FSU faculty through
collective bargaining, contract enforcement,
and political action,” the union’s website says.
Goodman describes the FSU branch as active and strong.
“This is a right-to-work state, which
means that people don’t have to join the
union if they don’t want to, but everyone’s
represented by it.”
She is involved with bargaining. Every
week, they meet with the administration so
her team and their team can talk about the
terms and conditions of employment and
how to make things better for faculty here.
Right now, the
biggest thing
the Union is
defending
is
tenure in the
contract. Other
issues on the
table
include
classroom safety, rights of academic freedom,
and how to reward faculty for
their productivity.
“There are a number of non-tenure-track
faculty who are also in the union, and right
now we’re trying to make their work conditions better and make their contracts more
solid and longer so that they get rewarded
for service at FSU,” Goodman says.
The UFF is also trying to strengthen faculty rights to self-protection in the classroom.
Goodman explains that the University of
Florida gives its faculty rights to self-protection in their contract, so that if a student
comes at them aggressively, they are allowed
to defend themselves. FSU’s faculty would
like to have similar protections.
Acutely aware of what is going on nationally within the political side of the academic
world, Goodman and the union are working hard to get the faculty some protection
against Florida’s open-records laws. She exSCROLL, SCRIBE & SCREEN
plains that records requests have recently
been used as an assault on academic freedom
in other states.
“Look at Wisconsin and all those protests
last year,” she says. “The state Legislature
asked for university professors’ emails that
contained words like, ‘Republican,’ for example. If somebody wants to see our emails,
we have to hand them over; but we want faculty to have protections if that kind of thing
happens.”
Service to the department
Goodman also spends a lot of time and
energy in her role as director of the literature program. This position requires her to
negotiate the distribution of funds between
the programs, to participate in admissions,
to maintain the website, and, this year, to
spearhead two colloquia. The program even
created a textbook for a short-story class for
the Fall 2012 semester titled Perspectives on the
Short Story. This anthology gives teaching assistants a clearer direction about how to design a course that they may never have taught
“I have worked with Robin
Goodman for the past two
years . . . and she has very
high expectations, which
pushes me to be a better
thinker and writer than I
thought possible. She is
invested in my work and
gives generously of her time.”
Aimee Wilson
Literature graduate student
before and will ensure that the undergraduates are exposed to a variety of literary traditions and themes.
Additionally, since the university has been
subjected to radical cuts, and the English department’s expense budget has been cut in
half, the textbook allows for continued programming of events, forums, and colloquia.
“This textbook will benefit everyone within the department—undergraduate students,
graduate students, and the faculty,” Goodman says.
As director of the literature program,
Goodman also must produce arguments
about where the department needs to go.
Hiring priorities are based on what students
want and what faculty members think they
See GOODMAN, page 34
Summer/Fall 2012 33
Goodman from page 31
need to further develop the literature program.
“We want to be a program that covers
a lot of ground, but we also want to have
strengths,” Goodman says. “We’ve developed in Renaissance literature and we’re trying to develop in post-1900s. Hopefully, our
next hires are going to be pre-1900 American, since recently we’ve had faculty members in that area leave. I guess that’s part of
the job: figuring out the program’s strengths
and needs.”
Graduate student Scott Ortolano, assistant
to the literature program director and coeditor with Caitlin Newcomer for Perspectives
on the Short Story, has only the best possible
things to say about Goodman.
“Dr. Goodman has a very extraordinary
and engaging personality that she is not
afraid to share with everyone she meets,”
Ortolano says. “No matter the topic, you
can be sure that Dr. Goodman will provide
a thought-provoking and unique perspective.
She does so much, and it all takes an incredible amount of energy and dedication, and I
am confident that I speak for everyone in the
program when I say that we are very lucky to
have her and her partner in crime/dog Mona
in our lives.”
High standards in the classroom
Goodman brings that energy and dedication to the classroom. In Spring 2012, she
was teaching a class called Feminist Theory.
The material is difficult, so she stays very
close to the text when she’s working with the
students in class. Sometimes the text itself
poses obstacles—difficult vocabulary or concepts—because of its philosophical content.
“I tell students that it’s like going to the
gym when you don’t think you’re going to be
able to bench that much—but then by the
end of three months, you can bench even
more,” Goodman says. “Students don’t realize it’s happening when it’s happening, but at
some point they have an epiphany, and that
epiphany is an intensely good feeling. It’s like
they’ve done something that they couldn’t
imagine ever doing.”
Graduate student Aimee Wilson appreciates being held to high standards.
“I have worked with Robin Goodman for
the past two years, first as a student in her
Feminist Theory course then as my dissertation director,” Wilson says. “The experience
has been transformative: Robin has very high
34 Summer/Fall 2012
“I write my books so the message
gets out there. I also used to write for
pleasure, and I don’t know when that
ended. I like writing, but it’s much
more painful now and it’s a lot slower.”
Robin Goodman
expectations, which pushes me to be a better
thinker and writer than I thought possible.
She is invested in my work and gives generously of her time.”
Most of Goodman’s students are selfselecting, but some still may be skeptical at
the beginning. These tend to be the students
who don’t expect to get as interested in the
class as they do.
“I met this guy at Occupy [Tallahassee]
who came up to me and said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I didn’t remember him, but he
was in my Feminist Theory class, so I asked,
‘Well, how did you like it?’ And he said, ‘Well,
when I was in there, I had just come back
from being a Marine in Iraq, and I really liked
your class, but it was against everything I had
ever learned.’ So, it made me really proud
that I was the transition stage between his
being a Marine and being involved in the Occupy movement,” Goodman says, recalling
the encounter.
Ralph Berry, professor and outgoing department chair, says, “She is like no one else
you have ever met. She combines unusual
seriousness of purpose, uncompromising
integrity, and impressive learning, with an irreverent sense of humor that borders on the
wacky. I know of no one else in the department more interesting or more formidable in
intellectual debate—and she also has a very
cute dog.”
Putting her ideas on paper
While colleagues and students find Goodman a delightful mix of the funny and the serious, she typically writes about serious matters. Her books are very concerned with the
public and private spheres, particularly in how
they relate to feminism, but they’re not just
limited to that subject. She constantly challenges herself to get to the next level in her
writing, to “bench-press” more than before.
“I write my books so the message gets
out there,” she says. “I also used to write for
pleasure, and I don’t know when that ended.
I like writing, but it’s much more painful now
and it’s a lot slower. Writing has become really hard, and it often feels challenging in ways
that I don’t measure up to my expectations,
so that always feels a little disappointing.”
As a reader, Goodman consumes book after book. As a writer, she waits for the right
moment.
“Suddenly I’ll feel like I start forming a
thesis and it gets to that point where I’m so
involved with thinking through the ideas that
I start to think about them when I’m sleeping,” she says. “That’s how I know when it’s
time to write.”
Goodman doesn’t remember how long
it’s been since she’s read for pleasure, stating now that she reads for this “un-pleasure,”
or “anti-pleasure.” She’ll read something
because she’ll find that the author is doing
something interesting. She reads in order to
engage in certain discussions that have nothing to do with pleasure. She reads because
she feels it’s her duty as a human being to
help clean up the murky world we live in.
“I really feel responsible for thinking
about how it can be better, and that, to me, is
more important than whether or not reading
a certain work gives me pleasure,” Goodman
says. “It kind of supersedes it. In fact, when
I do find myself feeling pleasure in reading,
I’m a little bit surprised because it’s been so
long since I’ve read for that.”
Goodman looks for the challenge in
reading. “If you’re getting pleasure from
literature,” Goodman continues, “it often
means that you’re comfortable or easy with
it, whereas if you’re reading philosophy and
you feel challenged and you don’t understand
something or are lost, that feeling of alienation is really where the start of a change in
thinking comes from. That’s how reading
became a kind of addiction for me. When
I don’t understand something, I ask myself,
‘What can I read so I will understand?’ I guess
I’m just always wanting that first high again.”
But Goodman is seeking more than just
that first high. As a writer, activist, and
teacher, Goodman is always looking for the
next challenge, for a way to put her beliefs
into action.
Roberts from page 11
State, combined that focus with her interest
in the state of Florida, where her family—
she is an eighth-generation Floridian—has a
long and storied history. A novel is also in
the works now as Roberts is on a sabbatical
for the Fall 2012 semester.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, while
writing for the Florida Flambeau, Roberts
(shown here in 1985) created her Das
Kapital column, which focused on the
Florida Legislature. Roberts would go to
the legislative parties and eavesdrop on
conversations, which would become the
topics for her columns.
An environmental activist
Most recently, Roberts has found a new
Photo by Bob O’Lary
cause.
Her writing drew the attention of those student of Roberts’s and author of The New
“I started learning about water, and I had
these friends who know a lot about this,” who fight full-time for the environment, and York Times best-selling memoir The Last True
she says. “And I know some environmental that has led to an even greater opportunity Story I’ll Ever Tell. “I consider myself fortulawyers, and just hearing them talk, I thought for Roberts to help the environment herself, nate to have taken her classes and to have
‘Oh my god, this is not a joke. This is real.’” as a board member of the Florida Wildlife had her for a mentor. She’s a true class act,
through and through, and any student would
Roberts credits her friends Julie Hauser- Federation.
Hauserman credits Roberts for being a be well served to take her class.”
man and Craig Pittman with getting her
Those students who end up in a class with
caught up to speed on environmental issues tireless advocate for environmental causes.
threatening the South. Hauserman, whose “Diane is one of the very best writers in Roberts learn about more than just words on
commentaries were also cut from WFSU in Florida,” she says. “I think she’s interested in a page.
“Teaching isn’t about hammering into
2003, is a former Capitol bureau reporter for the environment because she’s a native here,
the St. Petersburg Times (now called the Tampa and like all lifelong Floridians, she’s seen people’s heads the names of Dickens’ charBay Times), and Pittman is currently a staff what the despoilers have done—and ARE acters or who marries whom in Jane Austen
or who dies in The Sound and the Fury—it’s
writer at the newspaper. Both have written doing—to our beautiful state.”
about getting people to think,” Roberts says.
extensively on environmental problems fac“Good profs purvey critical thinking, quesing Florida. Roberts says she also takes issue A teacher and mentor
While Roberts may spend plenty of time tioning of authority, and learning to back up
with the way the environment is constantly
disregarded by many of the politicians who turning her energy and outrage outward what you think with actual evidence.”
Former Florida State creative writing stuagainst those who threaten her home state,
run Florida.
“I started getting annoyed with this idea she also spends plenty of time channel- dent DJ Hawkes, who graduated in Spring
that we could just develop any part of Flori- ing that enthusiasm and vigor toward her 2012, attests to Roberts’ gentler side. “She
da, anytime,” she says. So she started writing students, as a teacher and mentor. She says has a way about her that you find every so
that good teaching is a form of subversion: often in the education system, a sort of unabout the state’s environmental issues.
Her July 17, 2011, Times column titled “Which is to say, I help you evaluate what derstanding of the way the world works,”
“Clean Water Doesn’t Kill Jobs” called out you think you know. Often what you thought Hawkes said. “[She is] understanding, kind
and a true professor of wisdom.”
U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Winter Park, who, was true isn’t,” she adds.
This is what makes Roberts so appreciated
“She’s a fantastic teacher, writer, and also
Roberts wrote, “has come to save us from
that crypto-communist, job-destroying En- a great reader, something not everyone can in her different circles: the ability to be equalvironmental Protection Agency and once do,” says John Crawford, a former M.F.A. ly ruthless toward those who put their own
interests in front of her state or her
again make America safe for the
country—and equally caring topollutigarchy.”
ward students working under her.
Mica’s bill, HR 2018, the “Clean
At the end of the day, both sides
Water Cooperative Federalism
of Roberts—the vengeful satirist,
Act of 2011,” which passed in the
and the dedicated and supportive
House by a 239-184 vote, prohibfriend, colleague, and teacher—
its the EPA from requiring states
combine to make her one of a
to meet minimum water quality
kind.
standards, severely weakening the
It’s a good thing, because the
Clean Water Act. The U.S. Senate
world needs both sides.
has yet to vote on the bill.
“Fortunately for all of us, Diane
If it ever passes, Roberts
has chosen to fight back with her
writes, “[t]he nation can return
words,” Hauserman says of her
to those heady days when capitalfriend’s work for the environment
ism reigned unfettered by bunnyPhoto by Bob O’Lary and other causes. “And many of
hugging, water-testing, hippiewuss socialism, and America was Diane Roberts at a Florida Flambeau reunion, them are sharper than a bulldozer’s
blade.”
on one heavy toxic trip.”
held in March 2010 in Tallahassee.
Summer/Fall 2012 35
Hamby from page 15
Q
Describe a typical scenario when you are
working on a book of poetry or fiction.
Describe your writing process.
A
It’s the same for both. I start by writing
down images in my notebooks, and then
certain images start to come together. When
I have a first line or a first sentence, then I
begin writing. A lot of those lines, stanzas,
paragraphs, pages go nowhere, but some do
and that’s a pleasure. I work on a group of
poems at the same time. I used to work on
one poem at a time, but if it didn’t work out,
I had a hard time letting it go. For example, I
have images and/or drafts for 20 or so Russian poems. When I finish, I’ll be happy to
have ten or twelve.
The same is true for stories. I had twice
as many stories for my collection than were
in the final manuscript. I had to leave out
a couple of favorites that had appeared in
good magazines because they didn’t fit the
final structure of the book. That always
hurts at the time of amputation, but later
I find I don’t even remember the poems or
stories I left behind. I think that speaks of a
certain heartlessness.
Q
A
A
I didn’t cook until I went to Italy. I loved
the food there—its simplicity and the
importance of fresh ingredients. So I came
back a born-again cook. I especially love the
Italian antipasti table with its dozens of delicious plates. I also love soup. I’ve always
made a vegetable soup, and I usually make a
huge pot at the beginning of every semester
and freeze, so we have something nourishing
to eat when life gets hectic. Every Christmas
my nephew and I bake cookies. Last Christmas we made 14 different kinds. I also love
fruitcake, and I have a wonderful recipe for
one. I’m a salad lover, and I’m lucky enough
to have a garden in my back yard. The man
who built our house had a Victory Garden
there during World War II, so the soil is
very rich. I love arugula (Italy, again), which
grows from September to May here. Right
now I have carrots, beets, radishes, collards,
curly endive, yellow peppers, garlic, onions,
and lots of herbs. I love to go out and pick a
salad from my garden.
A
I didn’t choose FSU, it chose me. When
my first book came out, the chair of the
English Department, Fred Standley, asked if
I’d like to teach a class, and I said yes. That
was almost 15 years ago. I love teaching. Writing is a lonely business, and working with students is exhilarating. Unlike a lot of relationships, they are there for what you love best. I
never get tired of teaching. In fact, last semester I taught an honors seminar on the letters
of poets. It was a wonderful experience. We
started with Ovid and Horace and ended with
the Beats. I’m working on an essay now that
came out of discussions with my students.
How do you feel after you’ve completed
a book?
I was surprised at how depressed I was
when my first book was published. Don’t
get me wrong: I wanted it to be a book, but
I was really sad, too. It must be like having
a much-loved child go off to college. You
don’t want him hanging around the house
for the rest of his life, but you miss talking
to him every day. I missed fooling around
with my poems every day. As a result I have
a new project going before the old one is
published—thus the book of travel poems
while I’m finishing my Guggenheim project.
It keeps me cheerful.
Q
A
Q
With everything that you have going on
how do find time to relax? I read that
you enjoy cooking. What do you enjoy about
cooking?
Of the books you’ve written, do have a
favorite book?
I’m in a struggle with my current projects, so they are all I’m thinking about.
There’s a Russian word, “razlubit,” which
means the feeling you have for someone you
once loved but love no more. I think it’s kind
of like that. I love my other books, but it is
a distant love, not the intense passion of a
new love.
36 Summer/Fall 2012
Photos by Barbara Hamby
The arts cooperative
Nikola Lenivets (left)
is four hours south of
Moscow. The house has
thousands of holes that
were drilled by hand by
art students. The tower is
over 30 feet high.
Q
I saw your photographs on a website.
Do you find there are any similarities or
differences with photography compared to
writing?
A
For me it’s the same. I take photos of
things that interest me and see where
they will take me. I’ve been drawing for
about ten years, and I’m trying to figure out
how to combine drawing, photography and
poetry. But I haven’t gotten there yet.
Q
What do like about teaching and why did
you choose to teach at FSU?
Q
A
What are the main philosophies you try
to instill in your students?
I like to keep them away from ideas and
think in terms of images. The world tells
us a story every minute. I want to be open
to the story that the world is expressing. In
a poem or a story we move from image to
image, and those images tell us everything we
need to know. Students and all human beings
want to impose order. That’s good up to a
point, but you can get too carried away with
it, be too in love with your own intelligence.
You have to have a balance of discipline and
chaos to be a writer. It’s maddening and a
huge amount of fun.
Rubio from page 19
of jobs, one after another. Even while working these jobs, however, the couple’s focus
was never solely on earning money; they
always made time for volunteer and community work. Gwyn Rubio became a VISTA
(now AmeriCorps VISTA) volunteer, during
which time she wrote grant applications for
a food bank and worked at a center for people with dementia. She also recruited for the
Peace Corps at the University of Kentucky
“I think volunteer work makes us more
tolerant and more compassionate—makes us
more empathetic,” she says. “One thing that
we learned is that people all around the world,
we are all alike really. We all have the same desires, the same needs, the same wants.”
Facing her fears
Despite the richness of Gwyn Rubio’s
travel and humanitarian work, there was
still something missing from her life—writing. But writing scared her because of what
had happened to her father. It wasn’t until
her husband turned in an application for her
to the MFA program for creative writing at
Warren Wilson College in North Carolina
that she finally stopped running away from
writing, enrolling in 1983 and receiving her
M.F.A. in 1986.
After that, she dedicated herself to writing, yet it took years until she finally broke
in. Rubio came close once before Icy Sparks,
to the point that her agent told her to look
for pictures for the book jacket, when the
deal unexpectedly fell through. Heartbroken,
Rubio could fully identify with her father’s
Castillo from page 13
promised, it was published and became her
chapbook entitled Red Letters.
Community was an integral part of
Castillo’s time at Florida State, and the
continuous sharing and networking with
fellow Tallahassee writers facilitated
friendships and the confidence to pursue
writing as more than just a hobby.
“I couldn’t have gone to a better place,”
Castillo says. “I couldn’t have done what I’m
doing without having had those experiences.”
After graduating with her bachelor’s
and master’s degrees from Florida State
University, Castillo returned to Miami Dade
College, where she has been teaching for
more than two decades.
unhappiness with writing.
Still, despite her distress, advice from a
mentor kept her from giving up.
“He asked me, ‘Gwyn, do you enjoy the
process of writing? Do you enjoy the creative act?’ ” Rubio says.
“And I told him, ‘Yes, I do. When I am lost
in that world, when I am creating that other
world, when the characters are speaking to
me, they take over. When they become more
real to me than my friends, then I am truly in
a place of wonder and I do enjoy that.’
“He told me, ‘Hold on to that. Write because you enjoy the process. Don’t write worried about a publication or about the future
or about the prizes. Write because you enjoy
the process, and if you write because of that
reason, you will continue to write. With any
luck at all—you always need luck in writing;
that is a very big component, luck—eventually one of your novels will break through,’”
Rubio says.
In the years following that disappointment, Rubio got the idea of writing about a
little girl with a neurological disorder living in
rural Kentucky in the 1950s. After two years
of writing, while also working two part-time
jobs, Rubio had finished Icy Sparks. Published in 1998, the novel was well received by
critics and named a “Notable Book” by The
New York Times.
But even with positive reviews, the obstacle of being a first book from an unknown,
regional writer kept Icy Sparks from selling
as well as it could have. However, thanks to
attention from Oprah Winfrey three years
later, sales took off.
“I don’t remember exactly what it was,
but maybe 20,000 to 25,000 copies in paper-
back,” Rubio says. “But once Oprah called, I
only had a little over a week to keep my lips
sealed because in one week 850,000 books
were printed.”
After the success of Icy Sparks, Rubio began to work on The Woodsman’s Daughter. Published in 2005, it is a historical novel based
on Rubio’s great-grandmother’s life.
“I liked the book a lot,” Rubio says, “Many
people wanted me to do a sequel to Icy
Sparks, and I said no because I wanted to do
something different.”
The Woodsman’s Daughter won’t be the last
novel from Rubio, who hopes to publish another in the near future. “This time it will be
an unusual love story set in Ocracoke, part
of the Outer Banks,” she says.
Rubio, who has shelved about four to five
books, says it is heartbreaking to spend two
or three years on a novel and then set it aside.
“When my father was writing, you had an editor and publisher for life,” she says. “It’s no
longer this way. It’s a tough business.”
Nevertheless, Rubio is grateful for the luck
that came her way back in 2001 with that
phone call from Oprah. She is also grateful
for the support she has received from those
close to her. And she is grateful to Florida
State University, where she first realized that
she could write.
“Being brought up Southern, I was tied
up to being polite, very gentle and being the
Southern belle, but Florida State helped me
break through all of that,” she says. “For my
generation, that was a great gift. It helped me
understand that if I wanted to write I didn’t
have to marry a gentlemen who wrote. I
didn’t have to marry a writer. I could actually
write myself.”
Castillo advises aspiring writers attending
Florida State to take advantage of all that
the English department and the Tallahassee
community have to offer.
“I think that part of wanting to actually be
a writer is to have enough courage to stick it
out,” Castillo says.
Castillo is the author of two published
books, Red Letters, and My Father Sings to My
Embarrassment, the latter of which won the
White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2002. The
anthology chronicles her childhood, her
immersion in the English-speaking American
world, and the bittersweet homecoming to
Cuba.
In a review for White Pine Press of My
Father Sings to My Embarrassment, poet and
novelist Pablo Medina says “… the landscape
of loss and gain we call exile, seen through
the poet’s sharp eye and described in a voice
that never wavers from the truth. I felt I was
re-encountering Cuba in the light of new
imagining, freed of ideology and therefore
resplendent and complete.”
Her poems have been published in many
literary publications including Cimarron
Review, Midway Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry
Review, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano &
Latino Literary Art, and the anthology Cool
Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing Up Latino in
the United States.Castillo is currently working
on publishing a collection of poetry and is in
the process of writing a novel about growing
up in Miami.
“I always think ‘Here’s a story I can tell,’
”Castillo says. A natural born storyteller,
Castillo continues to weave the narrative of
her life for all to read.
Summer/Fall 2012 37
Areu from page 17
seeing their teacher walk the walk and talk the
talk. I taught them the power of the word,
and then they’d see it in their local paper.”
One of her Sun-Sentinel editors at the time,
Ken Swart, recalls that Areu always had good
instincts when it came to writing and pitching stories, referring to her as “my ‘go-to’
freelancer. Whenever I needed something
good and fast, I knew I could count on her.”
During one visit to the high school, Swart
discovered the extent of Areu’s commitment
to the craft.
“I found her in her classroom, a sandwich
in one hand, tapping a keyboard with the
other, monitoring her journalism kids at one
end of the room, while they worked on the
campus newspaper; and tutoring kids at the
other end of the room, while they finished
their make-up work in English,” Swart says.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow! This
lady must have a black belt in multi-tasking!’
It’s been 15 years since then, and nothing
much has changed.” Chaser of dreams
Maybe not much has changed with Areu’s
work ethic, but she has added a couple of
titles to her name: magazine publisher and
book author. Areu, now living in New York
City, says she sold her car to raise the start-up
funds for the 2001 launch of Catalina magazine, which highlights the achievements of
professional Hispanic females.
Film from page 23
choose to teach the courses we choose to
teach because we love the material. If I have
to show you Mel Gibson for you to understand why the material is interesting the way
I think it’s interesting, then I’m going to do
that. No, we don’t want to torture you with
scary literature that is old and moldy. That’s
not what it’s about. We want to find some
way to make you see what we see that is great
about what we’re reading.”
There’s a feeling among many instructors
and students that these two media—film and
traditional printed literature—have a synergistic connection in the classroom, so it’s no
wonder that these courses are in demand.
“I have the sense that quite a few students
are actually clamoring for these courses,”
Parker says.
Johnson, Walker, and Farmer say they too
have received positive feedback from both
the department and their former students
38 Summer/Fall 2012
“I love being a journalist and a
TV news pundit. I’m able to meet
the most influential people of
our time and talk about it later.”
Cathy Areu
“I just felt that the other magazines weren’t
capturing my demographic the best way they
could,” says Areu, the daughter of Cuban
immigrants. “They’d often feature Latinas in
sexy poses on their covers while trying to say
that we were smart business women.
“It was about time a publication for Latinas
should be owned by an actual Latina. And, at
the end of the day, it’s always a fantasy for a
writer to have his or her own publication.”
In 2006, Areu published her first
book, Latino Wisdom, based on some of the
well-known people she has met through her
work with the magazine. The book’s subtitle
is Celebrity Stories of Hope, Inspiration, and Success to Recharge Your Mind, Body, and Soul, and
it includes profiles of Linda Chavez Thompson, Mel Martinez, John Leguizamo, and
Daisy Fuentes, among others. They all offer
insights and “life lessons” on how they succeeded in their particular profession.
Recently, Areu wrote the foreword for the
book The Latina’s Guide to Success in the Workplace. Swart commends Areu for taking her
own risks and becoming successful in the
field of journalism.
“If there’s a moral to Cathy’s story, it’s that
if you want to be a journalist, take a chance
and go for it,” Swart says, listing Areu’s professional accomplishments as proof that
“you make your own luck in the journalism
business. She’s beautiful, intelligent, creative
—and sassy; and an inspiration to a whole
new generation of journalists.”
At this point in her career, Areu is thankful
for the way her life has turned out.
“I love being a journalist and a TV news
pundit. I’m able to meet the most influential
people of our time and talk about it later,”
she says, before admitting that maybe one
other line of work would appeal to her.
“The only better job than this would to be
an FSU English professor. Now, that would
be awesome.”
Darby Schwartz contributed to this article.
about using film in
the literature classroom. Perhaps the
integration of a
more modern medium encourages
literary analysis or
enables students to
grasp a lesson in a
way that becomes
more relevant to
them. It could be
that watching films
and
discussing
them along with
literature is just
Photo by Scroll, Scribe & Screen staff
plain fun. WhatChristina
Parker
teaches
in
her
Film
Theory
class about the
ever the reason,
German
expressionist
influence.
combining literature and film may be a dream come true for want to do it,” Johnson says. “They love film
and they love the Middle Ages, and they can’t
some students.
“I have students who are there because believe that they’re able to combine both of
they really love the material and they really them. They have to pinch themselves.”
Johnson from page 20
received $2 million in venture capital funding
earlier in 2012, offers premium, paid plans
aimed at high-volume users. It also offers
voice-mail messaging services.
Johnson’s founding of a Silicon Valley
tech company surprised many people,
including good friend and fellow FSU alum
Joe O’Shea, a 2008 Rhodes Scholar.
“I was somewhat surprised that Garrett
went to a technology-based start-up,”
O’Shea says, “But he’s an adventurer, and his
business is designed to help others—so it’s in
line with his character.”
But if Johnson’s unexpected business
career goes anything like his educational
and athletic careers, SendHub will be a big
success. Not only did the Tampa native
graduate magna cum laude in three years
from FSU with majors in political science
and English literature, but he earned his
master’s degree in 2008 from Oxford, the
university he attended as a result of being
named a Rhodes Scholar. As an athlete for
FSU, Johnson won the 2006 NCAA indoor
Haynes from page 21
Professor Kristie Fleckenstein and ended up
taking Fleckenstein’s rhetoric class during
her final semester at FSU.
Fleckenstein’s class was Haynes’s favorite
in college. She went to class every day, actively participating in the discussions.
“Haynes was an ideal student and one that
every faculty member would enjoy having in
class,” says Fleckenstein. “She was bright, she
was prepared, she was enthusiastic, she was
committed, she had all the characteristics that
we always love having in our students.”
With school coming to an end, Haynes
started to get excited about graduating, but
she was also nervous because she didn’t have
a job. One day, when she was taking a nap
on her couch, it hit her that she needed to
call her former boss, George Whipple. She
jumped up and called him, and he asked her
to intern for him again during the summer.
So Haynes packed up and went to New
York to take another internship at New York
1. During her internship, she secured interviews with the Harry Potter cast, including
Emma Watson and Matthew Lewis, at the
premiere of Deathly Hallows—Part 2.
“New York 1 didn’t even know it was happening, so I got in touch with Warner Brothers’ PR and I set up for us to have inter-
and outdoor shot put championships and
was named an academic All-American
in 2005 and 2006. He also set some FSU
records in field events.
While at FSU, Johnson also interned with
then-Gov. Jeb Bush, who later became one
of SendHub’s investors. Then, after Johnson
graduated from Oxford, he worked in
Washington, D.C. as a staff member for the
U.S. Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations.
He was also accepted to Harvard Law School
and could have enrolled in Fall 2012 but
decided to work on SendHub instead.
A look back at Johnson’s schedule while he
was at FSU offers some insight into how he
became so successful.
“My life was segmented into sports and
school, and I was also very involved in
politics,” Johnson says. “I worked for the
governor at that time, who was Jeb Bush. I
worked in his office during the early hours
of the day from 7:30 a.m. to 1 or 2 p.m. Then
I would fit classes in during the day when
possible, I would have practice during the
day as well (sometime between 3 p.m. and 6
or 7 p.m.), then night classes to end the day.
It was a difficult schedule, but I was doing
things I love and I really enjoyed it, so it
made things exciting.
Johnson also credits his success to his
family. “I was blessed to have two incredible
parents who went out of their way to make
my life and my siblings’ lives as easy as
possible,” he says. “My parents have played
the most influential role in my life. They have
encouraged me to pursue my interest, throw
caution to the wind, and dream big dreams.
And when you have that type of support
structure, you can pursue your interests and
take big risks—because you know you’ll
always have people who support you and
have your back.”
Turns out, even his FSU English major
has played a part in his success.
“I actually work in technology—but I’m
not technical,” Johnson says. “So I handle a
lot of the business development and strategic
partnerships. I also focus on our community
and reach out to users by writing articles and
blogs. So the writing skills I learned as an
English major have been very helpful. When
I was working in politics in Washington, D.C.,
I had to do a lot of writing there as well. My
major in English influenced all of that.”
“My whole family is into Fox News, so my
views,” Haynes says.
That summer, Haynes frequented several working there is a pretty big deal,” Haynes
other red-carpet events and spent her days says. “It’s the biggest thing that’s happened
off looking for a real job. Because her par- in my family. One night my dad called me
ents were only going to help her out finan- and asked me if I knew about the 300 people
cially for three months, there was a deadline who were involved in an accident that mornfor her to figure out her next move. When ing on the Brooklyn Bridge and I told him,
the internship came to an end,
she started to worry because, “[Marlee] was bright, she was prepared,
if she didn’t find a job, home she was enthusiastic, she was commitwas where she was headed.
ted, she had all the characteristics that
Fortunately, a chance meet- we always love having in our students.”
ing led to another career opProfessor Kristie Fleckenstein
portunity for Haynes.
Right before her dorm lease was up, her ‘Actually … it was 700 people and it was last
parents came to the city for a Stanley Cup night.’ My mom was on the line as well, and
game. Haynes’s dad wanted to take a picture she said, ‘I love how you know things before
in front of the cup outside an NHL store, him now.’ ”
and Jodi Geoghegan, a Fox News editing
As of the spring of 2012, Haynes was still
supervisor, happened to be inside. Haynes’s working at the Fox News channel as a logdad overheard Geoghegan talking about ed- ging assistant, living in Gramercy, and loviting and decided to introduce himself, telling ing her job. Eventually she would like to be
Geoghegan that his daughter was interested a “one-man show” at a news station: writing,
in editing and that the two should meet. shooting the footage, and then editing the
Haynes ended up talking to Geoghegan for final piece.
While Haynes loves New York, she doesn’t
a little while, which inspired her to apply for
see herself living there forever.
an internship at Fox News.
“I want to live abroad for a year and then
Fox News denied her the internship because she was too qualified, but instead sug- either live in Nashville, Charleston, or Atlangested that she apply for a position as a log- ta,” Haynes says. “New York is fun, but I’m
a Southern girl at heart.”
ging assistant. She landed the job.
Summer/Fall 2012 39
VWRS from page 25
Florida State students.
“We hope that one day the fund will be
large enough to fund a small writer-inresidence program and perhaps student
scholarships,” says Roberts, who has become
a leader for the Jerome Stern Benefit and has
rallied support for the Stern fund.
Thus, it was at the hand of Roberts and
Belieu that Tallahassee author Mark Mustian
was chosen to read this year, with his night
being designated 2012’s Jerome Stern Benefit.
Though he did not know Stern personally,
Mustian knew of Stern’s reputation and was
glad to step in.
“The FSU Creative Writing Program is
one of the best—if not the best—in the
country,” Mustian says.
Making a mark
Tallahassee attorney, city commissioner,
and author Mark Mustian was a fitting
choice as the featured speaker at 2012’s
Jerome Stern Benefit. An active member
of the local community, Mustian is also
no stranger to the Florida State University
English department. In fact, several FSU
faculty members offered praise for Mustian’s 2010 novel, The Gendarme, the same
book that prompted his invitation to read
at the annual Stern benefit.
Mustian has big plans for continuing
the Creative Writing Program’s commitment to the community. He and Professor Diane Roberts have even started a
local television show called Furious Fiction,
consisting of short interviews with fiction
authors from around the world. By 2014,
Mustian hopes to help organize a Tallahassee literary festival that will pair literature
and music. Those interested in helping can
contact him at [email protected].
Each new Visiting Spring Writers Series
echoes Jerome Stern’s commitment to student
writers and highlights the Creative Writing
Program’s dedication to the community.
In the book, Making Shapely Fiction, Stern
says that authors each owe the world a story
of themselves orated in their own specific
writing style. In deliberately hosting writers
whose works vary widely, the series remains
true to Stern’s original ideals.
The book focuses on the technology-driven
cultural transformations that occurred more
accessing pamphlets from Irish playwrights than 500 years ago, but she expects those
to help with the research for her book on findings to also offer perspective on the
21st-century information revolution.
18th-century Irish literature.
“In that earlier age of information revo“I was interested in finding out what was
going on in Ireland’s culture and with the lution, two kinds of textual technologies—
many riots that were concerned with emerg- printing and translation—worked synergistiing nationalism,” Burke says. From that peri- cally to create astonishing changes in literaod of research she wrote Riotous Performances: ture and culture,” she says. “In the current
The Struggle for Hegemony in Irish Theater, 1712- information revolution, we, too, are experi1784, which won the 2003 Michael J. Durkan encing the transformative powers of translation and ‘info-tech’ and, together, they
Prize for Books on Language or Culture.
Burke says that finishing the book with- connect cultures and shake up our basic asout the fellowship would have been diffi- sumptions and habits. But, because the analogy between the old and
new textual revolutions is
Elizbeth Spiller says that all grants
imperfect, it needs to be
and awards earned by professors in
historicized and contextuthe English department “testify to the
alized.”
Gants says his NEH
research strengths in our department and
fellowship
allowed him to
they continue to enhance and raise our
spend 2006 working with
national research profile.”
the extensive holding of
early printed books in the
cult because “when you are teaching, your Houghton Library at Harvard University.
thought process keeps getting broken and His research there was the first stage of work
to write a book you really need to be able on his digital project called “The Early Engto get some time out to write. I am just very lish Booktrade Database.”
“It’s conceived as a deep bibliographical
grateful to NEH for providing me with that
complement to the current ‘English Shortblock of time.”
Coldiron’s fellowship in 2010 was her sec- Title Catalogue,’ which lists all known books
ond; she won her first in 1998. Following her printed in the United Kingdom from 14732010 award, Coldiron visited libraries in the 1800,” Gants says. The ESTC is invaluable
U.S. and in Europe, where she examined ar- to scholars of English literature and book
chival materials and rare books as research history seeking to locate early printed books,
for Printers Without Borders: Translation, Tex- Gants adds, but it lacks “bibliographical data
tuality, and Tudor Literary (Trans)Nationhood. essential to an understanding of the English
printing and bookselling, information such
as the amount of type set in a particular volume or the number of reams of paper required to print it.”
He had the opportunity to examine each
item in the ESTC up to 1640, or about
38,000 individual titles.
“I was able to measure and quantify physical data extracted from over 3,000 titles,”
Gants says. “This extraordinary opportunity
also gave me the space to refine data collection and recording procedures, which has
made subsequent examinations of ESTC
items much more efficient.”
Taylor, who is the HoTT program’s
founding director, won in 1993-94 and used
his fellowship time to work on the Oxford
University Press edition of Thomas Middleton:
The Collected Works. Taylor had the idea for a
new edition of Middleton in 1985, and he
began work on the project in 1987. He saw
the opportunity as the most important project he could undertake in the field of Renaissance studies.
“Although Middleton is Shakespeare’s
most important contemporary—‘our other
Shakespeare’—there was no reliable edition
of his complete works, and previous attempts to produce one had broken down under the weight of the sheer size of the job,”
Taylor says.
The book was published in 2007 and won
the 2009 Modern Language Association
Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition,
the first time an FSU professor has received
an MLA book award.
This article includes information and quotes from
english.fsu.edu.
NEH from page 22
40 Summer/Fall 2012
E-readers from page 26
unknown capabilities for scholarship. “Could
I use it as a practicing scholar, including
making notes, annotating things, organizing
files, cross references, citations?” Fyfe asks.
“I was curious if it had come far enough
for me to be interested in it … The crucial
limitation of an e-reader is that it has very
little imagination about all the other things a
book does as a technology or as a platform
… but the book is an amazing technology.”
So it might come as a surprise that Fyfe
urged students to use an e-reader edition of
Pip and the Zombies by Louis Skipper in his
“What Is a Text?” senior capstone course as
part of an open-ended experiment.
There has been a growing trend in modern literature to try to rewrite or “resurrect”
the classics. Several of the changes that have
been observed are the reworking of covers
to more modern equivalents, and also the
complete rewriting of the stories with the
addition of fantastic and mythical creatures.
In addition to Pip and the Zombies, there’s
Mansfield Park and Mummies, among others.
Or perhaps you’re not feeling as gruesome,
so Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters would
Haddock from page 29
Haddock’s love of helping others doesn’t
just encompass the students she advises. A
self-proclaimed animal lover, she has a dog,
Holly, as well as three cats, and has fostered
orphaned and injured baby squirrels, raising
and taking care of them until they are able to
go back into the wild. She has worked with
two different wildlife agencies in Tallahassee, St. Francis Wildlife and Goose Creek
Wildlife Sanctuary, to help squirrels that are
harmed due to severe weather conditions.
Haddock was fostering some of these
squirrels when she first started working at
Florida State.
“I had to bring them into work and keep
them under my desk,” Haddock says. “I had
to feed them every two hours and a few students did get to meet them. I didn’t want to
just have them out in case a student didn’t
like that, or was afraid. I had my picture of
them out, and some students would say, ‘Oh,
you like squirrels?’ and I would say, ‘Well, actually . . .” and bring them out for them,”
Haddock says.
Haddock explains that animal rehab cen-
be more your speed.
Fyfe says few of his students in Spring
2012 actually had an e-reader, which surprised him. “But we were still able to talk
about how different platforms enable or disable ways of interacting with the text,” he
says. “With Pip and the Zombies, we took ‘zombie’ as a metaphor for the afterlife of print.
In their current form, e-books are not really
books, but they are not really anything else.”
Fyfe describes a similar open-ended experiment with technology at Duke University, where the entire freshman class of Fall
2004 was given iPods.
Naturally, Duke was accused of being
gimmicky, but the reality of it was, the students were never given instructions how to
use the iPod, except to imagine ways to repurpose it for school.
“And so, yes, there will be people listening to it on the elliptical,” Fyfe says, “but
suddenly these research and pedagogical
uses popped up, ways that it could be integrated into the curriculum that the program’s
directors hadn’t anticipated or imagined.”
Cathy Davidson, a Duke professor, was
closely involved in the iPod experiment and
has also similarly experimented with technology in her own teaching.
One of her classes, called “This is Your
Brain on the Internet,” uses “crowd sourcing,” to have students grade each other and
also help create the curriculum.
Fyfe didn’t know what to expect from
his own experiment, but he recounts a story
about what happened after he decided to use
the Dickens spinoff. Laughing, Fyfe says,
“The author actually wrote to me because
he’s his own publisher and noticed when
suddenly 35 students are buying this book.”
The author emailed Fyfe with his biography as an English teacher and his opinions
about Great Expectations and how zombification plays out in relation to the characters.
“He also kindly offered to mail inscribed
bookplates for all the students in the class,
though I was wondering ‘How are we going
to paste signed bookplates into Kindle editions of the text?’”
Would Fyfe do the experiment again?
“I think I would,” he says. “I would ask
students in a class to encounter a given text
in its different forms, then compare how
those versions worked and shaped our interactions. But I wouldn’t depend on a certain
piece of hardware. It may be instructive that
students have not widely adopted e-readers
or tablets or any specific device. In that context, the book is pretty resilient.”
Rachel Kosberg contributed to this article.
ters train volunteers
from the community to
take care of these squirrels and nurse them
back to health. Once the
squirrels are old enough
and well enough, they
can be released into the
wild. Haddock has fostered eight squirrels so
far, but she is not stopping there. She plans to
adopt more after graduating because she will
have more time.
Photo courtesy of Brandy Haddock
Even though Had- Brandy Haddock and her boyfriend, Jeremy Monckton,
dock’s career is just be- with a couple of squirrels that Haddock rehabilitated.
ginning, she has been
recognized by Florida State, receiving a powerful leadership role.
“My experiences at FSU have given me so
University Undergraduate Advising Award.
Further, the FSU Center for Leadership and much insight into how to fix big problems at
Ethics named Haddock a Hardee Fellow, a a higher level. I would love to be able to go
distinction given to graduate students who in and make things happen, fix things, and
have completed 18 credit hours at FSU with improve the university in any way, and I feel
a GPA of 3.8 or higher. Haddock says that that I have the understanding of how things
she would love to continue working in a col- work and the knowledge of how change aflege or university setting where she is helping fects students,” Haddock says. “I just really
students but would love to take on a more want to get in there and make a difference.”
Summer/Fall 2012 41
Atwater from page 30
for fellowship programs, and interfacing
with the dean’s office of the College of Arts
and Sciences regarding financial and academic matters.
Despite the many responsibilities and
deadlines, Atwater enjoys what she does. She
derives the greatest satisfaction when she
helps a student in need. She relates a story
about a student who left town for a job several years ago without officially filing his thesis. Seven years later, he wanted that official
sheepskin but needed all kinds of help from
Atwater to make it happen. Fortunately, the
story had a happy ending, but as a result of
this student’s experience, Atwater always
stresses to current students the importance
of filing their manuscripts before graduation. Naturally, the worst part of the job for
Atwater is when she cannot help students or
when she has to tell them no.
Atwater says she thoroughly enjoys working closely with the administrators in the department, including professors Ralph Berry,
the chair until Fall 2012; Eric Walker, the
current chair; and Helen Burke, director of
graduate studies. They, in turn, appreciate
Atwater’s assistance.
“It would not be possible to do the graduate director job without Janet,” Burke says.
“Her knowledge of the minutiae of university and graduate school regulations never
ceases to amaze me, as does her patience and
good humor when dealing with the ceaseless
stream of inquiries that we receive from current as well as potential students. She is truly
one of my heroes.”
Atwater came to the department in July
2010 with an already strong background in
education, having worked previously as an
undergraduate advisor at Tallahassee Community College and as an English teacher at
East Gadsden High School.
Asked about the biggest difference between advising undergrads compared to
advising grad students, she says, “Undergraduate students are primarily concerned
with their grade point average, while graduate students are concerned with things like
their thesis or their dissertation. Graduate
students are generally much more responsible because if they commit an error, it can
cost them their job [e.g., their TA position].
Nonetheless, everyone has their days—all of
us have days of immaturity.”
Despite the demands of her work, Atwater is pursuing graduate work as a special student in FSU College of Education’s Higher
42 Summer/Fall 2012
Education Program. As
a matter of fact, if you
look at Atwater’s educational journey, her perseverance is obvious.
Born in St. Petersburg,
Fla., Atwater, who has a
twin, is one of seven
children and the first
person in her family to
graduate from college.
After graduating from
high school, she got
married and attended
St. Petersburg CommuPhoto courtesy of Janet Atwater
nity College for a year,
first majoring in business. Janet Atwater with friends.
Realizing that the math
required of a business major was not what school we attended.
“College life was not familiar to her nor
she wanted to do, she changed her major to
English. Little did she know then that this anyone in my family, so beyond high school,
decision would affect the rest of her life, in- I was on my own,” Atwater says. “I firmly
believe the exposure to reading that she procluding her current career.
Following that first year at community col- vided for me created a curiosity about life
lege, Atwater took a break from school, but that drives me even today.”
When she is not working, Atwater and her
she eventually returned and graduated with
her associate degree at age 27. After that, she husband, Elzo, to whom she has been marearned her bachelor’s degree in English from ried 38 years, enjoy movies, travel, their two
the University of South Florida. Exhausted cats, and searching for their dream home in
from working and attending college for some Tallahassee. Before settling in Tallahassee,
many years, she re-entered the workforce however, the couple lived in Los Angeles,
full-time at St. Petersburg Community Col- Atlanta, and New Jersey.
Asked about current travel plans, Atwater
lege in a position created especially for her.
“I was quite surprised when my supervi- says she would like to make a return visit to
sor created a full-time staff position for me London as well as visit some of her husbecause she valued the initiatives I’d started band’s family in Ohio. But for now, Atwater
in the Career Center,” Atwater says. That will be spending most of her time in Room
position led to opportunities in teaching and 405B of the Williams Building, where her
attention is focused on graduate students
advising at the college level.
Atwater was inspired by then-Assistant who need her help in clearing the hurdles of
Dean of Students Myrtle Williams to contin- academic requirements and applicants who
ue to work in education. “Mrs. Williams was appreciate her steady presence in times of
always calm and unflustered,” Atwater says. stress.
The most important thing is to be relaxed
“I never heard her raise her voice, but she
didn’t allow you to make excuses for yourself and stay informed throughout the whole apto not be successful. At, the time she was the plication process, Atwater advises prospeconly woman to have ever been appointed tive graduate students.
“You must also take the GRE only when
dean of students.”
Atwater’s pursuit of higher education was you feel prepared because there is no point
in rushing and failing,” she says. “The bigalso inspired by her own mother.
“My mother completed the eighth-grade, gest factor in the admission process is to get
but was and is a ferocious reader,” Atwater the required material in on time—also being
says. “She took all of us to the library for resolute in the genre that you want to study.
books as far back as I can remember. We Your statement of purpose, writing sample,
each had our own library card, and for each and recommendations should all indicate a
book you checked out during the summer a focused genre.”
And the students who are accepted can
book report was expected. There was a limit
on television watching also. She was well count on Atwater to be there to help them
known by our teachers and principals at any with the rest.
he have any go-to-jokes?
“It’s always improv,” he says.
Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor
Hawkeswood believes a lively sense of huof Psychology, to co-write “The Measure mor is good for both the students who come
of a Man: Associations Between Digit Ratio in to see him, as well as for himself. He says it
and Disordered Eating in Males,” which was not only makes his day feel more interesting,
published in the International Journal of Eat- but that students are far more likely to listen
ing Disorders. It is rare for an undergraduate if what they are hearing is entertaining. Still,
student to get published, so this was both being funny is not just an act he puts on at
a testament to Hawkeswood’s talents and a work; rather, Hawkeswood’s sense of humor
highlight of his undergraduate career.
carries over to his personal life as well.
Hawkeswood is an only child
“I don’t feel like I have a purpose and part of a small family. He and
his mother came to the United
unless I’m helping people.”
States from England when he was
— Sean Hawkeswood 4 years old, following his maternal
grandparents, who were in the milIn addition to his school-related activities itary. When he was younger, Hawkeswood
as an undergrad, Hawkeswood was a yoga wished for a sibling; however, now
instructor and an FSU Freshman Interest he simply accepts that he does
Groups leader. Together, these accomplish- not have one.
ments and activities led to his being featured
Hawkeswood’s Giant Poin an online FSU student profile his senior meranian, Bella, is
year.
also part of the
Hawkeswood, always well-rounded, car- family. And yes,
ried this ability to juggle a variety of tasks Hawkeswood says,
and pursuits from his college years into his she is just as high
advising career.
maintenance as
“There is no such thing as a ‘normal day,’” the character
Hawkeswood said when interviewed during in
Twilight
the Spring 2012 semester. “That’s what I like (after whom
about this job; there are times of predictabil- she
was
ity, but a lot of the time you’ll be faced with n a m e d ) .
things you’ve never heard of before.”
Though he
Some of the more predictable aspects of enjoyed the
his daily routine in the English department recent bestincluded walk-in visits from students needing
help, emails to and from other administrators, and questions that he answered over the
phone. As an advisor, Hawkeswood could
not disclose any of the specific encounters
he had because it would have violated student privacy regulations; however, many of
his conversations with students dealt with
matters such as schedule selection, potential
major changes, or university policies.
Before advising FSU English department
students, Hawkeswood was an academic
support assistant for the Program in Inter- selling vamdisciplinary Humanities. Yet he liked the pire
series
change to one department. He says that by
Stephenie
working with students in the same major was Meyer, Hawkeslike having everything under one “umbrella” wood detests blood,
and that he liked the added organization of the sight of which makes
such an umbrella.
him faint.
However, Hawkeswood’s love for organiHawkeswood does not just
zation is balanced by his spontaneous sense stick to books, however. He is also an
of humor. Given that advisors hear some of avid video game and movie lover, as well as
the same questions over and over again, does a Britney Spears loyalist. Even during what
Hawkeswood from page 31
popular culture deemed the “Britney Dark
Ages,” (the years when she shaved her head,
gained weight, and got into legal trouble),
Hawkeswood remained a fan of her music;
in fact, he and his boyfriend even went to
see Spears during her 2009 Circus Tour in
Tampa.
Besides advising students during his paid,
eight-to-five job at FSU, Hawkeswood volunteered at 2-1-1 of the Big Bend, a local
crisis hotline, on weekends. This hotline receives calls on topics ranging from simple
questions about Tallahassee utilities to suicide help calls. Much like an advisor, a 2-11 crisis hotline volunteer or employee never
knows what will come next. However, it was
not a chore for Hawkeswood, who felt a calling toward human interaction and customer
service.
“I don’t feel like I have a purpose unless I’m helping people,” he says.
There is no doubt he helped many
students in the FSU English department.
“Sean is an incredible advisor,”
says English major Daniel Ruiz. “He
is accessible and approachable,
and he encourages students to
do all that they can to reach
their potential.”
Clearly,
Hawkeswood will be missed.
Hawkeswood
holds Bella,
accompanied by
his boyfriend’s
dog Chi-Chi.
Photo courtesy of Sean Hawkeswood
Summer/Fall 2012 43
avid golfer in her free time and plans to relocate to Miami after her
graduation in fall of 2012.
Jessica Reich
Jessica Reich is majoring in EWM and minoring in communications.
She is currently an intern at the Zimmerman Agency, working in
the public relations department and will have graduated in spring
of 2012. One day, she wants to get her master’s in communications
at N.Y.U. and she believes plans are overrated so her motto is to
practice spontaneity. About the
contributors
Samantha Schaum
A native South Floridian, Schaum is double majoring in EWM and
communication studies. She loves writing for the FSView, mentoring
kids in the creative writing program (Scribbles), and exploring the
local Tallahassee music scene. Graduating in 2014, she hopes to
pursue a career in publishing.
Maya Schuller
From St. Petersburg, Fla., Schuller is majoring in EWM with a minor
in Religion. She plans to graduate in December of 2012 and pursue
a career as an editor or journalist. Schuller loves theater and speaks
fluent German. Marlene Baldweg-Rau
Born in New York City, Baldeweg-Rau moved to Sarasota, Fla., when
she was 6 and she has called that home ever since. She is an EWM
and humanities major, with a minor in hospitality management. She
has a twin brother, and her young brother and sister are also twins.
Her parents are from Germany, and she loves to travel. She hopes to
work abroad someday or find a job that allows her to travel. Taylor Callahan
After earning her EWM degree, Callahan hopes to work in the field
of editing or publishing. Originally from Ormond Beach, Florida,
she enjoys traveling and reading.
Katie Cole
A fourth-generation Seminole, Cole is an EWM major with a minor
in History. Born and raised on the Gulf of Mexico in Ft. Myers, Fla.,
and with a love for cooking, baking, decorating, and the outdoors,
Cole hopes to eventually work for Southern Living Magazine.
Abbey Cory
Originally from Lakeland, Fla., Cory is an EWM major who will be
moving to New York City after graduation to pursue a career in the
44 Summer/Fall 2012
magazine industry. She enjoys music and traveling, and has been
known to laugh at her own jokes. Josh Davis
Hailing from Sarasota, Fla., Davis is an EWM major with a minor
in law and society. He hopes to attend law school at Stetson after
graduating in spring of 2013. In his spare time, he likes to play
basketball and collect sports memorabilia.
Amanda Diehl
Covert blogger and lover of all things fiction, Diehl is seeking
a degree in editing, writing, and media (EWM) with a minor in
communications. With plans to graduate in spring of 2013, her
goal is to work for a publishing company as copyeditor or to write
scathing reviews of bestsellers in many literary publications.
Andrea Fetcik
A lover of dance and the fine arts, Fetcik is a double major in EWM
and International Affairs and would love to travel the world will
writing. She is excited for the future and plans on graduating spring
of 2013.
Mollye Harper
Having graduated in the spring of 2012, Harper is a double major in
media/communication studies and EWM. She is an aspiring public
relations person from Panama City, Fla. and is a lover of the beach
and water sports. Carlos Lloreda
Coming from sunny Miami, Lloreda enjoys going to the beach and
playing paddleboard in his free time. He is currently an EWM and
communication studies double major aspiring to be a great all-around
person when graduation comes along in spring of 2013.
Marybeth McConnell
An Illinois native, McConnell is an EWM major with a minor in art
history who will graduate in summer of 2012. Upon graduation,
her goals include leaving Tallahassee to pursue a master’s degree in
journalism.
Yasmin Parsloe
An immigrant from London, Parsloe is an aspiring political journalist
currently pursuing a degree in editing, writing and media. She is an
Allie Sclafani
After earning a degree in EWM and a minor in English education,
Sclafani hopes to become a college professor of comparative
literature. Originally from Corona, Calif., she enjoys spicy foods,
baseball, and spending time with her family.
Darby Schwartz
Having graduated in spring of 2012, Schwartz is an EWM major
with a minor in communications. She is an Atlanta native. Upon
graduation, she wants to pursue a career in fashion, food, travel, or
event planning.
Alexandria Wallace
An EWM major with minors in film studies, Spanish, and
anthropology, Wallace spends most of her free time camping and
listening to music. She is graduating in spring of 2013 and, after
grad school, is hoping to pursue a career in documentary filmmaking. Advisors: Susan Hellstrom and Jack Clifford
Student editors: Kayla Becker, Eric Fisher, Samantha Fuchs
Design editor: Corie Biandis
Summer/Fall 2012 45
Scroll, Scribe & Screen
The Florida State University
College of Arts & Sciences
Department of English
405 Williams Building
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580
Visit the English department online
and stay up to date with our news.
english.fsu.edu

twitter.com/#!/fsuenglishnews
46 Summer/Fall 2012

Newsletter Fall 2012 - English Department

Transcription

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