This Week in English | September 30-October 6, 2024
Dryer Presents at CMJ Colloquium Today at Noon
Today at noon at the CMJ colloquia series in Dunn Hall 424, Dylan Dryer will be giving a short talk about the often-occluded practices of journal editing and of preparing manuscripts for potential review. Dryer will offer an alternative to conventional wisdom about the literature review and leave plenty of time for Q&A to dispel rumor, myth, and hearsay. There may even be time for noun clauses!
The talk can also be viewed on Zoom (for the link write to Haley Schneider).
This presentation grows out of, and feeds back into the upper-division seminar Dryer is leading this fall under the special topics designator ENG 429. Five juniors, eight seniors, and a graduate student are taking the course.
ENG 429: A Semester in the Life of Written Communication
How do academics make knowledge? Who decides what gets published and how does that work? What does the editor-in-chief of a scholarly journal do? This seminar offers students a ringside seat at the day-to-day editorial operations of Written Communication, a leading international empirical-research journal in Writing Studies. Students interested in or curious about a career in editing or publishing, or who wish to learn more about the craft and complexities of contemporary academic scholarship, will learn about the history of academic publishing and explore contemporary controversies and reform-efforts (e.g., the marginalization of the Global South, the politics of citation, and the challenges of publishing research conducted with alternative epistemologies). We will also dig into the hands-on aspects of developmental editing work with authors as well as nuts and bolts of copyediting scholarly prose. Students will have a chance to learn about the entire process of publishing academic manuscripts, from vetting initial submissions to double-blind peer-review to galley-proof and layout.
MA Alum Markey in October Issue of Written Communication
And while we’re on the topic, the lead author of the lead article in the October issue of Written Communication is MA alum Ben Markey, who is currently pursuing a doctorate in rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. As noted above, the journal is co-edited by our own Dylan Dryer and Mya Poe, Professor of English at Northeastern.
Talty Presents on New Novel at Bangor Bull Moose on Wednesday
Morgan Talty will be the guest at the next live installment of Maine Public’s All Books Considered book club.
The event is scheduled for October 9 at 7 PM and will take place at Bull Moose in Bangor. MPR host Bill Nemitz will be in conversation with Talty about Talty’s latest book, the acclaimed novel Fire Exit.
The event will be streamed on various channels as well; learn more about those options at the Maine Public website. If you are unable to attend in person, you can submit questions here. This event is free and open to the public.
Moxley Presents on Poet and Diarist Marie Uguay on Friday in Quebec
Jennifer Moxley will discuss the life and work of the poet Marie Uguay with Frédéric Rondeau, the director of UMaine’s Canadian-American Center, at the biennial conference of the American Council for Quebec Studies, which will be held in Quebec City later this week.
The special session, which will take place on Friday at 5:15pm, will be devoted to the first translation into English of Marie Uguay’s Journal, which combines reflections on poetry writing and an account of her personal experience. The discussion with the poet and translator Jennifer Moxley will focus on the challenges of translating Uguay, as well as on her own views on the Journal.
Garfield Book on Living without a Car Forthcoming from 12 Willows
Hank Garfied writes in with news that his non-fiction book “Slower Traffic: Life in Maine Without a Car” will be published by 12 Willows Press in March 2026. The book will be a collection of essays most culled from my blog and incorporating some new writing. The manuscript is due in March 2025, so I’ll have a busy winter!
New Writing Series Hosts Keith Rosson on October 10
The New Writing Series is sponsored by the English Department in partnership with the Center for Poetry and Poetics (formerly the National Poetry Foundation). Since its inception in 1999, the series has hosted more than 400 creative writers in a wide range of genres for live readings on campus. This fall the series marks its 25th anniversary by offering seven events, all of which take place in the Fernald APPE Space in the IMRC (Stewart Commons 104) on Thursday afternoons starting at 4:30pm. They are free and open to the public.
About three dozen students, faculty, and community members were on hand for the Series kickoff last Thursday. This Thursday is Rosh Hashanah, so our next event will be on October 10 and will feature Keith Rosson, who will be introduced by Jeremy Parker. We’ll have more details about the reading in next week’s bulletin.
Other authors featured this fall include Rod Moody-Corbett (introduced by Hollie Adams), Dawn Lundy Martin (introduced by Jennifer Moxley), Babak Lakghomi (introduced by Greg Howard), Daisy Fried (introduced by Steve Evans), and Nick Rees Gardner (introduced by Morgan Talty).
Queen City Scribe Series Kicks Off on October 13
Victoria Hood and Zack Lavway from the Department of English are co-hosting a monthly reading series and are looking for local writers who are interested in reading.
The Queen City Scribe Series is currently scheduled to take place monthly from October 2024 to March 2025, hosting readings on the second Sunday of each month at Bangor Beer Co. These events are free and open to the public.
Anyone interested in applying to read their work as part of QCSS can find more information here.
College Composition Updates
On Friday, October 4, the College Composition teachers will meet to conduct their first portfolio calibration session. Teachers will read, score, and discuss past College Composition portfolios to build shared understandings of the criteria of the Portfolio Assessment Rubric.
What’s Happening in College Composition Classes
Kat Gibson reports in from her English 101 section:
Last week in ENG 101, my students and I read Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” where she describes her experience as a Black woman in academia and focuses on the importance of listening to diverse perspectives and acknowledging subjectivity. In our discussion in class, we emphasized the importance of “approaching knowledge”: recognizing the importance of engaging with others’ experiences while also knowing that we can never fully understand experiences that are not our own. This is helping us to think critically about how we use language to describe and engage with ourselves and others.
These insights build on our previous course readings by Kevin Roozen, Victor Villanueva, and Anne Berthoff. These texts together ask us to consider how our voices contribute to varied meaning-making across diverse communities and reflect on how we can better cultivate “notions of honor, respect, and good manners” in these spaces (Royster 33). We’re also working to connect these concepts of identity, interpersonal communication, and empathy to our work with the PAR [Portfolio Assessment Rubric], an act that encourages our collaborative understanding of the document. I feel that this supports the college composition program’s principle of valuing student labor as they imagine how they can repurpose and develop their composing practices to meet their present and future goals.
And Miracle Gant shares some recent updates as well:
This week, we’re gearing up to write our essays for next week by reading Johnny Saldaňa’s piece “Blue-Collar Rant” and discussing conventional V unconventional mechanics. At the end of this week, we did some freewriting about the kinds of voices we want to use in our writing and how we can use those composing choices to help us accomplish a goal in our writing. Next week, we’ll be using our discussion about conventions and voice to set us up to write rough drafts. We’ll also return to our “Questions About Claims” infographic I made so they can home in on their own claims and controlling purposes. Exciting times!
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University of Maine Language Acknowledgment
