#sunyfredonia

You know what today is! This #FeatureFriday we have SUNY Fredonia Professor Eric Schlich! This is his second year teaching at Fredonia as a Creative Writing lecturer.

Professor Schlich gives us some great advice about overcoming the challenges of being a writer. He also gives us some insight into the release of his new book “Quantum Convention,” which will be celebrated on campus next Thursday at 7pm in the Kelly Family Auditorium. Be sure to check out our Facebook event page for more info!

Below is the full interview! 

1) What classes do you teach at Fredonia?

 I teach Introduction to Creative Writing, Intermediate and Advanced Fiction, Intermediate Creative Nonfiction, Form & Theory of Writing, and creative writing electives such as Humor Writing and Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing.

 Next semester (Spring 2019) I’m excited to teach the Literary Publishing course, which is the class that publishes Fredonia’s undergraduate literary magazine, The Trident. I’m also thrilled to be teaching a Young Adult Novel Writing course. The past workshops I’ve taught have all focused on shorter forms (stories or essays), so teaching approaches to novel writing will be a fun, new experience.

 2) What do you feel is the most interesting or unique thing about Fredonia?

 It’s hard to choose just one! That’s a lot of pressure. But I’m going to go with The Scallion, the humor section of Fredonia’s newspaper, The Leader. I really enjoy reading the comedic journalism the students publish there in the vein of The Onion.

 One of the new advice columns, “Ask Fairy Godmother,” originated as a student piece in my Humor Writing class and I’m really proud it lives on outside the course and has found a wider audience in The Scallion.

 3) What advice do you have for English students?

 My advice applies best to students who want to be writers and it’s this: Sometimes trying is more important than succeeding. We all hate to fail, but being a writer comes with a lot—and I mean a lot—of rejection. You have to have a tough skin and be open to criticism. You have to pick yourself up off the floor and write the next thing. Try, try, try again. Always be hungry for the next project.

 Some writers pride themselves on collecting rejections, but I think that’s the wrong attitude. I collect words and submissions. Every day I work on my writing, I jot down how many new words I wrote. Every time I submit a piece for publication, I put a check on the calendar and mentally pat myself on the back: I did it. I tried today.

 I don’t believe in the dreaded “writer’s block” in the sense of “I’m out of ideas.” There are ideas everywhere! Writer’s block is really a crisis of self-confidence. After the writing project you’re working on inevitably fails to meet your expectations, you wonder: Can I do this thing? Am I good enough?

 To which I say: Pick up the pen and begin again. The only true failure is quitting. The making of a writer is not talent so much as work ethic. My best students are the ones with discipline and drive. You have to be a trier.

 4) Tell us about your new book (What does it entail, what is your inspiration, what do you hope readers will gain?)

 Quantum Convention is a collection of eight stories that (as the copy goes) “balance precariously between reality and fantasy, the suburban and the magical, the quotidian and the strange.” I wrote most of the stories during my MFA at Bowling Green and a few more recent ones while working on my PhD at Florida State.

 The title story is about a high school English teacher who attends a parallel universe convention to meet his multiple selves. He wants to know if they’ve made better choices that led to happier lives (professionally, romantically) than the one he’s leading.

 “Not Nobody, Not Nohow” weaves together the stories of Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West, and a cross-dressing boy whose identity crisis is tied to The Wizard of Oz. There’s also a fairy tale about a banshee and orphan keeners; stories that feature a nerdy teenage cyclops, a lucid dreamer, a girl traumatized by The Rapture, a man who lives next door to Merlin; and more.

 I hope readers will enjoy the book’s whimsy while also feeling for the characters who, despite their sometimes magical circumstances, are really struggling with more down-to-earth problems: loneliness, marriage troubles, self-doubt, growing pains, etc.

 5) Have you written any other books/short stories?

 Yes. I’m revising a draft of a novel called Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife. It’s inspired by heaven tourism books like Heaven is for Real and is about a teenage boy who begins to question whether he really saw heaven during a heart surgery at the age of three. This doubt comes at a bad time: a televangelist who owns a Christian theme park called Bible World has just recruited Eli’s family to promote a Biblical Realm named after him. Plus, he’s discovering his queer identity and is unable to reconcile this with his Southern Baptist family. Poor kid!

 I’m also drafting stories for a new collection—Unpresidented! & Other Dystopias. The title story is about a reality TV show (not unlike American Idol) that now elects the U.S. president. Other stories in the collection will also feature dystopic or apocalyptic themes (I just finished one about a zombie outbreak in a high school).

 6) Is there anything you'd wish I had asked you? Further comments?

 I love to be asked what I’ve been reading for fun. A lot of my reading is for research for my writing or for teaching, but I never lose sight of why I wanted to be a writer in the first place and that’s for the pure love of reading.

 So a few books I’ve enjoyed recently include: The Power by Naomi Alderman, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, and Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.

Hello, and welcome to another #FeatureFriday! Today, we feature Dr. Jeanette McVicker, a professor of English at SUNY Fredonia since 1988 and a scholar of modernist studies. We sat down with Dr. McVicker to get her thoughts about her time at SUNY Fredonia, how you can become a better student, and the importance of a liberal arts education in the modern world.

1) You’ve been with SUNY Fredonia for 30 years. What do you think the most rewarding part of your time as a professor has been?

I would say, when I was heavily involved with interdisciplinary studies [Women’s Studies and Journalism] with English. The combination of those three things may strike people as kind of odd, but that’s been my whole life, trying to bring those three fields together. I was the faculty advisor for the Women’s Student Union [now Fredonia Feminists] for seven or eight years, and I was also the advisor for the Leader for eight years. Working with students outside of the classroom on those kinds of events and publications, and teaching coursework that was inside and outside the English department was by far the most rewarding part of my career.

2) Which of the courses that you have taught do you think students connected the most with? Which do you think you connect the most with?

That’s a hard question. I think different courses connect in different times. We’re in a moment where students are actively seeking out classes that deal with gender studies, but what I think students don’t often actively seek out is classes that actively deal with race, because they’re afraid of the conversations around race. For me, the most rewarding [are] when students who don’t typically think about issues involving race and ethnicity are able to engage and feel opened in a positive way to having those conversations after they take the course. Or classes in my specialty, like teaching Virginia Woolf, that’s part of my research and I obviously get a kick out of teaching that stuff, and I’m always really happy when students connect with it.

3) What is something that happened in one of your classes that you will never forget?

There are so many little moments. Where a student does a research project that’s so surprisingly in-depth, and you didn’t get the sense that that student was thinking along those lines before, those are great little moments. You can almost see the lightbulbs going off. There’s a lot of those kinds of small moments, but I’m thinking of a big, dramatic moment. There was a  student in one of my classes, who was an English/Gender Studies double major, and we were really close. I brought in something, a clip from the news or from a movie, something, but it was a triggering moment for her. She had a very difficult time processing it, and she was really angry that I didn’t prepare her for that. After class, we had this really important conversation; so, it was a negative moment, but it was a very valuable moment for me as a teacher. The student knew me well enough to know that it wasn’t done with malice, that I just hadn’t understood that that could be triggering. I think learning opportunities like that are important for teachers, and the fact that you have them makes you human.

4) What advice do you have for prospective and/or current English students?

Take advantage of opportunities to do co-curricular activities that both complement your major and help to build your skills. Not just writing or reading or editing skills, although those are obviously vital, but other skills [such as] such as how to compromise, how to see other people’s perspectives. Employers are looking for that, no matter what the job is! They’re looking for a variety of skills and the fact that you can be adaptable. Bring your classroom skills into another setting, see how well they connect, and be reflective about those connections. Study abroad!  Getting outside of this culture and getting to observe it from a distance - and also learning about other cultures - it’s so different, and it makes you learn about your own place and your own identity in it.

5) You played an important role in the creation of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at SUNY Fredonia. How would you say that the study of gender connects with the study of English literature?

Writers are always talking about the way that gender works with nation, with race, with language. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf talks about the idea of a “woman’s sentence.” It’s not the idea that women write English differently than men, it’s that the experience of their bodies shapes the way that they think of that first-person pronoun differently. The “I” in the world is a different “I” depending on the experience of your body, depending on the different violence that it’s subjected to or the places that it’s allowed or not allowed. Gender and literature always go together, but it’s ultimately about language.

6) You’ve had a busy summer: You put out two papers (“Ancients and Moderns: Greece, Egypt, and Englishness” and “Echoes of Thucydides Across Virginia Woolf’s Work”). Can you give us some background on this work and your findings?

The important thing is, I’ve got a lot of Woolf stuff. I’m on the editorial board of a journal dedicated to Virginia Woolf studies [“Woolf Studies Annual”] That whole era of modernism, there’s been a lot of discussion of women writers and feminist historiography in modernism. There was a conference in Colorado [“FiMa”] that I gave a paper about women in archeology - which doesn’t seem like it’s part of my field, and it’s kind of not - but I’ve been trying to do some work in Woolf about how she uses history and specifically Ancient Greek history, which was kind of the focal point for my summer work. The idea of gender and feminism in the modernist period has been a long-standing research interest for me, and I try to work it into class when I can.

Modernism, more or less, covers the period from the end of the 19th century to World War II, roughly speaking. It’s about the changes that came about when we think about that period. We think of war - and, certainly war is a major part of modernist studies - but it’s also the rise of consumer society, and advertising; it’s also the rise of mass movements - not just things like fascism, but the idea of a mass public. There’s so many transitions going on, and the arts are all responding to these changes. There are changes in science and technology that are major; think of things like the theory of relativity, or the ways that we think of chemistry. So, how does art respond to its time? Where I’ve come into it is: “When did modernism become something else?” What are the questions that are important to the time?

7) Finally: what would you say is the most important lesson that English can teach us?

Pay attention to language, and how language changes. How it can be manipulated, for both good or bad purposes. To stop thinking about language as a tool, I think that’s what English does differently from other majors where language is also important. The idea that language is not just expressive of the individual, that it expresses national identity, racial and ethnic identities. The attunement to language and its nuances is what I think English is most adept at helping students think about. We’re living in a moment where people are not being attuned to those nuances, and we need more English majors in the world.

Happy #FeatureFriday! Today we are featuring SUNY Fredonia senior, Tori Barnes. Tori is a journalism major with minors in writing and rhetoric and English. Below is Tori’s full interview to tell us more about her plans for the future and what have been the most significant things she has learned. 

1) What has been your favorite ENGL class and why?

My favorite English class was Introduction to Creative Writing. Most of the English classes I’ve taken have focused on grammar, style, or rhetoric, so taking an English class that focused on fiction and poetry was refreshing. I enjoyed learning the fiction and poetry writing strategies and experimenting with the forms like flash fiction and prose poetry. My professor encouraged me to keep writing fiction, even though I didn’t have much experience writing it.  

2) What is the most interesting thing that has happened in an ENGL class?

I had to do the Adopt-A-Beach Cleanup at Point Gratiot for Writing and Social Change. I was reading about plastic pollution in class and learning how it affected the environment. However, seeing its effects on the local community was a powerful experience.

3) What is the most valuable thing you have learned in an ENGL class?

The most valuable thing I learned in an English class came from English Grammar for Everyone. I learned that grammar wasn’t about being right or wrong but about adhering to your medium’s style guide and audience’s expectations. The class made me realize that I wanted to be a copy editor because I enjoyed using grammar and style rules to edit for different contexts. My professor inspired me to become the copy editor for The Leader.

4) As a journalism major and a writing and rhetoric & English minor, what advice do you have?

I’d advise taking a variety of English classes that focus on the different components of English like reading, writing, and editing. I’ve mostly taken English classes that have been writing or editing intensive, but I wish that I’d taken more classes that were reading intensive. I think that writers and editors learn from reading and exposing themselves to different strategies and perspectives.

5) With your major and minors, what do you hope to do in your future?

I know that I want to be a copy editor, but I haven’t decided whether I want to work for a news publication or a book publication. I think that I still have time to figure it out, right?

6) How do you think the classes you've taken from your minors will help you in your major?

Our first #FeatureFriday spotlight is on this senior, Erin Rogers! Erin is an English major with a minor in Creative Writing. Last Spring, Erin received the Mary Louise White Creative Writing Award. We interviewed Erin to get some insight on her experiences in the SUNY Fredonia English Department.

1) What has been your favorite ENGL class and why?

My favorite English class was Contemporary Literary Theory. It was all about looking deeper into texts and noticing its connection to the real world. We talked about humanism, posthumanism, and the change in humans and other species throughout the years. I liked this class because it was challenging; it made me feel stupid at times before I had to just buckle down and work at it until I was able to reach the point in my reading where I understood it and felt like Einstein’s offspring. That class helped confirm how eye-opening and vital literature really could be to understanding so many real-world topics.

2) What is the most interesting thing that has happened in an ENGL class?

The most interesting thing that’s happened in an English class was probably the revelation that nonfiction work isn’t actually the most boring thing in the literary world. I always assumed nonfiction meant dry and boring, but after taking an Intro to Nonfiction writing class I heard stories from people that lived through events that world-renowned fiction writers could only dream of coming up with. I have to admit, I definitely ate my words after taking that class.

3) What is the most valuable thing you have learned in an ENGL class?

The most valuable thing I’ve learned in an English class is probably just to try and find creativity in everything. Every piece of literature and creative writing can have a different meaning in it that’s specific to you as a person and other people might not see it, but that doesn’t make it wrong. You can make it what you want.

4) As an English major /Creative Writing minor, what advice do you have?

The advice that I have is not to second-guess yourself. There are going to be people who read things differently or that might have a different writing style that your professor raves about, but that doesn’t make you any less than them. Basically, don’t change your ideas because you know other people might not agree with them, because conforming to other people’s ideals is just boring and there won’t be as much passion behind it. You’ll find people that feel the same way as you, you just might have to be more patient than others.

5) Please explain the award you received last spring and what it meant to you.