News Archive

2005

Posted April 18, 2005
Spring Choral Concert April 23 features choral performance of a poem by Mark Neely: "Visions," a collaboration between Mark Neely and Ball State Music Professor Joseph Harchanko, will premiere Saturday, April 23, as part of the Spring Choral Concert, which takes place at 7:30 pm in Sursa Hall.  The Ball State Chamber Choir will perform "Visions," which sets to music a poem, "Eleven Visions," by Professor Neely.

General admission to the concert is five dollars.  Tickets are free to BSU student with ID at EA Box Office through 4:00 pm Friday, April 22.

Notes by the composer:

"Like many of my works, Visions deals with ideas in opposition, between which the lines become blurred. As I fall asleep, at what point are my thoughts dreams and not simply thoughts? How is my experience different, or any less significant, when I dream than my thoughts are when I am awake? Mark Neely's poem, Eleven Visions, clearly delineates in structure the difference between waking life and dreams, and yet the ideas and the imagery of the different sections flow easily across this boundary.

"The imagery in the poem is central to all the musical ideas. Every phrase is colored to the words causing the music to ebb and flow between dissonance and consonance, between brightness and darkness resulting in a netherworld between the sounds, as if floating between sleep and wakening. We found a striking sympathy for each other’s work as the composition reflected many common experiences resulting in part from the coincidence that Mark, a Midwesterner, composed the poems in Alabama, and I, originally from Alabama, composed the music in the Midwest. But much beyond this, I think, there is a voice that transcends specifics of time and place as our dream vision often does. I am pleased to dedicate this work to Jeffrey Pappas and the Ball State Chamber Choir."
--Joseph Harchanko, Ball State music professor

Posted April 11, 2005
"Writing Out of the Margins" performance reading April 12: Barbara Bogue's English 309 (Creative Writing in the Community) students will present a reading of original collaborative works with their writing partners from Big Brothers Big Sisters, Heritage Retirement Village, Hillcroft Services, Inc., and and VSA Arts Indiana. The reading will take place April 12, at 6:30 p.m., at Muncie Civic Center.  This event, which is funded by Lily Endowment and sponsored by  Creative Writing in the Department of English, is free and open to the public.

This Creative Writing in the Community event was recently profiled in the Muncie Star Press.  Read the article.

Posted April 4, 2005
Memoirist Michael Perry to read at Ball State April 20: Memoirist, essayist, and fiction writer Michael Perry will read from his new collection of essays on Wednesday, April 20th at 7 p.m. in Bracken Library, Room 225, on the Ball State campus as the final event in the 2004-2005 Visiting Writers Series sponsored by Lilly II and Creative Writing in the Department of English. Refreshments will be served after the reading at a book signing and reception with the author. Both events are free and open to the public.

Michael Perry is the author of four books, including Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren At a Time (HarperCollins, 2002), Big Rigs, Elvis, and the Grand Dragon Wayne (Whistlers & Jugglers Press, 1999), and Why They Killed Big Boy…and Other Stories (Whistlers & Jugglers Press, 1996). Perry’s latest book, Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets & Gatemouth’s Gator—Essays will be released by Perennial the week before his visit to Ball State.

Perry was raised on a dairy farm near New Auburn, Wisconsin, and put himself through nursing school working as a cowboy. He has written for Esquire, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, and Cowboy Magazine. He is the only member of the New Auburn Area Fire Department to have missed a meeting because of a poetry reading.

More on Michael Perry from his website: (www.sneezingcow.com).

Posted Mar. 31, 2005
An English Department Gathering - Visit With Gary Scharnhorst: The GSAB is hosting an informal conversation with and reception for Gary Scharnhorst Wednesday, April 6, 3:00 - 4:30 in Robert Bell 361.  Dr. Scharnhorst is a professor of English at the University of New Mexico and a Ball State alumnus (M.A. in English, 1973). The author or editor of some 25 books on American literature, Dr. Scharnhorst has five more books forthcoming, including a biography of the nineteenth-century American writer Kate Fields. In addition, he has been a frequent Fulbright lecturer in Germany, the president of the Western Literature Association, a section head for MLA, and co-editor of the journal American Literary Realism and (in alternate years) of the MLA’s American Literary Scholarship.

In addition to visiting with the English department, Dr. Scharnhorst will deliver the Kirkham Lecture, “In Defense of Literary Biography,” at 6 p.m. in the Alumni Center.  His visit to campus is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, and University Libraries. 

Posted Mar. 30, 2005
Lou Rowan to read his fiction April 6: Writer and editor Lou Rowan will read his fiction Wednesday, April 6, 7 p.m., in Bracken Library 225.  Rowan has recently completed three books: Except my Life, a collection of short stories; Let Leaves: Poems 1967-1997; and, My Last Days, a satirical Superman autobiography in which the prominent American superhero takes on the economic, cultural, and political establishment in New York City, retires to Kansas, but returns to his mission as the President, bringing compassion and danger to the second Bush term. He’s currently working on a long novel about losing the American West.

Rowan edits Golden Handcuffs Review, and his fiction appears in Prague Literary Review and English Studies Forum. His stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of journals, notably a study of David Antin in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. He began writing in New York City and participated in many of the literary experiments around St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

He has earned his living as an institutional investor and as an educator. Originally from Southern California, he lived in New York for three decades before moving to Seattle in 1997, where he edits Golden Handcuffs Review and works in real estate with his wife, the artist and designer Virginia Holzheimer.

Recommended:

• "Unreel", a short story in English Studies Forum
• Golden Handcuffs Review
• "Large Risks, Kinky Sex," a profile of Rowan and Golden Handcuffs Review

Posted Mar. 23, 2005
Kristie Fleckenstein wins CCCC Outstanding Book Award: Kristie Fleckenstein's book Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching (Southern Illinois University Press) was honored with the Outstanding Book Award, presented at the Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). CCCC is a constituent group of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). CCCC presents the Outstanding Book Award each year to the author or editor of a book that makes an outstanding contribution to composition and communication studies.

In Embodied Literacies, Professor Fleckenstein responds to calls to enlarge the purview of literacy to include imagery in its many modalities and various facets. She argues that we must evolve new literacies when we live in a culture saturated by images on computer screens, televisions, even billboards. Decisively and clearly, she demonstrates the importance of incorporating imagery—which is inextricably linked to our psychological, social, and textual lives—into our epistemologies and literacy teaching.

Posted Mar. 16, 2005
Award-winning poet Bruce Smith will read March 24: Bruce Smith will read from his poetry at 7 p.m. in Bracken Library 225 on Thursday, March 24th, as part of the 2004-2005 Visiting Writers Series sponsored by Lilly II and Creative Writing in the Department of English. Smith's last book, The Other Lover (U. Chicago Press, 2000) was nominated for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer. His new book, Songs for Two Voices (U. Chicago Press, 2005) was released this very month, so the reading/reception will be a book party of sorts.

Posted Mar. 14, 2005
Barbara Bogue and Elizabeth Young to read at next Friday Forum, Mar. 18: Barbara Bogue, Assistant Professor, and Elizabeth Young, graduate student, will read original works of poetry and prose dealing with the Vietnam War at the Friday Forum, March 18 at 3 p.m. in Robert Bell 361.  Their reading, titled "Wars Brought Home: The Autobiographical in Poetry and Prose," addresses the collision of loyalty and betrayal.  This event is sponsored by the Graduate Student Advisory Board.

Posted Feb. 18, 2005
Martha Payne to present "Adventures in Research" at Friday Forum, Feb. 18:  Martha Payne will discuss her research on the classicist B. L. D'Ooge in this year's first Friday Forum, February 18 at 3 p.m. in Robert Bell 361.  Dr. Payne will discuss aspects of the life of Benjamin Leonard D’Ooge and his family as gleaned from books, and the diaries of his wife, Jennie Pease D’Ooge.

B.L D’Ooge was a Classicist who taught Latin at Eastern Michigan University for over 50 years. In addition to teaching, D’Ooge also published numerous Latin textbooks for high school and college students. The diaries of Mrs. D’Ooge throw insight on Dr. D’Ooge’s and hers as the wife of an academic raising a family of four children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Posted Feb. 4, 2005

New Book by Kecia Driver McBride: The English Department is happy to announce the publication of Visual Media and the Humanities: A Pedagogy of Representation (University of Tennessee Press), edited by Kecia Driver McBride.  In this collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines address the intersection of humanities education and the visual media in all its forms. Their essays offer diverse approaches to the visual media, including the exploration of new technologies and their usefulness to the humanities, case studies of individual texts and their visual adaptations, the development of new critical frameworks, and practical discussion of classroom techniques.

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Ball State doctoral student earns Fulbright-Hays grant to study linguistics in Africa

8/29/2005 - Philip Rudd, a Ball State University doctoral student in linguistics, will be traveling to Nairobi, Kenya, in September on a prestigious Fulbright-Hays grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) program provides grants to fund individual doctoral students conducting research in modern foreign languages and area studies in other countries. Rudd's grant will allow him to study in the African capital for six to 12 months. Read more

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Paul Ranieri receives Outstanding Faculty Service Award

8/22/2005 - Paul Ranieri, Associate Professor of English, was recognized at the fall faculty meeting August 20 for his years of dedicated service to the Ball State community.  Read more

Radio series produced by Lauren Onkey's students featured on IPR

8/20/2005 - Beginning April 25 at 5:30 p.m., Indiana Public Radio begins a new radio series entitled "Consuming a Nation." The series is the product of Lauren Onkey’s seminar at the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry. Seminar students are studying the impact of tourism on Ireland.

Americans spend more than any other people on travel and tourism. Nearly a million Americans traveled to Ireland last year alone. We buy souvenirs, take pictures, send postcards, and soak up the culture of new places. But what effect does tourism have on the culture we consume? And how are we affected by what we see and do as we travel?

"Consuming a Nation" reveals the insights gleaned by the seminar students who traveled to Ireland in February. The series was recorded, written, and edited by the students with assistance from IPR’s Marcus Jackman, host of NPR’s "All Things Considered" and Indiana ArtsDesk. It continues all this week at 5:30, and culminates in an hour-long special on IPR at 3:00 p.m. May 6.

Listen to Indiana Public Radio at WBST 92.1FM Muncie, WBSB 89.5FM Anderson, WBSW 90.9FM Marion, WBSJ 91.7FM Portland, and WBSH 91.1FM Hagerstown-New Castle, or online at www.bsu.edu/ipr.