• Sayanti Ganguly Puckett Gives Presentation at Noon at the Nerman
English’s own Sayanti Ganguly Puckett gave a wonderful presentation at the Noon at the Nerman, Friday, March 28. The topic of her presentation was the photography/painting Gray Dawn (2006) by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Included in her presentation was an original poem about the poem:
Gray Dawn
Gray dawn comes again and the age-old question comes again. What of miracles in the land? Broken, bedridden, in thrall to each breath, you must wait and rest in a perfectly modulated state of hush and pallor. Place your hand over your slackening heart and wait as directed. Don’t try to rise. Wait. Don’t get excited. Don’t think too much. Avoid all sudden shifts in body and perspective. Turn your head slowly. The meds are coming.
Bereft and fever-bound, wonder now at the weight of all this exhaustion. Wonder about your connections and terminations. Wonder about the payments and payouts. Wonder about the official word and its efficient world, about those looming smokestacks assuming a sense of near-natural permanence, about your beloved plants growing thinner and thinner as they twist along that grimy pane you look to for answers. Wonder at nothingness or nothing at all. Wonder why the nurse is late.
Consider this gray dawn and the relentless industry involved. Consider this unshakable exhaustion and the grave framing its desiccated flowers. Consider how the machines but not the flowers can go on without you. When you look out do you also look away? Is that that the age-old question you really meant to ask when the one about miracles finally dissolved into the smoky expanse?
• Article by Beth Gulley Is Published
Beth Gulley’s article “Feedback on Developmental Writing Students’ First Drafts” was published in the Journal of Developmental Education, Fall 2012 issue. The article comes from part of the research for her dissertation. Here is the abstract:
Many writing teachers provide feedback to their students through writing conferences; however, the existing literature indicates teachers may unintentionally harm their weaker students by using this strategy. To better understand the effect of the writing conference on developmental writing students, the researcher created a mixed design ANCOVA to answer the research question: What is the effect of oral feedback delivered via student teacher conferences on significant revisions to content, structure, grammar, and style for developmental writing students? The study found no statistically significant difference among treatment groups. Therefore, the researcher concluded that students improved their drafts regardless of the feedback method.
Congratulations on your publication, Beth!
• Writer’s Showcase: Ruth Heflin
Ruth is an adjunct professor of English. She is the author of I Remain Alive: the Sioux Literary Renaissance. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2000.
She also wrote a chapter “Black Elk Passes on the Power of the Earth,” in The Black Elk Reader.
She is also working on a series of four novels set in Kansas—the Cosmic Wind series, under the pseudonym Rajah Hill.
$1.99 at Smashwords.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Kobo, iBooks, Sony’s Readerstore, Diesel Bookstore, and Versent Books.
• Carmaletta’s Publication News
I have a new publication “I’m Lonely, I’ll Build Me a Family: Functional Family Relationships in the Life and Art of Langston Hughes” in Critical Insights Langston Hughes ed. R. Baxter Miller, Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013.
• Writer’s Showcase: Greg Gildersleeve
Greg has recently published a book: THE POWER CLUB is available on Amazon Kindle:
Greg Gildersleeve is an adjunct associate professor who has taught at Johnson County Community College since 2007. A native of St. Joseph, MO, he graduated from Missouri Western State College (now University) and earned his master’s in English/Professional Writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Greg maintains two blogs:
The Power Club:
http://powerclubnovel.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/welcome-to-the-power-clubs-very-own-blog/?preview=true&preview_id=3&preview_nonce=9c4708ef36
The Semi-Great Gildersleeve
http://www.greggildersleeve.com
– for those interesting in writing and publishing fiction.
• Writer’s Showcase: Steve and Sharon Gerson
Steve and Sharon Gerson will publish the 8th edition of Technical Communication: Process and Product in January 2013. On the same day that they completed all phases of the publication process for this textbook, their publishing company, Pearson Prentice Hall, commissioned Steve and Sharon to write a new book, to be published in January 2015, entitled Professional Communication in Today’s Workplace. Both books focus on workplace communication, but the textbooks are geared toward different audiences/departments. The new book will have a technology and collaborative writing slant, in addition to including all workplace communication topics (ethics, audience, style, graphics, etc.) and genres (letters, reports, social media, user manuals, proposals, web design, etc.). Steve and Sharon are also authors of Workplace Writing: Planning, Packaging and Perfecting and Workplace Communication: Process and Product.
http://www.pearsonhighered.com/gerson/
• Writer’s Showcase: Karen Anderson
By Karen Anderson, who is an adjunct professor of English.
Over the past 25 years I have written hundreds of adult learning lessons and programs for students in credit classes and for participants in non-credit courses at JCCC. While pulling together several diverse programs for a curriculum of soft skills for young adults in a summer camp, I realized I had the contents of a book. The manuscript for Developing Professional Influence and Presence was born. Yet, I knew it would take awhile to transform training materials into readable, self-directed prose. I had been working with my Mastermind Group regarding marketing strategies for my professional development business, and publishing electronic books was part of the discussion. Then it dawned on me to take each program as a chapter and write it as a “chapter book” to sell on my website as an e-book. That way I could write and sell my original text, chapter by chapter: “Appearance and Presence,” “Leadership from the Ranks,” “Influence and Persuasion,” “Effective Email Messages,” “Relationship Building,”“Productive Conflict,” “Presentation and Facilitation,” and more. That is entrepreneurial writing!
Further Info:
Karen L. Anderson, M.A., CTD
President of ACTS-ion Solutions, LLC
“Moving Minds, Moving Lives, & Moving Forward Together! “
www.acts-ionsolutions.com
www.acts-ionsolutions.blogspot.com
www.linkedin.com/in/KarenLAndersonofLenexa
www.facebook.com/pages/ACTS-ion-Solutions-LLC/211940262214885?sk=wall
Twitter: KarenLAnderson8
Member of Global Speakers Federation (GSF)
Member of National Speakers Association (NSA)
Former President of NSA-Kansas City Chapter (NSA-KC)
Kansas Supreme Court-approved Core and Civil Mediator
Principal Owner of Outdoor Construction, Inc.
Former Director of an intercity charter school in Kansas City
Facilitator with Institute for Management Studies (IMS)
Consultant with The Center for Business and Technology (CBT)
Lieberman Teaching Excellence Award Recipient
Certified Adjunct Professor (JCCC)
Certified Trainer and Developer (ASTD/OU)
Certified Facilitator (AchieveGlobal and DDI)
Author of Books, including
Making Meetings Work
The Busy Manager’s Guide to Successful Meetings
Proof Positive: Finding Errors before They Embarass You
Living Letters: Make a GREAT Relationship
Co-author of Business Anthologies and Programs, including
Magnetic Leadership
Life Compass for Women
Performance Training: From Discovery to Delivery
Power Tools (for Executives)
• Writer’s Showcase: Anthony Funari
Anthony J. Funari has been an adjunct professor at JCCC since the Fall of 2010. Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, Anthony earned his B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, his M.A. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and his Ph.D. from Lehigh University. While finishing his doctorate, Anthony met his wife, Kim, a native of Lenexa, who showed him the beauty of eastern KS. They moved to Johnson County soon after graduation and haven’t looked back to the East Coast since.
Anthony’s research earned the 2010 College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Outstanding Dissertation award from Lehigh and was nominated for the Council of Graduate Schools Outstanding Dissertation in Humanities in 2011.
In October of 2011, Anthony’s first book, Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse published by Palgrave Macmillan, explores the poetic response to the Scientific Revolution. (http://us.macmillan.com/francisbaconandtheseventeenthcenturyintellectualdiscourse/AnthonyFunari)
Anthony’s work has also been feature in the online journal Early English Studies. (http://www.uta.edu/english/ees/pastissues.html) Currently Anthony is researching the relevance of social media and online communities for the college writing classroom.
• Matthew W. Schmeer
Matthew W. Schmeer joined the JCCC English Department in 2004. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing, a BA in English, and a Writing Certificate, all earned at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. When he is not in the classroom or meeting with students, Matthew writes micro-fiction, poetry, book reviews, and role-playing game materials. He is the author of the chapbook Twenty-One Cents (Pudding House, 2002) and his work has appeared in numerous national and regional literary journals and anthologies both in print and online, including Sentence, Verse, Cream City Review, No Tell Motel, Natural Bridge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Talking River, Kansas English, Maize, Soundings East, Ligature, The Connecticut River Review, Cairn, The Quercus Review, 42opus, and others.
From 1995 to 1998, Matthew edited and published Poetry Ink, an online literary newsletter, and Electric Broadsheet, an irregularly appearing broadside series of short fiction, poetry, and drama. From 2000 to 2010, he published the online journal Poetry Midwest; the back issues can be found at http://poetrymidwest.blogspot.com/
He currently maintains three writing-related blogs:
Rended Press, his rpg blog: http://rendedpress.blogspot.com/
Poetry Midwest+, a digital commonplace: http://poetrymidwest.tumblr.com/
Enjamb, a new blog featuring original works: http://scriptogr.am/enjamb
A sampling of his previously published creative work can be found here:
http://www.umsl.edu/~mfa/people/Schmeer.html
http://www.2river.org/2RView/6_1/poems/schmeer01.html
http://www.2river.org/2RView/6_1/poems/schmeer02.html
http://42opus.com/v2n3/moving
http://42opus.com/v2n3/brautigansguts
http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=617_0_1_0
http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=616_0_1_0
http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=615_0_1_0
http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=614_0_1_0
http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=613_0_1_0
• Mark Browning
Professor Mark Browning has taught writing and literature at JCCC since 1988. He served among the pioneers of online learning at the college and developed the current Bible as Literature course. Throughout those years, Browning has seen himself as a writer. His doctoral dissertation, Haunted By Waters: Fly Fishing In North American Literature was published by Ohio University Press in 1998. Since then, Browning has penned a number of works of varying quality and success.
Over the past several years, he has maintained A Noble Theme, a blog that looks at the intersection of Christianity and literature.
Most recently, Browning has completed a draft of a novel, Forever Blowing Bubbles, the first several chapters of which are linked here.
• Samantha Bell and Creative Non-fiction
Sam Bell earned her undergraduate degree in journalism from SUNY Geneseo in NY, and her MA in creative writing from SUNY Brockport in NY, where she worked with Judith Kitchen. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines to include DIAGRAM, Prick of the Spindle, Paradigm, Lake Affect Magazine, 10x3plus, Fourth River, Coe Review, Under the Sun, The Chesapeake Reader, Pure Francis, Storychord, and The Coachella Review. Her essays have also been anthologized in Split Oak Press’s One for the Road and in DIAGRAM’s 4th anthology, and she has been nominated for a “Best of the Net” award.
Some of Sam’s previous work can be read here:
http://emprisereview.com/emprise-17/memoir-assignment/
http://www.inpossereview.com/ipr_bell.htm
http://thediagram.com/8_6/bell.html
http://www.prickofthespindle.com/nonfiction/2.4/bell/the_facts_as_they_are.htm
• Greg Luthi
Greg Luthi is a veteran creative writing teacher at JCCC, who specializes in fiction and poetry.
Greg Reports on His Sabbatical on Screenplay Writing
The purpose of my fall 2011 sabbatical was to expand and update my knowledge of the craft and the business of screenwriting, in order to offer students more detailed instruction. The result was a twenty-five-page resource guide aimed at providing interested students with an introduction to both the craft and the business aspects. I gathered much of the information from twelve books devoted to screenwriting. Of them, Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting is the best on craft. Almost every page offers an insight, as in McKee’s observation that “TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature” (101).
I’d also recommend David Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script. While its section on craft is not as detailed as McKee’s, it does offer much helpful information on formatting and marketing a script. Another essential book is Brooke Wharton’s The Writer Got Screwed (but didn’t have to): A Guide to the Legal and Business Practices of Writing for the Entertainment Industry. An entertainment attorney, Wharton provides a lot of useful—and sobering—advice on now to market and legally protect a script.
Not only are books available to help the beginning screenwriter, but websites as well. Movie Outline.com and Hollywood Scriptwriter.com offer resources on just about everything related to screenwriting. In addition, screenwriting software is available to correctly format a script, although most programs are expensive and offer features not necessary for the beginning screenwriter. Without a program, the writer will spend more time dealing with format and will find revising more problematic, but he or she can save as much as three hundred dollars. A few of the more popular programs are Movie Magic Screenwriter 6, Final Draft 8, and Movie Outline 3.1.
Ultimately, I learned a great deal about screenwriting, and it was a pleasure to immerse myself in this project!
• Tom Reynolds
Tom Reynolds earned history and English degrees from Washburn University and an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University. Currently, he’s an associate professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. His poems have been published in numerous journals, including New Delta Review, Alabama Literary Review, Flint Hills Review, Little Balkans Review, I-70 Review, Aethlon:The Journal of Sport Literature, Sport Literate, Strange Horizons, Midwest Poetry Review, PotPourri, The Pedestal Magazine, American Western Magazine, 2River View, Prairie Poetry, and Ash Canyon Review. Ligature Press of Topeka, Kansas published his poetry chapbook Electricity, and in 2008, Woodley Memorial Press of Washburn University published his poetry collection Ghost Town Almanac. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, edited by Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam Goldberg, and in The 2005 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2004.
His poetry chapbook The Kansas Hermit Poems was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013. Here’s one of the blurbs that will appear on the back cover (from former JCCC professor Kevin Rabas) and also links to two poems that will be included in the chapbook.
Cut from Thoreau’s cloth, Reynolds’ collection transports us to a Kansas version of Walden, where the small talk and affectation of society silence in the face of birdsong and woodfire crackle. The speaker of these poems retreats to his sod house, where we, as readers, are returned to a simpler, more lyrical, more connected time, place, and way. Through these holistically-linked poems, Reynolds illuminates this magical, naturalistic terrain of meaningful place and character.
–Kevin Rabas, author of the poetry collections Bird’s Horn and Other Poems and Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano
Tom Reynolds read at The Writer’s Place in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 1, along with a number of other writers who have been recently published in the book To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices, edited by Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg.
The anthology is a tribute to the arts and culture of Kansas focuses on our state motto (“To the stars through difficulties”) through the use of the renga, a 700-year-old Japanese form of poetry in which each writer adds new lines to the poem.
Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg developed the renga project as part of her website, www.150KansasPoems.wordpress.com, to help lift up and share the literary arts in Kansas. Throughout 2012, new sections to the renga appeared atwww.150KansasPoems.wordpress.com every two to three days, giving subscribers and visitors to the site the poetry equivalent of regular sequels. Mirriam-Goldberg says, “The renga draws together descendants of pioneers, lovers of dogs or cats or both, attorneys and people who’ve spent time in jail, old hippies and young activists, social workers and psychologists, mothers and grandfathers, mathematicians and dancers, college professors emeritus and current students, authors and editors, ministers and mediators. In our poetic conversation, we celebrate Kansas and make community with others and with readers.”
Some Examples of Tom’s Poems:
“The Hard-Boiled Paleontologist”
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=1843
“How to Survive on a Distant Planet”
http://www.eclectica.org/v8n2/reynolds.html
• Danny Alexander
Though he studied Creative Writing and Film as Literature in school, Danny Alexander primarily publishes music journalism. He has written for a variety of publications, including The Kansas City Star, New Letters Book Review, Pitchweekly, The Source and Counterpunch, and serves as an associate editor of Dave Marsh’s music and politics publication Rock & Rap Confidential.
Danny has published articles about diversity in Scholar Space@JCCC on the JCCC library website. He also has a recent article in Counterpunch: Springsteen’s Call to Arms
