Faculty

"For 20 years I have been studying stories, how they've been told over the centuries, how they've affected and impacted lives, what medium was used to tell the story and what effect it may have had on the audience's reception. My research interests include narrative journalism and oral history and the broad overlap between their respective approaches to information gathering. I'm also fascinated by the role that digital technologies and multimedia journalism are playing in the evolution of the Fourth Estate."

"My personal, creative photography is primarily of landscapes and nature details and is a mixture of color digital images and large format black & white images, made using a 4" x 5" field camera, analog film and traditional darkroom methods. Recent self-assigned projects have involved multiple trips to the American Southwest to photograph isolated, ancient pueblo ruins sites, a trip to Peru to photograph Machu Picchu and other Incan ruins, and a project photographing receding glaciers in Alaska, Montana, and the Canadian Rockies. Photographs from the ancient pueblo ruins and Inca sites are part of a sizeable solo exhibit titled 'Ancient Echoes in Stone.' The glacier images from Alaska were part of a recent solo exhibit, and fieldwork on that glacier project is ongoing. I also have many years of experience doing editorial, commercial and industrial photography on a freelance basis."

"For a number of years my energies have been engaged with Twentieth Century American, British, and World Literature-including poetry, fiction, and drama-but more recently, I have been drawn to the multidisciplinary dynamics of creativity as an aspect of both cultural and natural environments. A term that best describes this focus, perhaps, is 'bio-formalism,' with its suggestion that cultural artifacts, such as paintings, plays, and poems or choreography and compositions, are significantly shaped by, derived from, and dependent upon our individual biographies, our personal and commonly shared biology, and our place as creatures of consciousness within the larger and evolving biotic system. As a practical matter, this means that young writers in my classes are continually encouraged to explore the artistic and natural world around them as a way of discovering and articulating the intricacies of selfhood."

"I often think of clay hills, d'Adamo walking backwards, or riding his wagon full of seedlings, reciting proverbs and tales to those doing the planting, such as my father and grandfather. Come on boys, know the one about Cilacchiatt'-who tied chickens to his belt? End of the row and I'll tell you how he fared-jumping from a fifth floor window. Is it too much to ask of a poem that it sustain us, or our curiosity at least, to the end of the 'row'? Is it too much to ask for an instant of faith in Cilacchiatt's power to fly? In reading, writing, and teaching it strikes me as utterly indispensable."

"Because the news of the day distracts me, my recent work is concerned with the current events that ask my writing to speak out of and about this new century of ours. There, where accumulation relies both on a kind of lyricism as well as on devastation, where things and ideas stack up in expected places -- a corner, a flat surface -- and in unexpected ones, amidst objects and ruin, both private and public, my work finds its focus. I want writing to exist in response to the world in which it was built and to be part of that world. I am concerned with questions of voice, what is shaped by region and by landscape, by faith and faithlessness."

"I'm writing a memoir which has me thinking about the stories that our lives write. Memoir crams the writer into close proximity with their own experience, but the act of writing forces a distance that helps makes sense of it all. Maybe. Sometimes I'm not so sure. What draws me to memoir is the brazen honesty. Do I have the fortitude for it? Fiction allows a masquerade. A respite. Memoir shoves the writer under the lights where it gets hot and can get to feeling desolate, but that's where faith in the process must kick in to carry the writer back to safety."

"I currently have three manuscripts in progress: a novel in the form of linked short stories, a young adult novel set in a fictional town called Twilight, Indiana, and a series of texts comprised of my feedback-marginalia, imagistic thoughts, end notes, etc.-to works written by students and professional writers. I began writing stories mostly because the works of other writers moved me-and because I wanted to be able to similarly move some potential reader who might find something I'd written in her hands. I am drawn to image and syntax and story, to the inexplicable thing that happens when our brains begin to negotiate and make sense of the language of others."