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Faculty Transitions
This summer the English Department bid a very fond farewell to two of Stauffer Hall's most creative muses: John McDowell and Mei Ann Teo.
This summer the English Department bid a very fond farewell to two of Stauffer Hall's most creative muses: John McDowell and Mei Ann Teo.
After ten years of inspiring English majors to exceed even their own expectations in his creative writing and literature courses, John McDowell is returning to Canadian University College where he will take up his previous position as a Professor in their English Department. Professor McDowell brought to the English Department not just a passion for careful textual analysis, but also his talents as both a poet and an artist. In addition, he served as director of the Honors Program for seven of his years at PUC, providing a vision for academic excellence for both the students and faculty involved in that program. Whether teaching first-year composition, Literature of the Bible, Poetry or an honors seminar, he taught students to think critically and be willing to examine all sides of a problem. As Juliette Biondi said in a farewell tribute, "Dr. McDowell taught me not to see the world in black and white but rather varying shades of gray. Even now, I catch myself saying, 'it doesn't have to be either/or.' There has been no greater life lesson to me than this one." (See PUC English Department Facebook page for the full text of tributes read at this departmental farewell event.)
Even in his absence, Stauffer Hall will continue to benefit from Professor McDowell's creative vision in the form of a painting that the English faculty purchased as a farewell gift to the McDowell family. Entitled "Angel Pyre (Vision #1)," this multi-media work of art hangs now just inside the entry to Stauffer Hall.
Another major transition this year is that Mei Ann Teo is leaving PUC to pursue an MFA in Theater Arts at Columbia University.
In the fall of 2004, Mei Ann Teo was hired as PUC’s first “Artist in Residence” and given the task of transforming the Dramatic Arts Society from a student club to a fully integrated part of the English Department. In the seven years that followed, Mei Ann inspired both cast members and audiences in productions ranging from Fiddler on the Roof to Red Books: The Search for Ellen White. Never satisfied with just staging plays without a larger purpose, Mei Ann found herself increasingly drawn to a form of documentary theater which allowed the cast to become an integral part of the experience of gathering, interpreting, and staging stories that were of particular significance to the PUC community. This journey began with Red Books and continued in Clay Feet/Wire Wings, an adaptation of a collection of poems by John McDowell, and This Adventist Life, a montage of stories that explored the essence of our Adventist identity. In her final production at PUC, Mei Ann and her cast explored the “story behind the story” of Alice in Wonderland in a production entitled My Alice. Using a cast that ranged in age from 12 to 95 (casting Alice Holst as the adult Alice Liddell), Mei Ann demonstrated yet again the kind of magic she has learned to create through collaboration. As she said in her “Artistic Director’s Notes” for the show, “This is what I have found: that there is nothing better than making a thing of complexity and beauty with people I love.”
Replacing Mei Ann as director of our theater program is Thorvald Aagaard, a PUC English Dept. alum, having graduate from PUC in 2000 with majors in both English and history. Following graduation, Thor spent several years as a professional actor in the Bay Area before going on to earn his MFA in Theatre Practice at University of Exeter in England. Thor brings to this position the combination of experience in both acting and education that will allow him to carry on the legacy of innovative theater performance that Mei Ann cultivated, as well as help the drama program transition to the next phase in its development as an academic program. In addition to teaching courses in acting and stagecraft, Thor will also be teaching a variety of other courses within the English department, including Playwriting, Survey of Drama and First-Year Composition.
Georgina Hill, who has been a part-time member of the English Department for the past two years, will be joining the faculty full time this year as she replaces John McDowell as director of the Honors Program. Professor Hill chaired the English Department at Andrews University before moving to Western Michigan University where she directed their first-year writing program. She has a Ph.D in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University and brings to both the English Department and the Honors Program a wealth of administrative and teaching experience. She is passionate about helping students fulfill their potential as undergraduates, and also preparing them to enter their chosen professions.
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New AS Degree in Film & Theater Studies
The English Department is very pleased to announce the creation of a joint A.S. Degree in Film and Theater Studies.
The English Department is very pleased to announce the creation of a joint A.S. Degree in Film and Theater Studies.
While examining the future of the drama program it had become clear that our current drama emphasis and drama minor had limitations. We were also aware that the Film & Television program was in need of trained actors, and our drama program was in need of the technical expertise held by Film students. So in collaboration with the Visual Arts Department we created an A.S. degree which, in addition to a core of classes in both areas, offers students the opportunity to specialize in Performance, Technical or Narrative/Writing. (Full curriculum description)
The first of its kind in Adventist Colleges and Universities, this two-year degree offers excellent preparation for students seeking careers in these areas, or for students wanting to increase their expertise in these areas while pursuing four-year degrees in other fields. This new program was approved by the faculty and board in May, received Interim Approval from WASC in September, and we were thrilled to welcome a total of eighteen students to the program when school started this fall. See our news article for more information.
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Heather Reid Completes Ph.D.
In August, Professor Heather Reid returned to the University of Victoria where she successfully defended her dissertation.
In August, Professor Heather Reid returned to the University of Victoria where she successfully defended her dissertation entitled "'The Story of Asneth' and its Literary Relations: The Bride of Christ Tradition in Late Medieval England."
Findings from Dr. Reid's dissertation research have already been presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies and at a conference held at Queens University in Belfast, Ireland on the Geographies of Orthodoxies Project: Mapping Late Medieval Lives of Christ. Dr. Reid's presentation was selected for publication in a book of the conference proceedings entitled Diuerse Imaginaciouns of Cristes Life": Devotional Culture in England and Beyond, 1300-1560. Her work has also been published in a book entitled Women and the Divine in Literature Before 1700.
Dr. Reid remains actively engaged in her scholarship despite a full teaching load, including courses such as Medieval Literature, Renaissance Literature, The Classical World, First-Year Composition, a Great Books class on the theme "Salvation Stories," and the Honors Seminar on Christianity. She specializes in Later Medieval English Literature with a focus on Female Patronage, Women's Writing, and the theological implications of the Bride-of-Christ Tradition in later medieval thought. Her interests include the study of paleography and the dissemination of fifteenth century English manuscripts that have connections to the West Midlands. She received a Herber Grant in the Summer of 2010 to study manuscripts at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. (See Heather's Faculty page for more details).
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"Write it Down": PUC alumna Tanita Davis Becomes Award-Winning Author
PUC English grad Tanita Davis (’93) is now a name to find in major bookstores across the country.
By Peter Katz
PUC English grad Tanita Davis (’93) is now a name to find in major bookstores across the country.
Davis attended PUC from 1989-1993, where she majored in English with an emphasis in American and British Literature. After graduating, she taught for a few years for the State of California, instructing wards of the State, and at private schools. In 2000, Davis sold her first book, The Camp Chronicles, based on her first summer of working at summer camp, to the Review and Herald. Following her publication, she returned to school, earning her Master of Fine Arts in English and Creative Writing from Mills College in 2004.
Writing has always been a part of Davis’s life, not just her schooling. “I went into writing in my preK days,” she says. “Seriously, I had to write all the things I wanted to tell my mother, because she desperately longed for my silence. She'd give me a pad of paper and a pen and say, ‘Write it down.’ This gained her whole minutes of silence.” This mode of expression blossomed in first and second grade, where her teacher, Avonelle Rembolt, held Author Conversations in class, where the students read, were read to, and composed their own stories. It was then that Davis won her first book award. “I was quite proud of that smiley face sticker,” she says.
Davis has recently published two young-adult novels—A La Carte and Mare’s War—and is working on her third, Happy Families, slated to come out in 2012. Her work has been noticed beyond publication. From 2009-2010, Mare’s War was a Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice book, was chosen as one of the Best Books for Young Adults by YALSA, was selected as a Junior Library Guild Book, won the Amelia Bloomer Award, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for Author Honor. Davis herself was also one of five people nominated for the NAACP Image Awards in Outstanding Literary Work: Youth/Teens category.
Unlike many other young-adult writers, Davis began her career with the intent to write for this particular audience. “While people have asked me if I can’t be coaxed into writing for adults, most of the time my thought is, ‘what for?’” Davis says. “I like young adult literature, because there is a freshness and a flexibility in the field. I don’t want to be pigeonholed into any genre, so I am writing, at present, a middle grade chapter novel, a science fiction YA novel, researching an historical fiction, and knee-deep in revising a contemporary novel.” Davis says she enjoys the freedom to explore that young-adult literature provides; for Davis, the genre means that she can write without people “question[ing] […] my expertise or the legitimacy of my qualifications to write—I have been a young adult. That, and the ability to remember that, is really all it takes.”
This love for the freedom of writing shows in Davis’s work and her approach to her work. When asked about her process, Davis responds with the clarity and down-to-earth nature of her genre: “All writing is rewriting. It’s a fact—and once you embrace it and begin to love the process, it all becomes so much easier. Really.”
Tanita Davis currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland, while her husband, PUC alumnus David Macknet (‘97) completes his PhD at the University of Glasgow. Find more about she and her work at http://www.tanitasdavis.com/
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As Told To . . . Morgan Chinnock
Another PUC English alumnae, Morgan Vogel Chinnock, had her first book published by Pacific Press.
By Peter Katz
Another PUC English alumnae, Morgan Vogel Chinnock, had her first book published by Pacific Press just two years following her graduation: The War Within: The Waldemar Leonhardt Story (2009).
The summer after Chinnock graduated in 2007, Marilyn Glaim, Professor Emeritus at Pacific Union College and then Chair of the English Department, received a phone call from Waldemar Leonhardt, an emigrant who grew up in Nazi Germany and lost four brothers in World War II. Leonhardt was looking for someone to ghostwrite his autobiography. Knowing that Chinnock wanted to write someone’s story, Glaim connected them.
Working one day a week for the next two years, Chinnock took down Leonhardt’s story and, as she says, “attached myself to it.” Through what she calls creative nonfiction, Chinnock molded the experiences of Leonhardt into art. It was, she says, “a great privilege to be able to see into [his world]. It’s great to get to know someone who is fifty-something years older than me and from a different culture—great to see the universal human experience through his eyes.”
Inspired by the experience of giving voice to someone else’s story, Chinnock and her husband Andy traveled to Ethiopia during the summer of 2009 to observe first-hand the work being done by the Tropical Health Alliance Foundation (THAF) on issues including obstetric fistula, podoconiosis (a rare form of elephantiasis), and contaminated springs and wells. The trip inspired her to bring awareness back to her community, one of the results of which was PUC students’ choice to support THAF with the 2010 REVO fundraising event.
Still passionate about giving voice to the untold story, Chinnock is now in the second year of an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco, where she is working on a nonfiction novel about her parents’ marriage and divorce, and the generations before them.
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English Alum Publishes Crossword Puzzle in the New York Times
Caleb Rasmussen ('08) has achieved the holy grail for lovers of crossword puzzles.
Caleb Rasmussen (’08) has achieved the holy grail for lovers of crossword puzzles: having a crossword puzzle selected and edited by Will Shortz for publication in the New York Times (Thursday, July 7, 2011).
In the daily Crossword Blog of the NYT Deb Amlen writes “I applaud the creativity and ‘cruciverbal’ derring-do with which he makes his debut here in The New York Times.” Caleb reports that he put his "Stauffer-Hall-forged research skills to use, reading everything I could about the Times puzzle under Will Shortz’s editorship. I probably found and read the majority of the interviews he’s given in the last fifteen years to find hints about his philosophy of good puzzles, and I scoured the online archives of Times puzzles to get a feel for what he’d accepted in the past."
Since the publication of his first puzzle in the NYT on July 7, Caleb has had a literature-themed Sunday puzzle published by the Los Angeles Times on July 24. According to Caleb “it has theme answers that are puns on author names (some of whom I likely wouldn’t know much about had I not studied English at PUC) such as “EASIER SAID THAN DONNE” and “WOOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.” He has also had another 15 x 15 daily-sized puzzle accepted by the NYT. His goal is to have a Sunday puzzle accepted. He says, “I have a Sunday puzzle with puns on Shakespeare titles working its way through the stack on Will Shortz’s desk.”
When he isn’t writing crossword puzzles, Caleb teaches fifth and sixth grade at Chico Oaks Adventist School. In the “Constructor Notes” published in the NYT Crossword Blog he says, “My students commiserated with me on my politely declined submissions all last school year, so I’m happy that I’ll be able to share this story with them in which patience and perseverance, as they often do, paid off.” (http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/blessing/?scp=1&sq=Caleb%20Rasmussen&st=cse).
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Craig Hickerson Premiers Film at Toronto International Film Festival
Craig Hickerson ('10) is the associate producer on the film The Island President which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sep. 10, 2011.
Craig Hickerson (’10) is the associate producer on the film The Island President which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sep. 10, 2011 and won the festival’s People’s Choice Documentary Award. He has been a part of the film since its conception over three years ago when he was working part-time at the San Francisco based company Actual Films, a position which grew out of a summer internship. Many of his PUC teachers and fellow students were not even fully aware of the nature of the project that drew him to San Francisco on a weekly basis. As Craig reports, “I didn't mention it often while in class but I considered this film to be one of those dogs that ate my homework.”
The film is a portrait of Mohamed Nasheed, the current president of the Maldives. In addition to leading a democratic movement which ousted a 30-year dictator, Nasheed also has been known internationally for his role in fighting climate change as his small island nation is already facing the danger of rising sea levels and will likely go underwater within our lifetime. The film follows his dramatic journey to the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 where President Nasheed was instrumental in creating a consensus which was the first international agreement to recognize climate change as a serious threat to the planet and advised that action should be taken to counter it. (For more information see http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/mohamed-nasheed-the-man-in-the-front-line-against-climate-change.)
Craig describes his role as follows: “As is commonly the case in documentary, our film's structure took shape in the editing room. My job as the only full-time employee of the production company responsible for the film was to do whatever it took to further the progress of the edit. This consisted of designing ways to manage media and solving various problems that occur when making a film. In addition it allowed me to be one of five key people present during the editing process and regularly be a part of the discussions that shaped the film. In fact, I don't think there was one rough-cut of the film that I did not weigh in on.
“Now that the film is completed my role has shifted to promoting the film online. The premiere of the film in Toronto has played a huge part in creating the online buzz that is so important for promoting anything to our generation. In Toronto I had the pleasure of finally meeting our film's main character President Nasheed and also working closely with our publicist who has experience with filmmakers such as Errol Morris (The Fog of War, 2003 ) and Lee Daniels (Precious, 2009).
Often I have relied on the skills I acquired while studying in the PUC English Program. Whether it be articulating my personal stories in Sara Kakazu's Creative Non-fiction class, watching Linda Gill crawl across table as she hammers out the important facets of literary theory, or simply being exposed to the wide gamut of literature which dramatically enhances how we understand culture and society. The years of English classroom experience have come together to give me the skills to excel in the real world. I vividly remember growing tired of constructing papers that argue seemingly meaningless points such as chivalry or the nature of the sublime moment but all that work and frustration has amounted to something important and cultivated skills that I use every day. After all a documentary film is really just an audiovisual essay.”
Currently Craig is working on a personal short documentary project about the experience of refugees living in Egypt and their struggle to live in a society that largely does not accept them. He plans to finish it later this Fall.
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AlumNotes
 Here are some additional updates on what some of our graduates are doing.
Here are some additional updates on what some of our graduates are doing. Let us know what's been happening in your life by going to the "Newsletter Signup" link on the PUC English Dept. webpage. There's space there for you to provide an update.
Megan Milholland Brooks ('09) returned to her Alma Mater this fall to serve as the English teacher at PUC Prep.
Laura (Moran) Gang (2000): I’ve been blessed to work at Loma Linda Academy for the last seven years as a junior high English and literature teacher. I married my husband, Duane Gang, in June of 2010. He is a political newspaper reported for The Press-Enterprise in Riverside.
Jenna Grant Matthews (2007): My husband Ryan Matthews and I moved to Phoenix, AZ after we both graduated from PUC. He is working as a nurse at Banner Gateway Medical Center and getting his RN-BSN at Grand Canyon University. I am now attending Capella University for my Masters in Mental Health Counseling. So I am transitioning into another career! I hope to become a middle school counselor. When we are not working or writing papers for school, we love to travel, camp, and root for Oregon State athletics. I also find time to volunteer at church and for the New Song Center, a non-profit that provides peer support groups for bereaved families. I love cooking, scrapbooking, and listening to audio books from our local library. We have two “furry children,” whom we call Sam and Frodo. (Pugs look like the hobbits of the dog world to us.) I loved the English Department – especially the “drama” side, -- and can’t wait to hear what is happening in the old PUC academic world!
[Since submitting this update, Jenna and her husband have moved to Tennessee where she is now an Administrative Assistant at Vanderbilt University]
Margery Rich (1975): I have been teaching English at San Gabriel Academy continuously since 1992 and previously from 1981-1987. I’ve been here long enough to have students tell me, “My mother was in your class,” which does not make me feel as old as I was afraid it would be it happened the first time. I am involved as member and volunteer in the Jane Austen Society—Southwest and the Costumer’s Guild West, Inc., in the latter as a member of the Board of Directors from 2002-2010.
Andrea Rivas (2009): Even though I was an English major (emphasis in Education) at PUC, I ultimately got my first job in my minor area: Spanish. I get the privilege of working with two other PUC grads from different major areas [at Hinsdale Adventist Academy].
The following recent graduates are currently enrolled in the following graduate/professional programs:
Britton Dake ('11): MA in English at University of Vermont
Tauva Hellie ('11): MA in English at San Francisco State
Nicole Hubbard ('10): Studying Computer Animation at the Art Institute of Calif.--Hollywood
Chris Kam ('10): M. Div. at La Sierra University
Peter Katz ('10): Ph.D in Literature at Syracuse University
Timothy Widmer ('10) MFA in Theater Pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University
Paige Worstell ('10): Completed degree at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising
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Editor's Note
It has been a year since the announcement of our new electronic newsletter, and even longer since the publication of the last print edition of "The Ellipses."
It has been a year since the announcement of our new electronic newsletter, and even longer since the publication of the last print edition of "The Ellipses." We can't even begin to cover "all the news you've missed" in this one edition, but we can promise to stay more regularly in touch in the future through this new electronic format. We hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse of what has been happening in the English department, and we look forward to staying in touch through regular updates in the future.
Let us know if there are any stories or features you would like to see us include in future editions of our electronic newsletter. Email cwesterbeck@puc.edu.
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