Literary Festival

The Literary Festival in November 2nd was a great success! If you didn’t have a chance to attend, the theme was “The Writing Life” and there were myriad presentations spanning fiction, poetry, nonfiction, publishing, and everything in between. The guest writers and presenters showcased writing as a means of self-exploration and engagement with the world around us.

The winner of the Flash Fiction Contest was Nichole DiGirolamo, a sophomore Psychology major with a minor in Art — congratulations!

Nichole DiGirolamo

Nichole’s piece, “My Mother’s Closet,” is about childhood memories, specifically memories about the items and colors inside her mother’s closet. Nichole explains, “How I miss being a child and seeing the colors and fabrics and not having a care in the world about anything going on. I wrote the piece because of all of the wonderful memories I had in that closet trying on my mothers shoes that are always way too big. Wearing her jackets that fell to the floor and always seeing the artwork she has kept from all those years. She reacts and treats each one like a million dollar piece of art even though it was terrible.”

An excerpt from her story:

A drawing made by a girl of a house on the hill. It was made with oil pastels, greens, blues, yellows fill the page. The house small but full of windows and doors so there’s a never ending amount of light to enter the home. A bush outside the shape of a cat with a tail longer than a mile it had what looked to be roses growing on it. There’s a walk way with bright pineapple colored stepping stones and in between each stone was smaller lemon colored stones. The sides of the house rough made out of bricks and cement. In the front yard a family, I tall tan man with a mustache the size of the titanic, eyes greener than limes and scribbles on his arms to mimic tattoos. A woman short with blonde hair above her ears with beautiful greenish blue eyes and a girl with long brown hair and straight across bangs giant eyes like pools of chocolate.

This is Nichole’s favorite part of the piece because of the sentimental value: “The picture is me and my family and all the colors and the details used to describe the picture was exactly how it Is described. I drew the photo when I was about 6-7 and remember every moment of making it.” To write the piece of fiction, Nichole describes that she “sat in my mom’s closet and just took a look around at the height level I would be when I was younger. I closed my eyes and touched things and smelled things to get a better sense of my surroundings and to give better detail. I looked at things that had the most meaning, like the shoes and the money. The money showed the trips we took as a family and showed how many memories we had on those trips.”

Here are some photos from the festival on November 2nd:

Panel Discussion – “The Writing Life” From left to right: Barb Strasko, Mitchell Sommers, Matt Kabik, Alex Brubaker, Phil Benoit
Poet Michele Santamaria
Event Organizers: Jeff Boyer and William Archibald

Poet Le Hinton (on left) with Matt Kabik

Former Lancaster Poet Laureate Barb Strasko
Books for sale at the event

Thanks to:

  • Festival Chair William Archibald and Assistant Chair Jeff Boyer for their work organizing the event
  • Curtis Smith, Le Hinton, Jenny Hill, Michele Santamaria, Mitchell Sommers, Barb Strasko, Alex Brubaker, Megan Phillips, Phillip Benoit, Jamie Beth Cohen, Jen Hirt, Laura English, Timothy Mayers, Katarzyna Jakubiak, and Michael Deibert for agreeing to present
  • Graduate Assistant Andie Petrillo for creating the WordPress site and assisting with general planning
  • Rachel Hicks for creating advertising

English Majors Primed to Take on the Digital World

In Dr. Pfannenstiel’s ENGL 318 Web Writing course, Kyle Steffish wrote an essay from the International Policy Conference about English majors in the digital world.

How do you engage with media? This was the big question behind Millersville University’s 11th Annual International Policy Conference held last month. It’s certainly a big question; but one the English Department and its students are primed to tackle.

The second session on the first day of the conference was presented by the English department’s Dr. A. Nicole Pfannenstiel. The session asked visitors to consider topics like technological empowerment and digital citizenship.

Placed around Lehr Room in Gordinier Hall were stations where session visitors could participate in interactive tech demonstrations. One demonstration allowed visitors to play The Stanley Parable, a video game with heavy existential overtones, questioning free will and the illusion of choice.

Visitors were asked to think about their time playing The Stanley Parable – to think of themselves as an audience and how they interacted with the game, the aim being to decide if the player was making their own decisions or if the game was making decisions for them through an algorithm. In other words: how much control do we have when interacting with digital media and how much are we influenced?

While the individuals who visited the session were certainly engaged, it was clear ideas like digital citizenship and empowerment were not questions many people pondered while twiddling on their social media, posting to their blog, or shopping on Amazon.

We live in a digital world. A world where leaving our house and realizing we forgot our phone causes panicked patting of pockets and a cold sweat. Most people engage with technology and act as digital citizens every day – including, of course, Millersville’s English students and English professors.

Yet, as writers, as rhetoricians, as composition instructors both present and future, are we engaging enough with these ideas and questions?

How do we engage with media?

Does technology empower us or entrap us?

What is digital citizenship?

And maybe the most important question of all: are students prepared for an ever increasing digital world?

Millersville’s English program is an excellent place to try to answer these questions and, better yet, empower students as digital citizens.

English classes like the recently introduced Web Writing (ENGL 318) offer a place to start for engaging students with and preparing them for a digital world. Classes like Web Writing encourage students to think about rhetoric and composition in ways they rarely do. Rhetorical thinking – like purpose, audience, and kairos – is shifted from the purely academic space to the digital space – a space where rhetorical thinking is especially critical. This space is quickly becoming ever important to all levels of our society. Having the tools to understand and create compelling content within this space is a necessity.

As English majors graduate and enter careers, it becomes clear the landscape has changed. There is a need for writers savvy with Search Engine Optimization, with social media platforms, and with creating multimodal content for websites and blogs.

Take a walk through any career fair and you’ll quickly see copy and content writers are in high demand. More so, regardless of career, you’ll see the importance for the skills needed for digital readiness – skills that are already being taught right here in Millersville’s English department.

We are on the frontier of the digital age. It is clear technology shapes how we write and how we think of writing. Yet this is still also new. It is exciting. We are trail blazers, explorers, carrying rhetoric and composition forward. Though classes like Web Writing are a great beginning, it is only the start.

Events like the International Policy Conference show we are only just scratching the surface of how we think about and engage with media, how we can empower ourselves through it, and how we can become digital citizens prepared for a digital world.

I believe the English department is the best place to push this frontier forward. The English program not only needs classes like Web Writing, but classes that emphasize digital rhetoric, skills, and citizenship.

Kyle Steffish 

myOwnBody.docx by Maria Rovito

Congratulations to Maria Rovito for publishing a book of her poems!  If you have been recently published, contact Rachel Hicks with your story.

myOwnBody.docx, a collection of conceptual, cyber, and experimental poems, looks at the ways in which bodies are rendered and manipulated on screen, on the Internet, and in real life. Reading on the page as lines of code, chat room messages, and transcriptions, Rovito’s work aims to explore and reinvent the question of the body and human involvement in machinery and technology, shifting the borders between human and non-human.

Maria was profiled on the blog because a few of her poems featured in this collection were published on websites and in magazines. Check out her experiences as a grad student and a writer here.

You can find her book on Amazon.

M.J. Zeller — The Edelion: Deliverance

Within the past year, Millersville alum Matt Zeller published a novel he began working on during his time at MU entitled The Edelion: Deliverance. This is the first book in a series of four.

From the back flap:

The underworld of society is not for the faint of heart. Nobles spit on you, the city watch beats you, and the general public treats you like a disease. To live in this cold and dark life, one must fight for survival every day. Many turn to theft by means of cruelty and murder, but there are some that approach this career through cunning, guile, and skill. It is through this lifestyle that we find a young boy known only as Harth, striving to make a life for himself and gain fame and fortune under the infamous banner of the Thieves Guild.

Upon passing the first test, Harth is instructed to find his way to the City of Thieves; however, he discovers a world far more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. Along his journey to the City of Thieves, evil creatures and minions of a long-forgotten power lurk in the shadows, tracking his movements for reasons unknown to him. It all seems coincidental to Harth, but the fluctuations of a sleeping magic within him suggest otherwise. Harth is left frightened and confused as his injuries pile up and his courage wanes, but the not-so-random people he meets along the way keep him pushing forward. Despite all the near-death situations, Harth finds his way to the City of Thieves to secure his place among the most infamous thieves in the world. But are his adventures complete? His goals met? Or have they only just begun now that a once-slumbering evil creeps back into the land, hungry for destruction?

Matt worked closely with Dr. Tim Miller on the early drafts of the novel when he was an undergraduate student.  We are so very proud of the publications that emerge from the creativity of Millersville students.

Millersville students get published! If you’ve recently found yourself a published author, let us know by contacting Rachel Hicks with your story.

Saxby’s Selfies

To participate in Saxby’s Selfies, invite a professor to coffee and the department will provide a $5 gift card for a “tasty beverage.” Take a selfie and send to Rachel Hicks with a quick blurb about what you talked about! 

Dr. Phannenstiel and Skyler Gibbon

On October 18th, Dr. Phannenstiel and Skyler Gibbon went out for coffee on the English Department. Their conversation covered myriad topics- from grad school opportunities to fashion.

We talked about our coffee addictions. We talked about grad school and the opportunities that come with it. We talked about the opportunities that professors and students have to participate in conferences. We talked about TV shows, like our love for John Oliver, cake-baking shows, and Atlanta.  We talked about how important writing skills are essential to all areas of study (like advocacy campaigns, science/technology). I talked about my thesis topic on the rhetorical influence and hermeneutics of black preaching…Nicole gave me sources to help with my research.  -Skyler Gibbon

Dr. Phannenstiel and Andie Petrillo

In October, graduate student Andie Petrillo and Dr. Phannenstiel grabbed coffee and talked about career opportunities after graduate school, among other things.

Back in October in the throes of juggling classwork, my G.A. duties, and rehearsing for Jesus Christ Superstar I was invited by Dr. Pfannenstiel to have a cup of coffee at Saxby’s as part of the “Saxby’s Selfie” promotion. Dr. Pfannenstiel is both my degree advisor and my thesis chair. After swapping updates on classwork and the show, Dr. Pfannenstiel and I discussed how to prepare for the real world after graduation. As someone who is interested in entering the world of academia and higher education, her advice has been invaluable in terms of building up a professional résumé and preparing myself for the higher ed job market next year. This is why I chose Millersville for my graduate degree; I wanted to be somewhere where I was a name, not a number and where my professors would help me succeed not only with my degree, but also in my career path. Not many programs would offer this, and not many professors would choose to see you as more than a glorified undergrad. -Andie Petrillo

Powerful Media Use at the International Policy Conference

Leah Hoffman participated in the International Policy Conference held on October 24th and 25th at MU. Check out her experience below! 

The International Policy Conference, focusing on the Power of Media, was held on October 24 and 25. One of the sessions focused on interacting with other languages and cultures in a digital space. Along with two other students, I examined the possibility for misinterpretation of other languages when engaging online and the practices that will hopefully lend themselves to more successful communication across languages.

The first aspect to our presentation focused on idiomatic phrases and their use in language. I brought some Spanish idiomatic phrases and asked students to use an online translator to learn the literal meaning of the phrase. We then contrasted the literal and idiomatic phrases. For example, “ser pan comido” literally translates as “to be eaten bread,” but it is more closely aligned to the American idiomatic phrase “to be a piece of cake.” I asked students to consider how a lack of cultural understanding or going solely off a literal translation could make communication more difficult, or even impossible. This began a discussion of user responsibility to have personal or cultural knowledge when interacting with other languages online, or at the very least user understanding that some meanings may literally get lost in translation.

We then spoke about the use of proverbs and sayings and their ability to convey the morals of a society. There is a Japanese proverb that literally translates to “Let the cute journey.” This may not make sense to a nonnative, but the meaning behind the proverb is not dissimilar to the American proverb meaning “spare the rod, spoil the child”. Again, this demonstrates the need for deeper cultural understanding, an understanding that cannot simply be garnered through an online translator.

To conclude our session, we introduced a quote from Nigerian author Chinua Achebe who suggested that “proverbs are like the palm oil with which words are eaten.” We asked students to consider how proverbs and idiomatic phrases allow us to communicate more clearly. We noted their importance in expressing abstract thoughts or making concepts and ideas more digestible. Students were challenged to think of modern or digital examples that serve the same purpose across different modes of communication. They were invited to participate in an ongoing conversation by adding their own thoughts and realizations to the poster with sticky notes, which were available for other students with the purpose of seeing how their peers were engaging with the content. Students made suggestions of examples in digital communication, such as the use of emojis to clarify text messages or the unifying or clarifying roles of memes of gifs which contain their own brand of meaning that can transcend communication barriers.

Overall, the goal of the session was to make students more cognizant of aspects of language that may not always be received when engaging in online communication. This called to attention practices that they may employ in digital communication to clarify their own intentions and messages. Overall, the students came away with a new perspective on their roles as digital citizens and a deeper understanding of intercultural interactions online in an age where the entire world is connected.

Leah Hoffman

ENGL 318: Web Writing — Community Service Learning Project

Dr. Pfannenstiel’s Web Writing class participated in a community service learning project with the Lancaster Osteopathic Health Foundation–read more below! 

Fall 2018 ENGL 318 Web Writing and Content Management engaged in a community service-learning project. This Friday November 16th is ExtraOrdinary Give day in Lancaster County, and I’m happy to announce that students of ENGL 318 created the web content and web content strategy that will be used by Lancaster Osteopathic Health Foundation (LOHF). Visit their website at lohf.org and their ExtraGive page.

As an AW course, a mix of students from various backgrounds and various majors register for and complete the course. Their enthusiasm for creating web content, with real impact in the community was amazing. I’m sharing a few samples of their work here, to both raise awareness for LOHF and the amazing community work they engage with in creating scholarship for organization supporting mental health in Lancaster County, and for the hard work of students across various disciplines who used web writing and web writing strategy to help further LOHF’s mission to support mental health awareness in Lancaster County.

The work completed by students in the course showcases the real work of web content in a 21st century digital world!

-Dr. Pfannenstiel

Image Created By Karen Layman, Karlee Rice and Vanessa Schneider
Image Created By Amanda Mooney and Leah Hoffman

Victorian Literature: “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

Read about Dr. Baldys’ Victorian and Edwardian Literature class and their trip to see “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” starring Jeremy Kendall at the Ware Center on October 26th.

Dr. Baldys and Jeremy Kendall

The story of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is about Mr. Utterson and his friend Dr. Jekyll living in Victorian England. Various crimes and murders occur in London, all connected by a strange man named Edward Hyde. Utterson eventually finds out that Hyde is associated with Jekyll, as Jekyll states in his will that his establishment in the case of his disappearance or death should go to Hyde. When Utterson sees Jekyll, he notices that he has been getting frail and sickly, due to his addiction to a particular drug. This drug is connected to Hyde, as Jekyll takes the drug to transform into Hyde. More and more, Jekyll grows addicted to the drug, and his transformation into Hyde becomes increasingly difficult. Eventually, Hyde is accused of these various crimes, and by the end of the novella he disappears. This novella demonstrates late Victorian anxieties about science and class in the post-Darwinian era; it also reflects emerging theories about the structure of the human psyche while addressing the age-old question of how to balance the “duality” of good and evil within ourselves.

Our class read the novella a few days before the performance by Jeremy Kendall. We have also been discussing how science and religion was viewed in the Victorian period and how these concepts impacted cultural discourse and literature. Jeremy also visited with the class to discuss his choices in adapting the work and his work as an actor. Jeremy’s adaptation was interesting because it was a one-man show. He played sixteen different characters and had to vary his acting to demonstrate sixteen different voices and used pre-recorded audio tracks to represent offstage crowds. The original novella doesn’t portray any strong women characters, but he added a female character, Louisa, to his performance.

The simplistic set including the door frame on wheels really forced the audience to focus on the characters and their actions. Jeremy was able to accurately capture the essence of sixteen different people in the course of 75 minutes. Seeing the performance enhanced my understanding of the text and allowed me to visualize each character in a new way. This show sparked discussion of adaptive choices with the class.

-Maria Rovito

Internship Profile–Kaylee Herndon

Read about Kaylee Herndon’s Internship with the Reading Royals hockey team! For more information about the internship process, check out the MU Internships webpage. 

I am currently in the middle of spending the hockey season with the Reading Royals hockey team in Reading, PA. As one of their media interns for the season I am getting to use my Journalism and English experience in a career path that many people do not regularly consider when getting their degree.

Photo by Kaylee Herndon

Working in media relations for a sports team is extremely similar to working in a newsroom, except that you know what your writing will focus on each day that you go into work. There are daily deadlines, social media updates, live tweeting, and other aspects that go into promoting a team and covering their games.

I have been using social media, Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere in addition to traditional writing at this internship (see the above graphic made using Photoshop). Premiere is something that I thought I would never need to learn, but it turns out the journalism professors are right: you need to be able to take and edit your own photos and videos to make it out there.

Another skill I was surprised that I needed to use is my phone photography. It is the easiest and fastest way to get photos up on social media, i.e. an Instagram story. I found out that there are settings within the camera that makes capturing quick movement, like skaters or pucks, easier, but it is still a skill to be learned.

The most interesting concept of the job for me is that I went from being an athlete to covering the athlete. Having been on the opposite side of the job definitely provides me a different perspective. It creates some barriers when it comes to what I expect to be true and what reality is. This includes willingness of participation of athletes in team promotion activities and fan engagement and the accommodation (or non-accommodation) of the coaching staff. It also has helped me create some unique ideas, such as a player blog where a player gets to discuss their experiences in the local area and on the team. It was a large adjustment in terms of expectations when I found out that the media for a team does not regularly interact with its player-members of the team that they promote. While from the athletic view it makes sense, at least while in college, it would produce more interesting and engaging content if players were more actively involved with the media being put out about them.

Overall, this internship has been an incredible experience so far in terms of preparing me for my future career whether I go into sports or traditional journalism. Without the real-life experience, I feel like I would be under prepared for the fast-paced world of sports journalism.

-Kaylee Herndon

Reading Our World: Masculinity

ENGL 242: Reading Our World is one of the core classes of the English major that is almost comparable to an advanced book club. Each section of Reading Our World focuses on a different theme  explored through a section of texts on that theme. Critical lenses are applied across the field of English Studies to explore different perspectives by learning methods for critiquing texts.

Of the many sections of ENGL 242 offered next semester, one of the newest to look out for is Reading Our World: Masculinity.

Toxic masculinity is a buzzword in 2018, but the concept certainly isn’t new. In academic circles, the preferred term is hegemonic masculinity. Simply put, this term refers to any practice that attempts to justify male dominance over women and “weaker” types of men. We see this not only in the male/female binary, but also in the straight/gay and alpha/beta binaries. These biases are deeply ingrained, even in our language. Honorific language is used to describe highly “masculine” traits, whereas pejoratives are used for most characteristics deemed “feminine,” especially when referring to less “masculine” men.

This course will examine Western literature through the lens of various masculinities in an effort to unveil the toxic ideology that contributes to social ills, including domestic violence, rape culture, gay-bashing, and the abuse of power, among others. Ultimately, students will leave this course able to recognize the ideology of hegemonic masculinity when they encounter it in music, film, television, and literature so that they can begin to dismantle it.

Details:

  • Wednesday from 6-9pm at the Ware Center
  • Counts as a G1 and a W
  • If you have already taken ENGL 242, you can take it again for elective credit

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