The festival, which began at St. Thomas in 1980, traditionally presents a broad range of artistic forms. All of this year’s events are free and open to the public and will be held on the university’s St. Paul campus. They are:

Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley will give a lecture on his book Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center.

Nola recounts the life of the author’s sister, who died at age 25 after several years of treatment for schizophrenia.

Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hemley has published seven books; his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of Defunct magazine.

Quvenzhane Wallis

Beasts of the Southern Wild, nominated for four Academy Awards and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, will be shown from 8 to 11 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, in Scooter’s, located on the first floor of Anderson Student Center.

The film, a drama with fantasy elements, is set in the Louisiana bayou and stars 6-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis. The film will be introduced by Dr. David Penchansky of the St. Thomas Theology Department. More information about the film can be found here.

St. Thomas Alumni Choir, a mixed vocal ensemble of young and old alumni, will present a concert from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, April 21, in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The choir is directed by alumni Sean Barker, Josh Bauder and Casey Johnson.

The choir will perform sacred and secular music by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Elizabeth Alexander, Josh Bauder, Jonathan Tschiggfrie, Stephen Paulus, Felix Mendelssohn, Alice Parker, Z. Randall Stroope and Keith Hampton.

The Gabriel Kney organ.

An Organ and Choir Concert, part of a series marking the 25^th anniversary of the dedication of the university’s Gabriel Kney organ, will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 28, in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas. Host will be Merritt Nequette, retired professor and former chair on the St. Thomas Music Department.

The program will feature the university’s Liturgical Choir and guest alumni singers directed by Aaron Brown and retired Liturgical Choir founder Robert Strusinski; Orchestra directed by Matthew George; and organists James Callahan, David Jenkins, Kevin Seal and Robert Vickery.

They will perform Noel Goemanne’s “Song of Praise” for choir and organ, which was commissioned for the Gabriel Kney organ dedication in 1987; the Franz Schubert Mass in G; the Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani by Francis Poulenc; and the new Concerto for Organ, Strings and Percussion, featuring its composer, organist and professor emeritus of music James Callahan.

Joyce Lyon

The art exhibit “Passaggio/Passage,” featuring works by Joyce Lyon, is on permanent display on the Campus Way, located on the second floor of the Anderson Student Center.

An associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota, Lyon’s works are in public and private collections nationally, including Georgetown University Law Library, the Florida Holocaust Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center and the Weisman Art Museum.

Her work focuses on the intersections of place and memory. “I work from observation with an acute sense of the layering of time,” she said. “In ‘Passagio/Passage,’ I consider pilgrimage as it relates to a physical and spiritual journey and as a meditation on here and there and the passages in between.”

“Passaggio/Passage” by Joyce Lyon

A schedule of this year’s Sacred Arts Festival events can be found here.

But you’re just going to have to deal with it. We’re not burglars or pedophiles, missionaries or Hari Krishnas. We’re looking for a place to live. We need a home and we need one now.

It’s the middle of July already and it’s a desert wasteland here in Salt Lake City. For eight days running it’s been over a hundred and the blacktop roads have begun to liquefy – not to mention this three-year drought that a thousand inches of rain won’t fix. The air is so hot and brittle it feels as though my skin might shatter, and beyond that the lease on our apartment is up in six weeks and we just can’t rent again. Jenae and I have been together for six years and have lived in nearly as many apartments. And it’s not that Utah is exactly what we imagine when we say we want a place to call home, but it’ll have to do for now. Still, we have no mover, no moving date, no home loan for that matter, and no home upon which we can make an offer.

It is not, however, for a lack of looking. Since May, Jenae and I have picked up every home buyer’s guide in the grocery store, studied each realty website till our eyes bled, and cased favorable neighborhoods so methodically we could put them back together from memory were they ever to fall apart. Then again, we’ve been driving around in Jenae’s VW Beetle, a yellow poppy waving like a drag queen from the dashboard vase; we are a threat only to good sense, fundamentalists, and long-legged passengers.

Having rented apartments for so long, we usually lived near other renters. We met in Boston where everybody we knew – rich or poor, young or old – lived in apartments, even if they owned them. In the West – and especially Utah – practically everyone we know owns her own house. Fellow waiters, writers, graduate students … everybody. Having just moved there, it made us feel like pariahs. It wasn’t just how we paid for the roof above us, it’s who we were and what we did to our communities: We were renters. An easy mark for the missionaries, for that matter.

When looking for an apartment, we had sought convenience, proximity to bars and grocery stores, off-street parking, soundproofing against the klezmer music that was always wafting around our invariably bohemian neighborhoods, a backyard for the beer-can bowling, a porch for the rocking chairs and a nice corner for the spittoon. We didn’t have to worry about the neighborhood, the neighbors, not even the place itself. It would have been like worrying about the feng shui of a bus station bathroom stall.

It’s utilitarian and temporary. Go ahead, dance with that glass of red wine, smoke those cigars, fry up some catfish, juggle those skunks. You don’t live here. You just rent. To buy a house – or at least to look in earnest for one – is to admit to yourself that you think you’re ready. At the very least, that you should be ready. Time to suck it up and recognize that there’s relatively little pride to be had in the fact that your downstairs neighbors are actually as careful as they promise about cleaning their guns or that you managed to keep a ficus alive from Halloween until Thanksgiving whereupon it shrugged all its leaves ceremonially to the floor. You’re married, you’re getting older, and your parents are looking more and more like the grandparents they are pestering you to make them. It’s getting embarrassing.

Your pathetic renter’s mailbox – the one with three former tenants’ names crossed out – is stuffed with your friends’ baby shower invitations. Just a few months ago, right after my grandmother died, five different people mentioned the word ultrasound to me on the same day. It was both onomatopoetic and devastating.

There’s something dreadful, however, about buying a house. You have to be willing to say to yourself, there go my freewheeling days of touring the Arctic on a kitepowered bobsled. So much for starting up that punk rock band that was finally going to answer The Clash’s call. If I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail, it’s going to be with a Baby Bjorn or not at all. K2 and Katmandu will have to take a bid on somebody else’s death wish. I’m getting old. Forty might be the new thirty, but nobody who’s twenty thinks so. It was time to grow up and settle down.

And, adulthood had just coldcocked us. First my adoptive dad died. And then Gram. Then Jenae’s grandfather. They all were devastating in their own ways, but Gram – her death was utterly unacceptable. All bets were off after that. Our best couplefriends were getting divorced. Doctors detected a strange mass in my mother’s abdomen, and, not to be upstaged, my grandfather started having trouble with – among a raft of other things – his colon. It all seemed to be happening at the same time, on the same day – every hour on the hour.

Between all the birth announcements and death certificates, we couldn’t tell up from down. Even the simplest facts and dates became obscured, irrelevant. All we knew was everyone but us was either dying, getting divorced, or having a kid and we were stuck with our hands in our pockets, waiting for the band to start. Life and death were coming for us, and we could either dig in, settle down and try to defend the home front, or just shake hands and walk quietly away from the line and go our separate ways.

Matthew Batt has been a member of the English Department since 2007. Sugarhouse, his debut novel, was published on June 19. Find out more about Batt at www.matthewcbatt.com.

Q & A with Matt Batt

What are your writing habits?
When I’m actively working on a project, I can pretty much do it anywhere, any time. No incense, stinky candles or fancy berets necessary. I try to abide by the 500-word-a-day rule. That’s like a long email or the equivalent of a couple of Facebook posts. Low stakes, in other words. But it’s long enough that, if you do it every day or so, you can write a book a year. Of course, the editing and revision process isn’t included there, but still. I like how it takes the mysticism out of the process and really just makes it what it is: the daily striving toward a long-term goal.

Has parenthood changed how you write?
I still have lots of other nonparenthood projects I’m developing, but there’s something so profound about parenthood that, for a nonfiction writer like me, I feel supremely compelled to write about. At the same time, knowing that my son isn’t just a hobby or a source of fascination but rather a person who deserves to have his identity unencumbered by my writing … it gives me pause.

Has writing gotten easier for you?
I feel like it’s gotten more goal-oriented and less imitative. I started out writing a lot of watered-down fiction where I was trying to sound like Ray Carver or Hemingway or Andre Dubus. Over the years I feel like now I know what my point of view is and what I sound like on the page, and it’s been extremely liberating if not actually easier.

Do you write anything other than nonfiction?
I started off as a fiction writer and remain an ardent fan of the short story, and I have a lot of ideas for a novel that have been percolating for some time. But, then again, who doesn’t?

Do you find that you gravitate to work similar to your own?
I find that I read about equal amounts fiction and nonfiction, some older/canonical work and a healthy amount of poetry, too. And I don’t know if it’s overly self- congratulatory or just silly or what, but I wish I could find more folks who write like I think I do. What and how that is I don’t guess is really for me to say, but I think the blessing and the curse of how I write is that I don’t feel terribly under any one or two writer’s sway.

Do you have a favorite piece that you’ve written?
I suppose I am pretty pleased with my essay “The Path of Righteousness” about baking sourdough bread and, you know, the fear of parenthood.

Is there something by another writer that you read over and over again?
In an oddly similar way, despite the vast differences in subject matter, I come back almost annually to Jo Anne Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” and David Foster Wallace’s “Ticket to the Fair.” They both do an astonishing job of taking a public event and making it deeply personal and vice versa. And, in a lot of ways, I think that’s what the best nonfiction writers are always after. Not just pathetic navel gazing but finding a meaningful and literary way to suture the public and the private.

What are the recurring themes throughout your work?
Without overthinking it (to which I am prone) I would say the fear of/attraction to commitment to huge responsibilities and/or challenges. It seems to me we live in a relatively lowstakes world where we can pretty readily make a life out of not really striving for anything. That sounds pompous, I know, but how often in your daily experiences do you encounter someone who seems to be really driven toward something important and meaningful to them? I do sometimes, but mostly not. I know I am daily tempted to do the same and often just fall right in line. But in my writing and the aspects of my life I like to write about I find myself drawn to extreme commitments and extraordinary challenges. All the better if I’m not particularly equipped or prepared for it, right?!

What are you working on now?
I just finished putting in a new kitchen floor. That was one onerous and long job, and I honestly hope I’ll never do something like that again. As for writing, I’m working on what I hope to be the final piece of a collection of essays called The Enthusiast. The manuscript deals with both personal and cultural obsessions with extremity, whether in the realm of bread baking or toddler-wrangling or more ostensibly exotic or athletic pursuits such as cave diving in Central America or ultra longdistance running. Meanwhile, I pray, no more home work.

Note: The Q&A was conducted on Sept. 18 by Kelly Engebretson for the St. Thomas Newsroom.

Read more from St. Thomas Magazine.

Larry Millett

The lecture, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the university’s English Department, home to the scholarly journal Victorian Periodicals Review as well as two new classes related to the Victorian era.

Those planning to attend the event are asked to register ahead of time here.

The evening will begin at 6 p.m. with poster presentations by St. Thomas undergraduate English majors who have been studying the Victorian mystery genre. Their work will be reviewed by graduate students in Dr. Alexis Easley’s Professional Editing course.

A Victorian-themed reception and book-signing will follow Millett’s lecture.

Millett will discuss his contribution to Victorian studies, the six-volume series that began in 1996 with his novel Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon. He will detail the processes of research, writing and editing involved in book publication and will discuss one of his current projects, a fictionalized account of a real-life murder mystery from the early 2oth century.

Dr. Alexis Easley

“St. Thomas is located at the heart of a city that grew up during the 19th century, so it makes sense that it is here we celebrate all things Victorian,” said Easley, a scholar of Victorian journalism who earlier this year became editor of Victorian Periodicals Review.

One of five academic journals edited by faculty members in St. Thomas’ College of Arts and Sciences, Victorian Periodicals Review was established in 1968 and covers the editorial and publishing history of magazines, newspapers and journals from that era. It is the official journal of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

“For some reason or another, [Menssen] thought I would make a good editor,” Clemenson said with a chuckle. After some consideration, he said yes. The department applied for the opportunity, and by October 2008 the journal was under Clemenson’s guidance. While considering the editorship, Clemenson said he reflected on one of the key responsibilities of any professor: service. “Every faculty member is expected to not only do research and teaching, but also service. That can take a variety of forms. I thought this was one of the best fits for me. I’ve always been research oriented, and [editing] involves something very close to research.”

A commitment to service and scholarly endeavors is deeply rooted in the College of Arts and Sciences, which encourages faculty to enrich the community through “discovery, artistic activity, integration and pedagogy.” This mission gives Clemenson and other faculty members the encouragement to put in extra hours every week editing academic journals that become dear to them.

Clemenson is one of several College of Arts and Sciences professors who were nudged toward or sought positions as editors or publishers of scholarly journals. (See a list of journals on Page 17.) Philosophy professors W. Matthews Grant, Christopher Toner, Gloria Frost, Timothy Pawl, Mark Spencer and Joshua Stuchlik are part of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly’s faculty editing team, which is supported by department staff member Ann Hale, who is the quarterly’s managing editor. Sociology and Criminal Justice professor Lisa Waldner co-edits Sociological Quarterly, while Art History professor Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell publishes Pacific Arts Journal, and English professor Alexis Easley edits Victorian Periodicals Review.

Increasing Expertise and Personal Growth

For Easley, the most exciting part of her editing work is the development of a deeper understanding of her subject. Easley is a scholar of Victorian journalism. When she began editing Victorian Periodicals Review in spring 2012 she did not expect to develop a new and strong connection to her research.

“It’s giving me insight into [Victorian] editors,” Easley said. “It’s giving me solidarity with these individuals.”

Easley has been a member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals since 1998. She credits the society for mentoring her throughout graduate school. The society was founded in 1968 by scholars who were interested in Victorian journalism and studied the magazines, newspapers and journals of “every stripe” from about the 1780s until World War I, she said.

“It’s an international group of scholars. It’s pretty amazing and wonderful that we (St. Thomas) have this journal,” Easley said. “It’s quite a plum.”

Most of Easley’s work is concerned with editing the submissions, much as the philosophy faculty editing team members have their hands full with the editing and extensive review process behind the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.

The quarterly was founded in 1920 under the title New Scholasticism as a response to a call from Pope Leo XIII for a renewal of Catholic philosophy and theology. While the journal’s name has changed since then, its spirit of bringing reason and faith together in the area of philosophy has remained.

This mission is constantly on the editors’ minds as they process submissions to the journal. As do all academic journal editors, the St. Thomas editors seek experts in the subfields of their disciplines to act as referees who determine if each submission is worthy of publication. But before that process can begin, Clemenson and Toner dig through the submissions and determine each one’s level of appropriateness for the journal.

“Part of the beauty of philosophy as a discipline, because you’re dealing with fundamental questions, is that you can’t afford to limit yourself to a narrow specialization,” Clemenson said. The greatest benefit of editing the journal, he said, is the countless chances he is given to enrich his intellectual life by reading submissions and interacting with authors and referees.

“It’s important not to put the blinders on, but to keep perspective,” Clemenson said. He sees this branching out to learn about subfields in philosophy as a wonderful scholarly opportunity.

When Waldner was seeking new scholarly opportunities, she never dreamed of applying to a journal as prominent as Sociological Quarterly. That is, until her doctoral adviser and mentor, professor Betty Dobratz of Iowa State University, asked her to apply jointly to the Midwest Sociological Society’s call for a new editor in 2011.

After a rigorous application process, the pair was chosen. They began editing the journal in March 2012.

“Sociology is so broad, and there are some things that I know more about or that she knows more about,” Waldner said. “We thought a team made sense.” The pair’s broad knowledge base is very important for a journal such as Sociological Quarterly, which focuses on “a whole gamut” of things that sociologists study, including family, crime, politics and gender topics, Waldner said.

Waldner and her co-editor face the challenge of working together across a physical distance. Video chatting plays a big role in the editorial process, with weekly Skype appointments to discuss papers submitted to the quarterly that deserve a second look. Editing is a challenging and time-consuming process after which only about 10 percent of submitted articles are published. But to Waldner, the outcome and personal growth attached to the process make it well worth the challenge.

Waldner said the most exciting part of the editing process is when a paper goes out for review. A referee is generally at the top of his or her field and an expert on the submitted paper’s topic. “I really enjoy that it has given me an excuse to contact fairly prominent sociologists and say I’m the editor of The Sociological Quarterly,” Waldner said. “It’s providing [me] an opportunity to learn.”

It gives her the opportunity to read about almost every subfield of sociology and to identify additional topics she and Dobratz believe will be of interest to readers. Waldner said they identified Occupy Wall Street and the 2012 elections as special section topics for upcoming issues, and they regard the special topics as the perfect way to increase readership while keeping the journal, and themselves, current in sociology.

Mentoring the Next Generation

Professors are not alone in receiving new opportunities with the presence of scholarly journals on campus. Students benefit, too. They gain from the increased knowledge shared by professors in their classes.

Clemenson said he brings new articles from American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly into the classroom and finds his expanded knowledge of the field a benefit when it comes time for his students to write papers, because he can direct them to the best scholarship in the field.

“Being an editor of this journal broadens my perspectives, and keeps me from being narrowly focused on my own set of interests,” Clemenson said.

Waldner noted that expanding her knowledge outside her specialty in sociology helps her in the classroom. She believes working with the journal increases her critical-thinking skills, which she can then pass on to her students. “Folks that are involved in creating knowledge are the best to impart knowledge,” Waldner said.

The more insight the professor has, the more easily students are able to access information. Easley sees editing as a natural extension of her research and teaching. “The big picture is to bring the richness of Victorian culture to the next generation,” she said.

Some of the journals, including Victorian Periodicals Review, also provide tangible opportunities for students. English graduate student Rachel MacDonald is the first of an expected long line of students to receive an editorial assistantship with Easley.

“The experience [has] confirmed my belief in the revision process as the place where good writing becomes great writing,” MacDonald said. She was surprised at how much work goes into each issue, she said. The editing is extensive, but much of the work has “nothing to do with editing, but marketing, branding and business.”

The position allows MacDonald to be integrated in every part of this editorial process.

Pacific Arts Journal also provides a graduate student position, which is currently filled by Rachel Simmons. The journal is published and produced by members of the Art History Department under the leadership of department chair Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell. Simmons hopes to make her career working with Pacific art in some way, and Stansbury-O’Donnell believes work on the journal is an excellent opportunity for her to network in the art community.

The journal publishes articles on the art of Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines and the Pacific islands. This focus may seem very far away from Summit Avenue, but with the recent establishment of the American Museum of Asmat Art on campus, the Art History Department is showing itself as an impressive resource for Pacific art.

“She’s been brilliant,” Stansbury-O’Donnell said of Simmons. “Not everybody wants to or can teach in a classroom or curate in a museum. A publication is another place. Copy editing is not specifically an art history skill, but you could get a job editing art history journals.”

As a strong advocate for mentorship of students and recent graduates, Waldner seeks to pull her former students into Sociological Quarterly.

“I reach out to my [former] students and provide them with opportunities,” Waldner said. The newest member of the journal’s editorial board is 2004 St. Thomas graduate Valerie Clark. Clark is a research scientist for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “It gets her professionally engaged, and it’s something she can put on her résumé,” Waldner said. “I look forward to inviting more [students] in the future to give them experience.”

Providing Visibility

Each of the scholarly journals edited or published in the College of Arts and Sciences provides new information and exciting opportunities to the faculty who work on them. Editing a journal also brings recognition among other scholars. Clemenson describes the responsibility of housing a scholarly journal at St. Thomas as a true “vote of confidence” by a scholarly discipline.

“Our institution was entrusted with this responsibility,” Clemenson said. “That speaks well of our department.”

Read more from CAS Spotlight.

Patrick H. Lally, who taught English for most of his 37 years at St. Thomas, died Saturday, Nov. 3. Lally, 80, of St. Paul, is survived by his wife, Mary Ann, and sons John and Joe ’86, and daughters Brigid Lally Gustafson and Jane Lally Montei ’92.

A native of Green Bay, Wis., Lally earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Notre Dame. At St. Thomas from 1960 to 1997, he primarily taught American literature, including the novel since WWII, and developed a course on sports literature. Lally also worked at the Management Center (now the Center for Business Excellence) in its early years, and served as assistant to Monsignor Terrence Murphy, president, for a year.

He also coached tennis. In spring 1974, his first season as tennis coach, a St. Thomas news release noted that the team’s spring trip to compete at four schools in Wisconsin would include a homecoming for the coach – competing at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The traveling team included one junior, four sophomores and two freshmen.

The news release noted, “The likeable Lally said his green group has one qualification to a man: Each of them can beat the coach. He describes himself as a ‘Sunday morning hacker’ and said he is operating this spring’s tennis schedule at St. Thomas on a budget ‘about the size of a Sunday collection basket.’” He continued to coach tennis until the early 1980s.

In September 1991, Lally published an article in The Raker (a printed “forum for discussion at St. Thomas”) in which he reminisced about his years at St. Thomas.

“A reasonable amount of sentiment and a mild nostalgia pervade these early-morning thoughts as I sit here on the porch with black coffee and blacker cigar,” he wrote. “The blue-grey smoke wends its way toward the early morning light that flickers behind me in the east. My mind drifts to days of yore.”

His first semester (fall 1960) provided him a “curious teaching schedule, the first formal teaching schedule I ever had.” He taught four three-credit courses in Freshman Composition. Three met Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and the fourth met Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. “(Yes, Virginia, we did have Saturday A.M. classes in those days),” he added.

His 1960-61 faculty contract as an instructor in English for nine months of teaching was “for a grand total of $4,600 spread out over the nine.”

Lally served under three university presidents: James Shannon, Terrence Murphy and Dennis Dease. Referring to Shannon and Murphy in The Raker, Lally wrote, “Each possesses gifts of generosity of spirit, quick intelligence, respect for learning, integrity, wit and capable management skills.”

He noted many changes that took place during his years on campus, and that: “The students get younger every year, especially now that I’m teaching the children of some former students.”

“So from the porch on Portland Avenue in St. Paul, the sun now almost over the yardarm, I recall some of those early colleagues who gave me that early sense of a St. Thomas community,” Lally wrote in his concluding thoughts.

After naming dozens of colleagues, including many who had “passed to their rewards,” he turned his thoughts to the future: “And to those of us left to carry on, to those new faculty and staff, even to those yet to come: Keep the faith, and in the words of the poet – ‘Wake the happy words!’ May the good ship UST continue on its ‘journey toward fulfillment.’” (Journey Toward Fulfillment is a book about the history of the College of St. Thomas, published in 1986, written by Joseph B. Connors, an English Department colleague.)

An obituary and guest book can be viewed at legacy.com.

Visitation will be held from 9 to 10 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 8, at the Church of the Assumption, 51 W. Seventh St., St. Paul. Mass of Christian Burial will follow at 10 a.m.

St. Thomas magazine was given the gold award for Best Alumni/Institution Magazine (3,000 to 9,999 full-time students). Judges considered the overall strength of the writing, design, photography and editorial vision of all magazines in this category. The magazine received the silver award in this category in 2009, and the bronze in 2008. Past gold winners in the Best Alumni/Institution Magazine category include the University of Dayton, St. Olaf College and Indiana State University.

St. Thomas magazine is published three times a year by University Relations, and is staffed by Brian Brown (senior editor), Patty Petersen (managing editor), Mike Ekern (director of photography), Sara Klomp (designer), Doug Hennes, Bill Kirchgessner and Nadine Friederichs.

Ekern’s image of Chandran Duffy took home a gold in the sports category.

Photographer Mike Ekern was recognized for his individual work in the magazine, receiving two gold and one silver award for Excellence in Photography. Ekern’s photo of John Kascht (fall 2011) received the gold in the People and Portraits category. Ekern also won gold in the Sports category for his action shot of softball player Chandran Duffy sliding into home (fall 2011). He received a silver for his photo essay of artifacts of Ireland Hall in the winter 2012 issue.

Writing in the Margins, the English Department newsletter, received a Bronze Award for Best Tabloid/Newsletter for External Audiences.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education will present the awards in Chicago on Dec. 10. District V includes colleges and universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

This year’s context speaks to a central fact of human experience. Certainly, this university, which includes the phrase “to work skillfully” in its mission statement, as well as the student population that we teach, are preoccupied with work. Without its workers, the university could not function, and the students we serve work daily with the expectation that they soon will enter the workforce and help contribute toward building our society.

But work is often broader and more complicated than we realize. The notion of work and working speaks directly to who we are as human beings. Work is often said to ennoble our lives, particularly if understood as a vocation, as Dorothy Sayers argues in her essay, “Why Work?”; at other times work is said to degrade, alienate and render our lives absurd, as in the television series, “The Office.” Thinking and talking about work in all its complexity can be an essential part of understanding what place we want to occupy in our collective society.

It is our hope that during the course of this school year, students, faculty, and staff will be able to engage in productive conversations about the significance of work in both our private and public lives.

Fall 2012 events are listed below:

3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, OSF Library, Room 108
Lecture: “Work, Race and Masculinity in the Jim Crow Era: The Case of the Black Musician”

In an American culture preoccupied with the ideal of the “self-made man,” hard work has been an essential requirement of manhood; however, not all groups of Americans have agreed as to what counts as “work” in the first place. By comparing Jim Crow-era vagrancy laws with ideas expressed by black musicians, Dr. Robert Hawkins of Bradley University demonstrates how different definitions of work have produced distinct versions of masculinity. These competing masculinities, in turn, were crucial factors in struggles over racial equality and economic justice. This event is co-sponsored by the American Culture and Difference program.

3 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, OSF Library, Room 108
Performance: “The Mill”

Dr. Amy Kritzer directs a student reading of Duluth playwright Jeannine Coulombe’s play based on real-life events that took place in 1989 in International Falls, Minn. Faced with the Boise Cascade paper mill’s attempts to undermine the power of their local union, workers must decide between accepting the company’s terms or taking action that might ultimately destroy their town. This heated conflict boils over into a violent confrontation and one local family is irrevocably drawn into the fray. “The Mill” is a powerful drama about work, workers, immigration, race and resistance. Jeannine Coulombe will be on hand to speak to students following the reading.

7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, JRC Auditorium, Room 126
Film: “The Harvest / La Cosecha”

From award-winning filmmaker, photographer and activist Roberto Romano and executive producer Eva Longoria, this acclaimed documentary provides a startling, heartbreaking, and inspiring look into the lives of Zulema, Perla, and Victor – three children who “struggle to dream while working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week to feed America.” Co-sponsored by UST Libraries.

Noon, Thursday, Oct. 11, James B. Woulfe Alumni Hall, Anderson Student Center
Lecture from Annie Baxter of National Public Radio

Annie Baxter, of Minnesota Public Radio, and more recently, National Public Radio, will speak about her reporting on work, unemployment, and the economy in Minnesota. She’ll also talk about the work of being a journalist and what it takes to tell the stories of the community you live in. Co-sponsored by the Communication and Journalism Department.

With a nonfiction writer and poet filling the space of an evening, the event promises to be eclectic and entertaining. Batt’s memoir chronicles his and his wife’s three-year saga renovating a former crack house in Salt Lake City. The pair, who had no prior construction experience, undertook the project amidst a series of personal turmoils that put their marriage to the test. In the end, they successfully transformed a house, and their relationship, for the better. The poems in Y, Miller says, ”aim to enlarge the kinds of questions we ask about childhood and its role in the broader human culture.” Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser called her work as a poet “delightfully eclectic, learned and wise.”

Both writers/professors took some time out of their busy schedules the first week of fall semester to answer a few questions about their perspectives on writing and reading. If you want to learn more about Sugarhouse and Y, you’ll have to hear it straight from the sources this Friday.

Tell us about your first book reading  in which you were the “star.”  

Batt: Sugarhouse is my first book and it’s only been out for a couple of months so I remember pretty well every reading I’ve done. There have been some really nicely attended ones and then, well, some were, shall we say, very intimate. But I abide by the rule of thumb where any literary event is a success if the audience outnumbers the reader. I have been the only attendee of events before. I’m sure at some point I’ll be that reader, too. As for numbers and such, I guess I’ve done a dozen or so readings – lots of radio and some local-ish TV stuff. And I absolutely always think I’m going to be super nervous, and then, for no reason I can figure, I end up being mostly OK. But what do I know? Ask the audience!

Y by Dr. Leslie Adrienne Miller, English Department.

Miller: I don’t remember the first time I read from a book I’d written, but I do remember the first time I read published poems to a live audience. I had the good fortune to have some poems published in my college literary magazine, and the publication reading on our college campus was a big event each spring. Certainly, I was nervous about it, but the excitement and pleasures of joining a community of writers and readers around me made it an invigorating experience, and I think that’s largely still true when I give readings now. I still get nervous, but I know that once I get going, I’m inside the work, and if the audience is a good one, they will go there with me.

What kind of work are you most drawn to reading? Do you find that you gravitate to work similar to your own?

Batt: I find that I read about equal amounts fiction and nonfiction, some older/canonical work and a healthy amount of poetry, too. And I don’t know if it’s overly self-congratulatory or just silly or what, but I wish I could find more folks who write like I think I do. What and how that is I don’t guess is really for me to say, but I think the blessing and the curse of how I write is that I don’t feel terribly under any one or two writer’s sway.

Miller: Well, my tastes in reading are constantly changing, but I’ve been reading poetry for many years, so I tend to gravitate toward work that is utterly different from mine, work that I don’t understand completely yet but which presents me with a philosophical and/or aesthetic challenge. But I also like returning to older poetry because it changes as I do, and I see new things in it at different stages of my own development as a writer. My biggest fear as a writer is getting to some level of skill and staying there. There is always room for growth, and I’d take as my model a poet like Adrienne Rich who kept reinventing herself as a poet with every new book!

How is the experience of listening to a writer read his or her own words different from reading them on the page?

Batt: I think the best writers can make their work shimmer right off the page without you needing to hear him/her, but, that said, it’s always fascinating to hear someone read from his/her own work. As one of my friends puts it, reading is an inherently complicated process – the eye translates the page upside down and backward through the optic nerve to the brain … a lot of translation is happening – but when you hear it, that’s about as direct a transmission as it gets.

Miller: With poetry, the experience of listening is pretty essential because the best poems have real music – rhythms and sound echoes that work with and against sentence structures to produce a complex auditory experience. On the page, these aspects are backgrounded because line breaks are often visual in nature, so the page and the stage offer entirely different, but I hope complementary, experiences of a poem. It’s really necessary to have both to get the fullness of a poem, and once you’ve gone to dozens of poetry readings, as poets do, you begin to “hear” things while you read them on a page, so you form a kind of “stereo” habit of reading.

Tell us about your writing habits. Has parenthood changed how you write?

Sugarhouse, by Dr. Matthew Batt, English Department.

Batt: When I’m actively working on a project, I can pretty much do it anywhere, any time. No incense, stinky candles or fancy berets necessary. I try to abide by the 500-word-a-day rule. That’s like a long email or the equivalent of a couple of Facebook posts. Low stakes, in other words. But it’s long enough that, if you do it every day or so, you can write a book a year. Of course, the editing and revision process isn’t included there, but still. I like how it takes the mysticism out of the process and really just makes it what it is: the daily striving toward a long-term goal. As far as fatherhood and writing, yes and no. I still have lots of other nonparenthood projects I’m developing, but there’s something so profound about parenthood that, for a nonfiction writer like me, I feel supremely compelled to write about. At the same time, knowing that my son isn’t just a hobby or a source of fascination but rather a person who deserves to have his identity unencumbered by my writing … it gives me pause.

Miller: My writing habits are a little boring and predictable, I am afraid, but I know very well what they are: It must be morning, and it must be quiet. Absolutely no music; music interferes with my hearing of the sounds and rhythms. I do turn off the phone frequently, and more importantly, I turn off the Internet connection entirely so I can’t check email or get endlessly distracted by looking for something on the Internet. I usually just unplug the modem and make it hard for the world to intrude on me. Believe it or not, I write best when I’m not yet fully awake! Motherhood has most definitely changed my writing schedule. I have fewer mornings when I can go directly to the desk, and my work day is circumscribed by school bus times. On the other hand, my perceptions of the world have been drastically changed by my role as a parent, and my child’s developing mind has offered me new ways of seeing and observing that would never have occurred to me as a woman.

Has writing gotten easier for you over the span of your career?

Batt: I feel like it’s gotten more goal-oriented and less imitative. I started out writing a lot of watered-down fiction where I was trying to sound like Ray Carver or Hemingway or Andre Dubus. Over the years I feel like now I know what my point of view is and what I sound like on the page and it’s been extremely liberating if not actually easier.

Miller: Believe it or not, I think writing poetry has become harder. The more good poems I read, the more inadequate I feel about making something equal to them, and the more I know about what works, the more I doubt what I produce. On the other hand, there is much less pressure on me now to publish, so I can take my time and revise work for months and even years before anyone else sees it. This doesn’t make the work easier, but I hope it makes it better. It gives me plenty of time, anyway, to get distance on a poem before I move it out of the intimate space of my own desk and into the public work of publishing.

Do you write anything other than nonfiction/poetry?

Batt: I started off as a fiction writer and remain an ardent fan of the short story and I have a lot of ideas for a novel that have been percolating for some time. But, then again, who doesn’t?

Miller: Yes, I write essays, too, mostly essays about reading poetry, writing poetry, being a writer. I’ve written fiction as well, but it’s often the case that once I start a prose project, I can’t help moving it over into poetry. I have a few plays in the drawer, too, but I so love the concentration and music of poetry that pretty much all my best ideas end up in that form sooner or later.

Do you have a favorite piece that you’ve written? Or something by another writer that you read over and over again? If so, what keeps drawing you back to it?

Batt: I suppose I am pretty pleased with my essay “The Path of Righteousness” about baking sourdough bread and, you know, the fear of parenthood. And in an oddly similar way, despite the vast differences in subject matter, I come back almost annually to Jo Anne Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” and David Foster Wallace’s “Ticket to the Fair.” They both do an astonishing job of taking a public event and making it deeply personal and vice versa. And, in a lot of ways, I think that’s what the best nonfiction writers are always after. Not just pathetic navel gazing but finding a meaningful and literary way to suture the public and the private.

Miller: I don’t have a single favorite poem of my own, though there are always one or two in a book of which I feel most proud. Generally, they are the poems where I figured out how to say or do something that I was struggling with throughout the process of writing the book, but they’re not necessarily the best poems in the book. As far as another writer goes, that one is easy: I go back to Ranier Maria Rilke all the time, and he never fails, even in translation, to surprise and inspire me. His poems achieve a special balance of tantalizing mystery and utter clarity, and that’s a balance I seek in my own poems as well as in what I tend to read.

Do you see any pattern(s) or recurring themes throughout your body of work?

Batt: Without overthinking it (to which I am prone) I would say the fear of/attraction to commitment to huge responsibilities and/or challenges. It seems to me we live in a relatively low-stakes world where we can pretty readily make a life out of not really striving for anything. That sounds pompous, I know, but how often in your daily experiences do you encounter someone who seems to be really driven toward something important and meaningful to them? I do sometimes, but mostly not. I know I am daily tempted to do the same and often just fall right in line. But in my writing and the aspects of my life I like to write about I find myself drawn to extreme commitments and extraordinary challenges. All the better if I’m not particularly equipped or prepared for it, right?!

Miller: Patterns … yes, I tend to hover around a loose iambic pentameter line, not always, but quite often that kind of line seems most natural to me, most capable of rendering complex philosophical investigations at the same time that it remains musical. When I am in that pattern, it’s much easier to trust the language to take me where I need to be.

As for themes, well, I’d leave articulating those to readers, though I can say that there is a strong feminist vision in all of my collections. I can’t say that I ever intended that, but having been an undergraduate at an all-female college in the mid-1970s (Stephens College), my first encounters with an intellectual tradition were all imbued with feminist perspectives, and they have stayed with me.

What is the most memorable experience that’s happened at one of your readings?

Batt: When I read in Seattle, this guy showed up to hear Francine du Plessix Gray. She read the night before – I went and she was absolutely magisterial. You’d never confuse me for her. But this guy was patient enough to check out the description of my event and it turned out that he had not only lived in the Salt Lake City neighborhood in which my book is set, but he had worked at the King’s English Bookstore where I was headed the next day. Nutty!

Miller: I’d have to say that one of the best reading experiences I’ve had was reading from my last collection, The Resurrection Trade, to an audience of medical students in training. It was a large audience, and the images on which those poems were based were projected on huge screens all around me, but what was most delightful was the fact that at the end, so many of these young doctors in training came up to talk to me afterward. They knew my subject matter from a medical perspective and were excited to experience it from another perspective. Even though many of them had never studied poetry, they were an audience of bright minds, and their immediate and complex understandings of the poetry just bowled me over!

What are you working on now?

Batt: I just finished putting in a new kitchen floor. That was one onerous and long job, and I honestly hope I’ll never do something like that again! As for writing, I’m working on what I hope to be the final piece of a collection of essays called The Enthusiast. The manuscript deals with both personal and cultural obsessions with extremity, whether in the realm of bread baking or toddler-wrangling or more ostensibly exotic or athletic pursuits such as cave diving in Central America or ultra long-distance running. Meanwhile, I pray, no more home work!

Tell us some background information about Y.

Miller: This is the hardest of your questions to answer because the book itself is the answer to the questions I sought to explore, and if it could have been done in prose, I would not have needed to write the poems! But I can say that Y brings together a few seemingly disparate areas of subject matter that seemed intimately related to me the more I wrote the poems: First, the Y chromosome itself, its portrayal in popular culture and science, the mysteries that surround it – and, of course, its connection to the development, physical, emotional and cognitive, of boys. Along the way, I also ended up reading a great deal about both fabled and real “wild” children, most notably, Victor of Avyron, the child found in the woods of France whose story was the basis of Francois Truffaut’s film “The Wild Child,” as well as accounts of teaching young boys to sing, medical accounts of physical changes boys undergo and accounts of how infants learn language, including how we read the human face. I know that sounds like a lot, but the book is an attempt to bring many of these interdisciplinary forays into the same space. And ultimately, the poems aim to enlarge the kinds of questions we ask about childhood and its role in the broader human culture.

There are 16 sets of notes at intervals through the book called “adversaria,” a term which generally references a miscellany of notes. I chose it because it did not have the strict definition we normally ascribe to epigraphs, footnotes or endnotes. The adversaria are meant to accompany the sets of poems they frame and to provide a kind of through-line for the book as a whole. I was talking the other day with an interviewer (Amy Goetzman who did the excellent interview/article on Y for MinnPost, ”Brought to You by the Letter Y: Leslie Adrienne Miller’s New Poems“), and she described the adversaria as “keys” to unlock the book. Exactly. I love that description!

The presentations mark the culmination of a workshop extending over seven months to support research in the areas of service-learning and engaged pedagogy sponsored by the Office of Service-Learning.

The schedule and speakers are:

• 1 p.m. – Dr. Debra Peterson and Dr. Tim Scully, Communication and Journalism Department
• 1:30 p.m. – Dr. Ernest Owens, Management Department
• 2 p.m. – Dr. Susan Callaway, English Department
• 2:30 p.m. – Break
• 2:45  p.m. – Dr. Mike Klein, Justice and Peace Studies Department
• 3:15 p.m. – Dr. Kimberly Vrudny, Theology Department

Abstracts of the papers

Debra Petersen and Tim Scully: “Study-away Service-Learning: Preparing Students for a Transformational Experience”

If international service-learning is indeed “the most powerful pedagogy available to higher education,” we should examine its effects on our students and the strategies we use to maximize the desired outcomes with the goal of improving our ISL courses. For over a decade, UST Communication and Journalism faculty and students in “Hawaii: Multi-Cultural Communication in Diverse Organizations” have had a small bilingual charter school on Kaua’i, Hawaii, as their service-learning partner. Many of these UST students report that their relatively brief time at the school was a life-changing experience. This paper will focus on the current structure of the course and how it is designed to prepare students for a transformative experience at the service-learning site, as well as unexpected ways that this experience has been enhanced.

Ernest Owens: “The Effects of Sponsor Immersion on Service-Learning Based Project Management Curriculum”

Most research in service-learning and project management focuses on the process of service-learning or the methods of project management. This review will focus on the role of community sponsors and their efforts to engender successful service-learning-based projects. The analysis will frame the pedagogy for a semesterlong course where the sponsor participates as a student in the course on project management. This paper explores what happens when the sponsor is not an external leader guiding the effort from outside the classroom, but an integral member of the classroom experience. This paper elucidates some of the outcomes where the sponsor is trained alongside and experiencing the project on an equal footing with the students.

Susan Callaway: “Contexts and Contributions: A Case for Service-Learning in the Writing Center”

Despite the challenges inherent in community outreach, writing centers can benefit from service-learning in the peer consulting preparation course. Service-learning disrupts the assumptions consultants hold about writing, learning, literacy and their roles with their peers in the university. Through the lens of the UST Center for Writing’s work in the community, this paper describes the intersections between writing centers and service-learning, and then examines the issues a writing center director should be aware of in establishing outreach, all the while mining the benefits of partnering in the community.

Mike Klein: “Beyond the Dichotomy of Charity or Justice: Complementary Service-learning Strategies on the Social Change Wheel”

Social change wheel models provide a unifying framework for interrelated strategies addressing social issues without undermining critical analysis of power and injustice. Moving from a theoretical approach to practical application, this article presents the social change wheel as a synthesizing model and describes applications for service-learning reflection, analysis and planning.

Kimberly Vrudny: “‘Doing No Harm’ and Other Implausibilities: Photographic Ethics in the Field”

Dynamics of power and privilege are evident in documentary photography, as photographers with expensive cameras and generous travel allowances journey around the world, sometimes making a spectacle of human suffering. In creating “30 Years / 30 Lives,” a photography exhibit that introduces viewers to 30 individuals in the United States, South Africa, Thailand and Mexico whose lives in some way intersect with HIV/AIDS, I attempted to advance photographic ethics in the context of humanitarian relief by occupying a middle place between arguments that suggest such photography is never warranted, and the free-for-all arguments that suggest anything goes. Before departing to carry out the project, I outlined 10 ethical principles that should guide the practice of documentary photography, and then I attempted to abide by them in the field. In this paper, I examine three of those principles – preventing exploitation, mitigating privilege and overcoming stereotypes – with stories from behind the scenes, highlighting moments when remaining true to the principle was not always as straightforward as I might have wished, as well as moments when my horizons were broadened by interaction with participants in the project.

Lisa, I know you moved among many different disciplines (theater, sociology, creative writing) during your years at St. Thomas, and right now you’re writing plays by day and doing collaborative poetry with jazz musicians by night. Can you talk a little about the way your work moves among these disciplines?

Where to begin? When I entered college I was convinced I was going to become a writer. I thought I’d write fiction, though I’ve never completed any of the stories I’ve started. My first semester, I was really engaged in my sociology class. It was an opening up of worlds I wasn’t yet familiar with: cities, populations and environments with conditions I’d never experienced. This is a lot like literature, really. Or better yet, this is literature we sometimes read to find each other, rather than reading to find ourselves.

I persisted with sociology and English literature in tandem and eventually received a degree in sociology. I attended Midwest Sociological Society Conferences (in Chicago and St. Louis) presenting research papers with other undergrads. When it came time to think about graduate school, I was convinced I was going to be a sociology professor. I was one of those people who took sociology as a safe and practical gesture toward both academia and self. Didn’t get into graduate school. Didn’t go. This forced me to do some re-evaluation. I worked for a while post-grad as a personal advocate for an insurance company. I hated it. I would sit in my cube and feel that I was not actually helping people, and it became a bit injurious. I found myself reading in my time off and writing into the wee hours. It was really draining. I had been bitten by the poetry bug late in my college career – most specifically in your class, Leslie, Intermediate Poetry Writing. It was a time when I was beginning to find my voice and style and the architecture of my thought, all the while trying to find the way I fit into the world as a human being.

The summer after I graduated from St. Thomas, I went to work with the poets Dara Wier and Terrance Hayes at the Juniper Institute in Amherst, Mass. I felt like I didn’t know exactly what I was doing on the page. Certainly I was acting up, breaking rules and all that. Not only was I enjoying it, I was like a kid with a yo-yo learning how to “walk the dog” and make the “Eiffel Tower.” I was creating, and I wanted to show off. Later that year, when I was a Givens Fellow, writer Laurie Carlos told me that I had to stop apologizing in my work, and if I was going to continue apologizing I needed to at least understand why. Carlos’ advice was a breakthrough for me. The writing I was doing was very character driven, more like monologues and dialogues than a simple poetic rendering of experience. Ishmael Reed and Carlos both pushed me to write for the stage, so I applied for the Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellowship and got it!

I also began collaboration with jazz group Lulu’s Playground. Adam Meckler and I spoke early last year about collaborating to synthesize some of my spoken word into an avant-garde jazz/classical ensemble he was creating. They were doing everything from Shostakovich to Hank Williams. The first time I sat down with them it felt incredible. I’ve also worked with the Fantastic Merlins and Nathan Hanson, Brian Roessler and Rahjta Renn. These guys are so intuitive and free. When I play with them it is like all of that sadness, all of that grief is accessed, but with a palpable whimsy that adds a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Jazz music and the jazz community in general have allowed my work a foot in the door to public performance. It took me out of the often isolating place writing can put one. Now my biggest struggle is balancing the public self I’ve created and the private writer. It takes discipline I’m still learning.

What advice would you give current St. Thomas students in creative writing?

Keep writing and keep reading and learn how to be your best editor. As we grow as writers and also into our own adulthood, there won’t always be a workshop or a mentoring writer to use as a reference point. It’s important to learn about others’ work so you can recognize the magic of your own.

You’ve done such a good job of making connections in the Twin Cities community of artists and writers. Can you give current St. Thomas students some advice about how and why moving beyond the campus might enrich their years here?

I think as a student you can tend to become really restricted to the offerings of campus life. You can limit yourself. Here in the Twin Cities there is such a vibrant community of artists and writers that if you start going to a few things, you begin to see familiar faces. Minnesota artists (even our transplants) are very friendly, warm and willing to talk to young artists.

I know you maintain a blog, and I wonder if you could talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of blogging for a writer-artist.

This is a great question. I started the blog [http://2speakeaseblog.wordpress.com/ ] in 2009 as a manner of holding myself accountable. It was to be an online response to the things I was interacting with musically, in literature and on stage. Originally very inwardly focused, over the last year it has begun to morph into something more like an entertainment blog. Now I try to support some of my friends and artists by advertising for their shows. There are a lot of things about the old blog, when I had no notoriety, that I miss. I am no longer able to be as socially political as I’d like to be. But I can put that in my work. And I do, or I try to. For now I’m trying to observe and learn as much as I can every moment I’m lucky enough to be producing work people are hearing.

What is next for you in the best of all possible worlds?

Well, I am hoping to go back inside myself and write. I’ll begin to amalgamate a larger body of work. I have a few play concepts that I need to finish up and workshop before they will be ready for production, and I hope to commit more fully to the writing of plays and to continue writing poetry. In the best of all possible worlds, I will find a balance between the two forms. And a little balance between writing and performing.

Read more from CAS Spotlight

I, Liz, am a rhetorician, and this is how I began my 2009 book, Burke, War, Words. The book explored the development of modern rhetorical theory by looking at the efforts to “purify war” of a key theorist, Kenneth Burke, who tried to find a way during World War II not to eliminate debate but make it effective. As I read through the 60-year-old letters between Burke and his close friends, I gradually realized that he could develop a theory of debate as “purified war” because he and his friends were so often in conflict. They ranged from communist activists to conservative professors, and they attacked each others’ positions, called each other names, felt genuinely betrayed by each others’ stances, and yet remained friends. It was this feeling of being so passionately engaged with both the issue and the relationship that they just would not give up that served for Burke as a visceral alternative to the real war raging around him. I saw this theme so clearly as I sat in the archives during our current war, pouring over those long-ago letters, because I was at the same time involved in my own engaged, argumentative friendship with Joe.

When the two of us think together about “civil discourse,” we don’t start with what might seem to be the obvious question: “How can we as a society politely get along with each other?” Instead we ask ourselves, “How can we as a society engage in full blown useful debate? How can we believe in each other enough to believe that it’s worth it to keep trying to persuade each other? How can we both acknowledge our real differences and find our common ground?”

As a psychologist and marriage and family therapist, I, Joe, see every day the  importance of respectful, but honest, discourse that persuades without hurting. In my clinical practice, families come in with relationships fractured from a lack of civility. Some people have difficulty handling conflict in a way that remains respectful of the other; they attack and may eventually create enough damage that the relational bonds can never recover. Other people, however, err too far in the opposite direction; they avoid conflict altogether, so the issues and distance grow and the bonds weaken. We all engage in these behaviors to some extent. When Liz and I rekindled our friendship, at first I made many assumptions about who she was based on who I was 25 years ago. We didn’t understand each other, and we had many conversations that were not always civil.

Both of us had what we thought were our own diverse circles of friends, and we thought we were tolerant people. We knew, however, that certain beliefs were either held in common among most of us or they just weren’t discussed. The two of us “renewed friends” assumed similar commonalities and only belatedly realized that we now had profound differences, deeply felt, and perhaps epitomized by our “Ronald Reagan” conversations. Reagan had been president when we were in the St. Thomas social justice groups, and it turned out that we’d both later had personal contact with his policies. Thus, our increasingly uncivil attempts to explain our strong disagreement, demonstrated by Joe’s agonized note to Liz: “Reagan helped bring freedom to my family in the Czech Republic with his tough-on- Communism policies,” and Liz’s equally agonized note back: “Reagan helped kill my former brother-in-law in Guatemala by supporting death squads.” Reagan (his policies, his era) had saved or ruined the lives of people we loved – how could our friend not see that? Did we not care? With this and endless other differences between us, could we really talk?

For some reason, we did not do “the polite thing” and drop all controversial subjects. That would be the response of Joe’s conflict avoiders, who damage the relationship with the false civility of distance. In Liz’s world of public policy, it would be the times we red- and blue-staters decide there’s no point to seriously discuss together energy policy, war, the economy or the myriad other issues debate-weary people skirt. The two of us instead went around in circles, trying hard not to become Joe’s conflict bludgeoners or Liz’s talk-radio pundits, but instead to be more like Burke’s group of friends, trying to persuade each other and, therefore, trying to believe in each other’s potential as good and rational people capable of persuasion.

Sometimes that didn’t work. Sometimes it still doesn’t. But we are lucky – like the successful families that Joe treats, we shared the desire to respect each other’s opinions before we shared our own opinions. And the more our respect for each other’s core values grew, the more we understood – as Burke had predicted – that underlying our differences are many points of common departure for future discussions. We probably still disagree about Reagan, for instance, but now we recognize that disagreement springs from a common love for people, a common hatred of oppression, a difference in the contexts we’ve personally experienced, and probably a different – equally faulty – sense of Reagan’s influence on world events. It does not spring from a knee-jerk naïve leftist worldview versus a selfish, uncaring rightist worldview. As Liz is fond of noting, Burke insisted that “people, taken by and large, are acting reasonably enough, within their frame of reference,” and when the frame no longer fits, the solution is to widen one’s perspective, not think the other irrational – to see the world not as evil but as misguided and in need of our engaged, respectful, persuasive guidance.

However, with our own new, wider frame of reference regarding friends like us, what we increasingly noticed is that society echoes instead our former polarized conversations. The Left, the Right, environmentalists, businesspeople, Palin supporters, Obama supporters, Tea Party supporters: Groups bond by reassuring themselves how “right” they are and how wrong/evil/stupid the opposition is. We see that columnists, pundits and bloggers make a living lampooning the other side. We share a frustration that politicians spend more time attacking than governing. But we also share a growing awareness that the people in our daily lives, the people we agree with, oftentimes lampoon and attack, stereotype and misunderstand opposing opinions just as much as do public figures. And when the other side is evil, not misguided, there’s no reason to try to persuade them.

We see hopeful signs that others also are becoming aware of this dilemma. St. Thomas’ important new initiative in civil discourse is part of a growing trend. Last spring the president of Ohio State University, where Liz works, called for this largest university in the nation to take the lead in promoting civil discourse in public policy. This fall Joe’s professional group, the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, is holding its annual conference with a call to engage in civil discourse about diverse viewpoints on marriage. Liz’s professional group, the Rhetoric Society of America, recently awarded book of the year honors to Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse.

As a nation, we clearly need this kind of civil debate. In Crowley’s book, she cites Chantal Mouffe’s assertion that “a well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions” and adds that when “citizens fear that dissenting opinions cannot be heard … they may replace their allegiance to democracy with other sorts of collective identifications that blur or obscure their responsibilities as citizens.” Liz sees this societally with the rise of alienated internet niche groups; Joe works to overcome it on an interpersonal level in his clinical practice: once people feel they are understood, they soften and become more giving, more able to understand in turn.

But he and other psychologists also point out that it is increasingly difficult in our society to create the kind of safe space where such listening can occur. There are demonstrably increasing levels of narcissism that push us away from citizenship responsibilities toward each other. While we usually think of narcissism as excessive self love, it is actually a condition based in shame: narcissists experience considerable internalized shame, and they therefore need to embellish their accomplishments. They are very threatened by criticism. While healthy people can accept their weaknesses and strengths and can admit to being wrong, narcissists need to always be right and therefore need to devalue others. America suffers from a psychocultural “narcissism epidemic,” according to a recent book, and its authors, psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, note that “narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present.” Among a studied group of 37,000 college students, one in four students in 2006 agreed with most of the standard narcissistic indicators. As our culture becomes more narcissistic, we begin to treat each other as objects rather than equals. Being heard becomes more important than listening or understanding. Thus we continue the vicious pattern where being right, blaming and never taking responsibility for fault become the primary ways of “winning” an argument.

And this leads us to the concern we have with the way “civil discourse” is sometimes discussed today. Rhetoric tells us that persuasion must be predicated on the belief that the other is persuadable – an important first step for civil discourse to occur. However, the two of us worry when the new desire for civility stops there, when what “we” really hope will happen is that “we” will try harder to convince “them,” and “they” will become more open to listening to “us.” (Liz sees this, for instance, even in Crowley’s otherwise fine attempt to open discourse between liberals and the religious.) Our own friendship convinces us that only when we allow ourselves to soften, to also be open to persuasion, can we really engage in the kind of dialogue that strives not to win but to persuade, or in psychological terms not only to be heard but also to listen. This is the kind of discourse that occurs between friends.

Together we tried unsuccessfully to write our ideas about real discourse for several years before we finally found an unusual format that lets us bring both our professional knowledge and our love of writing together: We started a novel. We did it for fun, initially, and so our novel is a murder mystery and an adventure yarn, with as much humor and action and pathos as we can create. It includes a cast of characters ranging from Harry Chapin (the novel is called Cats in the Cradle) to Kenneth Burke to Pope John XXIII, and its “big picture” plot involves the conspiracy over a lost papal encyclical from Vatican II titled We Humbly Seek the Truth. Locales range from the Midwest to Rome to the Philippines. There’s even a scene at St. Thomas. But the novel also allows us to be serious about our growing shared insights into the vital need to disagree and be willing to change while staying in relationship –even when it’s really hard. Its primary protagonists, then, are the dysfunctional, post-modern “family” of a failed scholar and her former friend, a divorced newly ordained priest, his alienated daughter and her Buddhist brother. It is through them – their continual failure to listen to each other and their endless attempts to try again – that we seek to show just what the abstractions of “purified war” mean in our world. Betrayal, redemption, humility, rightness, narcissism, altruism, division and unity – just as in life – are enacted both on the global ideological stage and the local interpersonal one.

As an example, here is a piece of the St. Thomas scene, in which our protagonists, Luke and Ellie, have been brought back together after nearly a decade to try to help solve the “Cats in the Cradle” mystery:

“We were best friends, Luke. Do you even know how much that meant to me?” Her eyes filled with tears and she looked away from him, over the river, silent a long minute before she could go on. “And when things went wrong you couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me why.”

“It wasn’t about you.”

“No, the reason wasn’t about me. Not telling me the reason, that bloody well was all about me.”

“What do you want from me?”

She frowned. “I want you to treat me the way I’d treat you.”

“You want me to abuse you?”

At that she stamped her foot. “You are oblivious. Don’t you get it? If we’re both biking full speed, me north and you south, and we crash into each other, we’re both injured – but I immediately know that it was an accident so I roll over, ribs broken, and say, ‘Are you okay, Luke?’ But you don’t accept accidents, so you get up, bleeding, without looking at me, and you speed away because one of us had to be to blame. You don’t understand that no matter how many broken bones there are, it’s the speeding away that’s the real hurt.”

“I don’t do that,” he shook his head with finality, denying it all.

As we began to write, a funny thing happened: We realized that the tenets of the “better world” we were envisioning were the theological concepts we’d imbibed as students at St. Thomas. At college in the 1980s, we recognized that we were part of a Church going through enormous changes, still struggling with what it meant to become the Church in the modern world. It was a very exhilarating, very frustrating time – a very alive time – to be a Catholic. And so in our novel, Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, plays a key role. In order to write “him” (or really, a character that is based on him – we admit freely to playing with history in this fictional account), we’ve been re-inspired by his life and teachings, and this has been, for us, one of the best parts of our research. His novelistic nemesis is an anti-Modernist secret society (which actually existed at the time of Pius X) that will go to any length to eliminate a challenge to their view of Catholicism.

Here, for instance, is a bit from the first meeting of Burke and Pope John in 1963:

[Pope John XXIII] “I am no scholar, no intellectual. I am a man of the people, a paisano – a farmer, yes, but always I have believed that a peaceful man does more good than a learned one.”

Burke relaxed visibly, grinning broadly at the pope. “I live on a farm,” he said. “I don’t have a college degree. I believe in starting from words and actions, not abstractions. And all my life I’ve tried to say that people act reasonably if you understand their point of view.”

As we write and work in our respective professions, trying to help people engage in “effective dialogue” or “respectful listening” or “civil discourse,” we find that the ideas and ethics we learned a quarter century ago at St. Thomas still inspire us. Liz was at the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on Memorial Day, using a quick visit home to scope out a scene for the novel. (A good thing too – how did the whole building manage to turn itself in the opposite direction from our perfectly clear memories?!)But some memories were stronger. Up in the choir loft, the ghosts of the Liturgical Choir in which Liz had sung filled their chairs, lifting their voices to sing for a Sunday morning Mass the song of another alumnus, Marty Haugen: “Gather us in the lost and forsaken. Gather us in the blind and the lame. Call to us now and we shall awaken. We shall arise at the sound of our name.” This desire for unity is the lesson we learned from St. Thomas, the reason that we think civil discourse has a natural place at this university. Grounded in the Spirit at its best, religion shows us how to bond together, not in pride but in the hope that we can persuade others of what we believe to be true and the humility to believe that they may already have some of  that truth. “We are the young, our lives are a mystery. We are the old, who yearn for your face. We have been sung throughout all of history, called to be light for the whole human race.”

And so, no longer young, not quite yet old, we write together, striving to bring to life the visions of John XXIII, Kenneth Burke and Marty Haugen and the cloud of witnesses who have made us the people we are today. We won’t always get it right indeed, Joe once said that the thing that makes our friendship like family is that we fight like cats and dogs – but we strive to overcome our failings and continue the dialogue, the unending conversation. It is so easy to be certain that our opponents will never have our morals or be compelled by our logic. But as the University of St. Thomas, our alma mater, taught us, it is better to sing a song together with other imperfect people than to sing it alone perfectly: “Gather us in the rich and the haughty. Gather us in the proud and the strong. Give us a heart so meek and so lowly. Give us the courage to enter the song.”

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In the photo above, Conney appears with her poem located on the south side of Dayton Avenue near the Church of St. Mark. To learn more about the project, visit http://everydaysidewalk.org.

Bad Day

The red line unscrewed

from the jar of extra crunchy

almost empty

and the full, mounded spoon

half shoved in my mouth

says it all

-I don’t want to talk-

Caley Conney

What is the inspiration for this poem?

It’s a silly little poem. It’s very different from what I usually write, but it’s still so me. I had to write a poem for Dr. Alexis Easley’s English class and I had no idea what to write. I was sitting on the couch eating peanut butter right out of the jar and I remembered Dr. Easley had suggested that I write about my having difficulty writing the poem.

The longest poem I’ve written was about a patient dying from the perspective of being in the back of an ambulance. I worked as an EMT for four years. I loved it. Most people don’t realize that you are let into parts of a person’s life that no one else sees. It’s a very interesting window into humanity. That’s why I was a pre-med student when I came to St. Thomas.

Why did you submit the poem to the Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks project?

My mom made me do it. She said, “I really think you should enter this. I will pay your entrance fee if you submit a poem.” I submitted three poems. The other two poems were more deep and meaningful! I threw the winning poem in just for something different.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a weather person. In kindergarten, we made a weather wheel with an arrow that spun around a circle pointing to rain, sunshine, etc. It was on our refrigerator. After supper, I would stand in front of the fridge and use a small strainer as my microphone and tell my family what the weather was going to be. I still check the weather compulsively.

What is one of your favorite books from childhood?

My grandmother read all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to me as a child and then I read all of them later by myself.

What’s your favorite book?

My favorite novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. She was about 19 when she wrote it. The book started as a contest. She and her husband were at a party and they decided everyone should write a scary story but Mary’s was more psychologically scary than the others. I like it because it’s not a refined piece; it’s raw.

My favorite poet is Denise Levertov and I love her poetry collection, The Stream and the Sapphire. It’s not often that you hear a fresh take on Christianity. She makes me look at things in a different way.

Do you like writing poetry?

I love to write. It’s not really an option. I’ve always kept journals. Everyone in my family is a bookworm. And, I had my own personal librarian! When I was a kid, I had Carol at the Dakota County Library. She’d drop what she was doing when I came in and have a pile of books for me to read.

What kinds of things do you like to write about?

Everyday things. Things you might miss if you’re not looking and then you realize the significance and beauty of them.

Where do you work?

I’m an associate development officer at the University of Minnesota Foundation. I didn’t look for traditional writing jobs when I graduated, but so much of what I do in nonprofits involves writing that it still feels like a “writing job.” Nonprofits and foundations have wonderful stories about the generosity of donors. Often those stories go untold, but I have the opportunity in my job to put a face to those giving and receiving gifts.

What are your plans?

My dream is to get a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. Right now, I’m more career-focused.

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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. – Willa Cather

For years I misremembered it as The heart of another
is always a dark forest,believing the wilderness a given,
a problem to solve before we’re let in. That once you find
the way in, it’s a wood you can know, with beasts
you can name if not outwit, even when they try
to take you by wonder. Above all, that the getting close
would unravel a path in the undergrowth, beat back
stinging snarls, so we’d arrive at some degree
of recognition, then have every reason to expect
improvement, even comfort thereafter, the screaming
and slithering thinning over the years
until it’s more Hyde Park than Yellowstone.

But there’s no accounting for the loneliness
of a journey we expected to share and ended up
taking solo, and though we knew there were
tunnels everywhere underfoot, that everything
living beneath the surface was as afraid of us
as we were of it, fear kept tarnishing our way,
and the grizzly of hope was always somewhere ahead
just off the path, unaccountably cute in its hunger,
swatting berries toward its giant smiling ma
was if there were years to accomplish the task
of fattening the chance of survival.

But Cather knew what she was doing
when she moved that insipid always due east.
That the region of the heart is impenetrable ever,
that knowing the beast doesn’t shame him,
that proximity invites peril, that even
with his snout smeared in huckleberry juice,
his eyes too tiny to detect you in the bramble,
he is the intimate who stumbles toward you,
navigating by smell alone, with damage in mind.

However, by celebrating the New India brand, corporate and state interests also minimize the grim realities – especially the poverty and inequities – that confront the vast majority of India’s people. The Indian government is less inclined, for instance, to report that structural inequities at the national level are at critical levels: India is ranked 126th on the United Nations Human Development Index. Life expectancy at birth is a mere 65; rural poverty is over 30 percent; and female literacy is barely at 50 percent. Troubling are the various inequities based on caste, class and gender that remain embedded in the social system; a small minority continues to amass huge wealth; and a rising middle class is offered the seductive promise of consumer goods, even as its foothold on the class ladder becomes ever more treacherous as a result of increasing costs of food, housing and other essentials. Such contradictions of the New India seldom appear in the brand image.

I have been reflecting on and writing about the New India brand and its contradictions for some time, and I spent my last sabbatical (2006-07) writing and revising a bookmanuscript, Tracing the New Indian Subject: Reading Culture in a Neoliberal Age. A portion of my sabbatical also was spent in India, traveling to various cities, meeting academics and activists, and conducting research at libraries and public policy organizations. The India that I see and try to capture in this book is very different from the media’s somewhat onesided image of a new economic power.

My work focuses on particular aspects of this “new,” liberalized India: the ways in which citizenship and “the citizen” are formulated. The rituals and forms of citizenship, broadly defined, are sites where the texts of nation, diaspora, religion, capital and consumerism collide and coalesce. Such sites are critical to creating, negotiating and challenging ideas of the New India.

Since many of the contesting notions and rituals regarding citizenship are played out in the realm of public culture, I analyze an array of texts that constitute public culture in the New India (fiction, film, political advertisements, and so forth). In these texts, I examine four constructions of the new Indian citizen/subject.

The first one, constructed primarily by the corporate media and the political parties is the consumer subject. In this incarnation, the citizen is constructed both as an individual who has the choice to consume within the terms of the freemarket economy and as a national subject, heir to a glorious cultural tradition. This citizen is thus connected to the global economy, but also rooted in the idea of the national.

The second formation is the cosmopolitan subject, represented as a potentially liberatory figure who resists the designation of the subject-as-consumer by rooting his or her identity in a humanist tradition marked by collaboration, accommodation and convergence. This subject, in direct opposition to nativist calls by fundamentalists and nationalists, ideally transcends the narrow limitations of nation, religion and space and is captured most effectively in the work of one of India’s foremost writers, Amitav Ghosh.

A particularly contested terrain of struggle in the New India has been the designation of the so-called “new” Indian woman, who is represented as a confluence of many “virtues”: she is liberated, independent and tapped into the world of finance capital, but she is also able to preserve her idealized, feminine “Indian” self. My examination of this gendered subject, however, is not in the realm of this hegemonic construction; instead, I look at attempts by three feminist diasporic filmmakers to position a subject who, in their view, can forge a new gendered identity on her own terms.

Finally, any study of the New India has to take into account the multiple resistance movements that are emerging to fight for a democratic and egalitarian nation. These battles are being waged by ordinary farmers and workers who, on the margins of the “New India,” are attempting to define citizenship and subjectivity through direct political action. Prominent among these citizens are the many urban food vendors who are being forced out of their livelihoods by a combination of state and corporate pressures. I examine the contours of one such struggle in the city of Kolkata (formerly, Calcutta) and highlight both the struggles and the achievements of this resistant subject.

Throughout, I attempt to reveal the complexities of all four subject formations, highlighting the contradictory ways in which they function within these cultural narratives. My claims are that these narratives partially reflect postcolonial anxiety about the Indian state and the “new” Indian citizen, and that these texts often are caught up in positions that neither conform to, nor are completely resistant to, a defining model of the New India. Hopefully my work will diffuse some of the glare that distorts views of contemporary India, offering a more nuanced perspective on emerging subject positions.

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This workload is increased when a given year’s common text generates controversy, usually because it presents language or an aspect of experience someone judges inappropriate for 18-year-old men and women at a Catholic university. This fall our choice of The Handmaid’s Tale was attacked on several fronts, including in a newspaper column. The columnist made the amusingly confident assertion that the novel was “utterly passé” in “literary circles,” but the column elsewhere seemed to argue that we should choose “literary classics” for our common texts, which would indeed save us from at least one kind of predictable attack. After all, with such an undeniable wealth of certified classics available, why choose a relatively contemporary text, which people inside and outside the university feel free to attack as unworthy and unwholesome?

Provoking controversy is not a useful goal in itself, but provoking thought is central to our mission as a university, and that’s where our choice of a common text comes most sharply into focus. The most successful common texts over the years have been those that are richly literary (that is, interesting and skillful in terms of style and language), that are substantial enough to bear the weight of sustained attention, that pose a variety of challenges for the reader, and that engage tensions recognizably present in our students’ world.

We certainly could turn exclusively to “classics” and still provoke emotional as well as intellectual discussion (and even generate controversy – selections from Chaucer come to mind). Our openness to relatively recent work and our general preference for texts that reflect the complications of a multicultural world derive from our experience as teachers that those are works likely to provoke thought among our students, engage a full range of emotions, raise real questions, and encourage intellectual conversation. Every literary work starts out being contemporary. Every literary work is written for a living audience of people walking around outside while the writer sweats away with computer or typewriter or pencil or pen or chisel or naked memory and imagination and voice. For us to avoid books by living writers because that would help us avoid controversy would seem to me to be a double error – first because it would take from our students the shared experience of engaging literary forms and voices of their own time, and then because it would limit opportunities for active, fully engaged discussion.

There’s an idea, common among those on the left as well as on the right, that English professors choose literary texts in order to push some social or political agenda. I suppose this happens sometimes, but every teacher I know chooses texts because she or he believes they have literary merit and will provoke thought, spark discussion and generate interesting writing. Literary texts are full of ambiguities and paradoxes and mixed feelings, just as the rest of life is, and like the rest of life, they move us in unpredictable and contradictory ways. Read with an open mind and an open heart, literature makes the world richer and more complicated, exactly the opposite of what propaganda seeks to do.

Although it’s obviously aggravating for department and committee chairs and administrators to have to field attacks and insults from those who disagree with our curricular choices, I believe it’s important to choose texts that challenge our students on a variety of levels, including those that trigger strong feelings. If there is a place in the world that is appropriate for the discussion of controversial matters, it is the university, including the Catholic university. We have in the past included classic texts in our common text selections and we might well do so in the future, but to exclude any text – classic or contemporary – because it could involve controversy would seem to me to be a terrible mistake.

The story says a lot about the 90-year-old professor emeritus of English, as well as the way in which he has spent his days since learning to read at age 7. It also says something about time and how Connors has chronicled its passage during seven decades spent in the shadow of the now University of St. Thomas.

Reddy Fox is now available as an e-book; it can be downloaded for $7.95.

The story is the same; the delivery system has changed. The school Connors entered in 1933 and later served as a faculty member, administrator and historian is still a Catholic diocesan institution of higher education but one that has evolved into a comprehensive urban university. Despite all the changes, one person who would still recognize the educational narrative, Connors maintains, is St. Thomas’ founder, Archbishop John Ireland. “He would say, ÔI told you so,’” observed Connors.

Where others might see only newness, Connors also sees historical glimpses – an earlier time – as when he recalls that the brick skin of the old Foley Theater lies underneath Mankato stone where Coughlan Field House meets Schoenecker Arena. While others might have been surprised by the advent of a Minneapolis campus, Connors’ wonder is tempered by the notion that the very location of St. Thomas presaged an educational leap across the nearby Mississippi.

While some might worry about the fate of the liberal arts, he believes a St. Thomas education still “enables one to teach one’s self” – his definition of a liberally educated person. He has written enough critically praised history about St. Thomas to deflect any charges of being overly positive. Mark him down as an optimist who stresses continuity. “I much prefer the opinion of John Ireland,” he observed in a 1992 talk at a campus forum on the Catholic university, “who argued that since our hours in the sunlight are pathetically brief, we should lengthen life at both ends by borrowing from both the past and the future. From days that are gone, experience and ideals; from those to come, scope and purpose of action.” If St. Thomas is to achieve greatness in the 21st century, Connors believes it will only be as a Catholic university with a liberal arts core.

It has been more than two decades since Connors left the classroom after teaching (in his words) “virtually every English Department course in the catalog,” to write Journey Toward Fulfillment, the definitive centennial history of the college published in 1986. Institutional histories are, in the words of a former St. Thomas history professor, “a devilishly difficult species,” but Connors’ chronicle drew praise for not being dull and uncritical. “The text possesses integrity as well as felicity of style,” wrote a reviewer who went on to admit his only criticism was the lack of a dust jacket.

Connors enjoys research. “It’s a lot like fishing,” he explained. “You move into unfamiliar bays, and there’s a sense of mystery, not knowing what’s under the surface. You cast and get an occasional nibble, then a tug – hints at an answer. When you finally land what you are after, it might be of interest only to you because it clinches something important.”

His doctoral thesis at the University of Minnesota, “The Victorian Reappraisal of the 18th Century,” took him 17 years to complete, some mornings rising at 4 a.m. to work on it while teaching five classes at the college. “Essentially, it was finding out what everyone in the 19th century thought of everyone in the 18th century,” he commented, with the inflection of a man who would not choose the same topic again, fishing simile or no.

Parkinson’s disease and other ailments have affected Connors’ erstwhile hobbies of hiking and reading. He keeps a street map of London by his side to test his eyesight, and it has been four years since he last walked a campus deep in memory. “I worked on the grounds crew the summer before my freshman year,” he recalled. “We pushed hand mowers, four abreast on overlapping paths,” across a campus considerably less manicured than at present. It was a much smaller school in the Depression 1930s “when buying a streetcar token was something to consider carefully,” but it had an intimacy remembered fondly by Connors.

From his modest apartment about two miles south of the campus on Mississippi River Boulevard, the emeritus English professor can measure an increased pace of institutional advancement. Since he wrote his last longhand sentence in the draft of Journey, the Minneapolis campus grew from rented space in the former Powers department store in 1987 to a gleaming downtown campus highlighted by a newly opened School of Law; the affiliation with the St. Paul Seminary occurred; the college became a university, and Father Dennis Dease became its 14th president; and Frey Science and Engineering Center, and Morrison, Murphy and Opus Halls, and additions to O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center and Murray-Herrick Campus Center were built.

Some of the change is intertwined with Connors’ personal campus history. The English Department in which he taught for 27 years established a master’s program; the Catholic Digest, on which he was associate editor for seven years, was sold by the university; and a development campaign raised an unprecedented $250 million between 1993 and 2001. The last would impress Connors because he served as assistant director of development, writing materials for the campaign to match the 1962 Ford Foundation grant. That drive raised $6.3 million in three years, considered a fund-raising marvel in its day.

Time also closes friendships. Within a span of five months, two former presidents of St. Thomas, James P. Shannon and Monsignor Terrence J. Murphy, died. Connors admired both and tried to define in his book their contributions by subtitling the Shannon tenure (1956-66) “The Era of Good Feeling” and that of Murphy (1966-1991) “The Comprehensive View.” “The single most important element in institutional progress is presidential leadership,” asserts Connors, who sees Dease as continuing the tradition of his predecessors.

Extensive reading lists were common adjuncts to Connors-taught courses. He started reading in Boswell when he was 9 years old, and in remarks at an honors convocation in 1982, he stressed the importance of the “neglected R.” Constant independent reading leads to all-important intimacy with the written language, he argued. “I have never known a single person who handled the written language competently who was not also a habitual reader,” he told his audience.

His own collection of some 500 books is now mainly dispersed to libraries, but he has kept as many volumes as his apartment can comfortably accommodate, including the complete works of Charles Dickens in his bedroom. “Until recently, I read The Pickwick Papers every year,” he said. He also had the habit of periodically reading Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order – and sometimes in reverse chronological order. Connors advocates the “interested life,” one “marked by strong, unflagging interests,” and stresses “reading for the pleasure of satisfying one’s curiosity.”

The historian of St. Thomas has a prodigious memory, not only for chunks of English verse but also for scenes from classic films like “Casablanca,” as well as minutiae from Sherlock Holmes adventures. (Connors is a serious student of the famous English detective and, especially, of his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, whom he considers to be under-appreciated.) He can recall today the design of the nametag his future wife Catherine Commerford (who died in 1985) wore when she checked his coat at a Junior Catholic League Halloween dance in the 1940s.

He urged his students to memorize poems, and when he retired, snatches were returned to him in letters from grateful graduates. Poetry was not all for which he was thanked. “Your class notes in the Romantic Age did more to guide me through preliminary and qualifying exams for the Ph.D. (at the University of Michigan) than any graduate seminars,” wrote one former student. Others remembered acts of kindness – a five-pound note sent to a recent graduate living as a freelancer in London in the early 1970s, and advice on appropriate love poems given a student embarking on a honeymoon.

A former colleague remembers him as “shy and diffident maybe to a fault.” The word “gracious” is perhaps the one most frequently applied by those who know him, and it can be found in the written critiques he gave student writing. Consider the probable hapless condition of the essay that elicited this gentle instruction (reported by the essayist many years later): “Your aim must be to make your expression match your thinking.”

When a future historian of St. Thomas tries to define Joe Connors’ institutional contribution in a chapter subtitle, let that person ponder this 1977 evaluation by his department chair: “Joe Connors continues to be the main source of strength and inspiration (in the department). Nothing ostentatious – just superb teaching, continual intellectual and professional commitment and well-reasoned counsel.”

Richard Conklin ’58 retired in 2001 from his position as associate vice president for university relations at the University of Notre Dame. He and his wife live in the Twin Cities.