Department News

WLP students published on TheSmartSet.com, Skirt! magazine, and Salon.com

This past semester, two students in Writing, Literature, and Publishing Associate Professor Jeffrey Seglin's Column Writing classes had their pieces picked up by media outlets. Alex Strum, MFA '11, had his column "My Facebook Ombudsman" published on TheSmartSet.com, and Rachel Walls '10 had her story "The Plank House" published in Skirt! magazine.

Strum says his piece for TheSmartSet.com was a social commentary on Facebook. "We put so much of ourselves out there," he says, referring to status updates on Facebook. "People tend to read into other people's status updates and thinks there's more to it." His essay, he says, takes a small shot at those people who seem to take Facebook too seriously.

For her humorous personal essay "The Plank House," Walls says she drew on her childhood growing up in Alaska. She admits that she was wavering a bit about her ambition to be a writer before getting published. "I had a fear of getting rejected, and was worried I wasn't enjoying writing like I used to," Walls confessed. "But Jeff's [Seglin] class approached writing in a more professional way," she explained. "There is an end goal, and he asks us to think about writing from a freelancer's perspective. You have to think, 'OK, where do I want this to go?' before you write," she said.

Both Walls and Strum say they are going to continue to pitch columns to media outlets.
Salon.com, the award-winning online news and entertainment website, recently signed on to publish a column by Strum defending his opinion that the movie Kids (Lionsgate, 1995) was the scariest film of the past 20 years.

"When I first saw Kids I was terrified," he said. The movie centers on a day in the life of a group of sexually active teenagers, a few of whom are HIV–positive, in New York City and their unrestrained behavior toward sex and drugs during the mid-1990s.

Walls says she is going to take a few more of the pieces she wrote for Seglin's class and pitch them to magazines such as Bitch and Bust. She hopes to move to New York City upon graduation and get a job working for a magazine.

Seglin's Column Writing class requires those enrolled to write and pitch columns on a weekly basis. For the class, all students must identify the publications to which they want to send their work.

"I never thought of myself as a journalist," says Strum, "but in taking the course I realized I could write about stuff I'm actually interested in and really enjoy it." Strum is continuing to pitch columns to publications and is getting paid for some of them. "The [Column Writing] class and Jeff were the catalyst for my interest in column writing," Strum said. "Seglin is one of the best professors I've ever had."

Check out their columns at TheSmartSet.com and Skirt!

John Skoyles is a guest columnist for The Boston Globe

Professor John Skoyles has written a series of op-ed pieces for The Boston Globe in the months of December and January. Here are a few:

• "Pawing her way into my heart"
• "Joining the fountain pen network"
• "The Raymond Carver I knew"
• "On a trail in Truro"
  

First-Year Writing Program student wins Scholars for the Dream Award

Fernando Febres, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and is now a second-year Marketing major at Emerson, has won a 2010 Scholars for the Dream Travel Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication to speak on a panel “Designing a Multi-Media Catalog for a Community Literacy Project in Medellín, Colombia” at the annual convention in Louisville this March.

The bi-lingual, multi-media catalog was a project in Tamera Marko’s WR121 course in the First-Year Writing Program and is part of an ongoing bi-national collaboration between North American students and Medellin, co-founded by Marko and Jota Samper at MIT.

Jeffrey Seglin pens column for Real Simple magazine

Writing, Literature, and Publishing Associate Professor Jeffrey Seglin penned an article titled "Ten Everyday Ethical Questions Answered" for the Expertise column of the February 2010 issue of Real Simple magazine. Expertise is a monthly column that is part of the Life Lessons section of the magazine.

Seglin writes "The Right Thing," a weekly column on general ethics syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate. In the column, he regularly offers solutions to ethical dilemmas posed by readers who write to him at rightthing@nytimes.com.

Seglin says he is often surprised to learn which dilemmas draw the most attention from readers. "It's never the seemingly important or weighty things that get people," Seglin explains. "It's always the smaller issues, like garbage; how to dispose of garbage seems to come up often."

In the Real Simple article, Seglin covers similar, seemingly small ethical questions that have occurred to him and his readers, such as "If a charity sends me free address labels and I don't make a contribution, is it OK to use them?" and "If someone tells an offensive joke, is it my responsibility to speak up about it?"

Seglin is the author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart. His syndicated column's blog is at www.jeffreyseglin.com.

Jessica Treadway wins the 2009 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award

The University of Georgia Press is pleased to announce Jessica Treadway as the winner of the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award for her manuscript Please Come Back to Me. The award recognizes a superlative book-length collection of short fiction and includes a cash prize of $1000 and publication by the University of Georgia Press.

In most of the stories in her winning collection Please Come Back to Me, the line between parents, partners, and children is strictly drawn; there are perspectives from all sides, but very little empathy in between. Treadway has previously published a collection of stories, Absent Without Leave (Delphinium) and a novel, And Give You Peace (Greywolf).

Lise Haines' new book Girl in the Arena hits bookstores on October 13

From the American Library Association: “Vividly rendered, this story of self-determination, loss, grief, and survival is set in a contemporary but alternative world permeated with virtual reality and an extreme-sport gladiator subculture. Eighteen-year-old pacifist Lyn has no intention of becoming a traditional gladiator’s wife. Then her stepdad, Tommy, is killed in an arena fight, and she faces an impossible choice: to follow the corporate-run Gladiator Sports Association’s rules, which require her to marry his competitor, Uber; or to protect her family’s future by entering the arena herself, with possibly devastating consequences. Referencing history and pop culture, Lyn’s droll, sometimes poignant first-person narrative is engaging and intimate, and it deftly combines romance, Lyn’s family responsibilities, and thought-provoking, frequently satirical looks at societal issues, such as celebrity, violence, and a culture that prizes profit over compassion. The scenes are occasionally disturbing and gruesome, but the diverse characters, chillingly hyperrealistic scenarios, and the strong, appealing protagonist provide an immersing read that is likely to attract fans of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.” ~Booklist

“Entertainingly gruesome and emotionally resonant.” ~Kirkus

“Girl in the Arena is a heart-pounding, suspenseful read with twists and turns you won’t see coming…” ~The Compulsive Reader

Richard Hoffman wins two awards and publishes new book

Richard Hoffman is the winner of the 2009 New England Poetry Club Sheila Motton Book Award for Gold Star Road. He was also announced as a recipient of a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellowship Award.

In addition, he has just published a new book -- a short story collection titled Interference & Other Stories.

"The stories in Interference are moving, wise, and bracingly unsentimental. Richard Hoffman writes about male sadness and vulnerability with unusual insight and tough-minded compassion." - Tom Perrotta

“These stories of ordinary and extraordinary heartbreak investigate centuries-old themes with details that are at once familiar and surprising. Humorous or brutal, transgressive or redemptive, each story is full of wisdom and beauty.” - Kyoko Mori

"These stories are both funny and moving, wise without being pedantic, intelligent without being showy, and experimental without being precious. Richard Hoffman's vision is wide and deep, and he evokes his characters with an artful grace that is a joy to read. Interference is a triumph!" - Andre Dubus III