News & Events
Steffens & Voos Attend Yellowstone Conference
From the GMC Journal
Week of October 6, 2008
GMC student Jonathan Voos and Prof. Ron Steffens (communications) recently presented papers at a conference focused on a scientific and policy retrospective of the 1988 Yellowstone fires. The conference, “The ‘88 Fires: Yellowstone and Beyond,” was hosted by the International Association of Wildland Firefighters in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Ron presented a paper titled “How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fire: The Rhetorical Regeneration of Fire Landscapes and Communities.” It analyzed narrative myths that underlie and frame the way reporters, fire managers, and the public respond to wildfires. Ron has both written about wildfires and served as a fire manager in the Yellowstone ecosystem since 1992.
Jonathan also works for the National Park Service; he manages trails crews in Olympic National Park while writing an internship report that will complete a degree in natural resources management. His talk, “The Failure of Wildland Fire Management to Meet the Tenets of True Wilderness Preservation,” grew from an independent study project he researched with Provost William Throop. In his paper, Jonathan outlined the tenets for a “natural processes” approach to wilderness management that precludes active management, including fire suppression.
Christensen Publishes Essay Collection
From the GMC Journal
Week of September 29, 2008
Prof. Laird Christensen (English and Environmental Studies) has published a new collection of essays, Teaching North American Environmental Literature, which he co-edited with Mark C. Long of Keene State College and Fred Waage of East Tennessee State University. As the latest in the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series, this volume gathers together essays that provide a fundamental context for teaching interdisciplinary courses in literature and environment, as well as descriptions of a range of such courses from more than twenty leading figures in the field.
Laird’s essay introduces the portion of the book devoted to teaching approaches, describing the enormous growth in variety and sophistication of such courses since they began to appear in the early 1980s. Drawing on the ASLE Collection of Syllabi in Literature and the Environment, which he compiled and edited with Peter Blakemore in 1996, Laird traces the evolution of such courses past a pioneer stage of survey courses and tentative interdisciplinary adventures, observing that contemporary teaching in this field is typically characterized by a resistance to canonization, greater theoretical sophistication, and attempts to engage literature students with their own physical environments.
LesCarbeau Publishes in SeaStories
From the GMC Journal
Week of September 8, 2008
Prof. Mitchell LesCarbeau (English) had a poem accepted in SeaStories, an online publication put out by the Blue Ocean Institute. Its title is "The Poet who Mistook the Sea for a Mirror." Last year he had a prose piece about sailing accepted, entitled "End of Summer."
World Literature Today Features
Christensen Article
From the GMC Journal
Week of September 8, 2008
Prof. Laird Christensen (English and Environmental Studies) published an article entitled “Writing Home in a Global Age” in the July/August issue of World Literature Today. Laird's article, which introduced the journal's special issue on "Literature Goes Green," explores the persistence of local and bioregional writing in a time increasingly defined by the forces of globalization. Developing a bioregional intimacy with the places we live, he writes, can help us understand how a global economy obscures the impacts that our daily choices have on someone else's habitat.
Denise Hill, reviewing the issue for NewPages.com, writes that, "This essay, as well as the whole issue, would be a powerful addition to any curriculum that includes nature, environmental, or place-based writing."
Artist & Author to Visit Green Mountain College
From the GMC Journal
Week of September 2, 2008
Clare Walker Leslie, an artist and author nationally renowned for her work teaching nature journaling, will present "The Artist's Perception of Nature Throughout Art History" on Thursday, September 25, at 6:30 p.m. in the Gorge. Leslie, the author of eight books, was the 2004 winner of the John Burroughs Award for Nature Literature for Young Readers.
Her presentation is sponsored by the GMC English Department, the ELA program and the GMC Speakers Bureau.
Hidden Oak to Publish Poems
From the GMC Journal
Week of May 5, 2008
Prof. Mitchell LesCarbeau (English) recently had several poems accepted for publication in Hidden Oak. They are titled “Hot Night," "Narragansett Bay," "God Will Save Me, if He Exists," and "Temporarily Jejune in June."
Mitchell LesCarbeau to Publish Poems
From the GMC Journal
Week of April 21, 2008
Prof. Mitchell LesCarbeau (English) has had two poems accepted for publication in Timber Creek Review. They are titled “Sketches of Jazz” and “Penelope Alone.”
Mitch LesCarbeau has two poems accepted for publication
From the GMC Journal
Week of April 30, 2007
Prof. Mitch LesCarbeau (English) had two poems recently accepted for publication: "Athena," in Albatross, and "The Northern Renaissance," in The Iconoclast. Both will come out in the next few months.
Paul Stuewe published in Canadian Notes & Queries
From the GMC Journal
Week of April 23, 2007
Prof. Paul Stuewe (English) has had reviews of two new biographies of Canadian literary stalwarts published in Canadian Notes & Queries. While waxing enthusiastic over Ormond and Barbara Mitchell's W.O. Mitchell: The Years of Fame, 1948-1998, Stuewe was far more severe with Robert Thacker's Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, even suggesting that if the publisher had "paid to have this book copyedited, it should ask for its money back."
Poet, Former NPR Commentator David Budbill to Give Reading
From the GMC Journal
Week of April 23, 2007
The campus community is invited to an evening of "Poetry, Music, and Politics" with writer David Budbill at Green Mountain College on Thursday, April 26, at 7 p.m. in The Gorge of Withey Hall. Budbill is author of seven books of poems, eight plays, a novel, a collection of short stories, a picture book for children, dozens of essays, introductions, speeches and book reviews, the libretto for an opera and is a performance poet on two CDs. He was for a time a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and his poems are frequently read by Garrison Keillor on the NPR feature, The Writer's Almanac.
Budbill tours occasionally with avant-garde bassist and composer, William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. In 2003 the three released, Songs for a Suffering World: A Prayer for Peace, a Protest Against War. William Parker and Budbill also released in 1999, Zen Mountains-Zen Streets: A Duet for Poet and Improvised Bass, a two-CD set of a live performance which is available on the Boxholder Records label.
Visual Writer Marjorie Ryerson Gives Reading
From the GMC Journal
Week of March 5, 2007
Photographer, poet, journalist, and author Marjorie Ryerson will give a reading from her works on Thursday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the East Room of Withey Hall. Ryerson, who will be a visiting writer at Green Mountain College in 2007-08, is the author of Water Music and Companions for the Passage: Stories of the Intimate Privilege of Accompanying the Dying. Marjorie Ryerson is an award-winning professor, photographer, poet and journalist. Her photographs have appeared in such diverse publications as Vermont Life, The Boston Globe, Yankee, Country Living, and the photography books, The Vermont Experience, Vermont for Every Season and Water Music. As an art photographer, Ryerson has had numerous one-woman shows of her work. Her feature stories, news stories, photography and poetry have been published by magazines and newspapers across the Northeast for the past 25 years.
Ryerson taught writing and photography at Castleton State College from 1991 until 2005. She was selected as the Vermont State Colleges Faculty Fellow for the academic year 2000-2001, the highest honor awarded to a professor in the Vermont State College system.
Transgendered Author Jennifer Finney Boylan to Speak
From the GMC Journal
Week of Jan. 22, 2007
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of the bestselling memoir She's Not There, gave a talk entitled "A Life in Two Genders" on Thursday, Feb. 1 in The Gorge of Withey Hall. The public was invited to attend this free event.
Boylan is a widely praised author and professor at Colby College in Maine. "She's Not There," published by Doubleday in 2003, was the first bestselling work by a transgendered American. Her writing has been described by Edward Albee as "observed carefully and with love, and her levitating wit is wisely tethered to a humane concern." Boylan has been a frequent guest on national television and radio programs, including three visits to the Oprah Winfrey Show. She has also appeared on the Larry King Show, The Today Show and been the subject of a documentary on CBS' 48 Hours. She has also appeared on NPR's Marketplace and the Diane Rehm Show.
Slam Poet, Mike McGee Performs
From the GMC Journal
Week of Jan. 22, 2007
"Mighty" Mike McGee, an international spoken word artist, writer, performer, speaker, slam poet and comic, performed in the Gorge of Withey Hall on Wednesday, January 24. In 2006, Mike was crowned the 2006 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, besting over 70 of the world's best-ranked slam poets. McGee’s performance was free and open to the public.
Paul Stuewe publishes review in Magill's Literary Annual
From the GMC Journal
Week of Dec. 4, 2006
Prof. Paul Stuewe (English) had his review of a new collection of writings by Roland Barthes, The Neutral, published in the 2006 edition of Magill's Literary Annual. Stuewe notes that Barthes, one of the major figures in contemporary literary theory, supplies a useful antidote to deconstructive excesses in his engagement "with what had in effect become a kind of tyranny of the binary opposition, as he returns to his earlier interest in searching for signs that there are in-between, unappropriated, and essentially neutral places that have escaped the domination of discourse by dichotomous thinking."
