Chapman NOW, Summer 2014

A S P E C I A L P U B L I C AT I O N F R O M C H A P M A N M A G A Z I N E ■ S U M M E R 2 0 1 4

What Comes to Mind When You Think of Home?

My home is creatively furnished with four beautifully smart, athletic and kind children my husband and I have raised. I find myself reflecting on how incredibly blessed I am when we are all sitting down for our traditional Sunday evening dinners. My home comes alive when I have all four children home with their friends, hanging out, swimming, playing pool or shuffleboard, or watching a movie. The sounds of innocent laughter, embraced with love, make my home special.

THE

SHIFTING NATURE

By Pico Iyer

ERIN LASTINGER ’88, a communications graduate, is chairman and CEO of the A. Gary Anderson Family Foundation. She is pictured with her husband, Gary, and their children, clockwise from left, Parker, Austin, Brady and Morgan.

Alone in my second-story dorm room, I raise the window overlooking the quad. Elbows propped on the paint-cracked sill, hands on my cheeks, I listen to night sounds: a fountain splashing, wind rustling through eucalyptus trees, crickets calling, and the clang-clang of the Los Angeles Railway V Line streetcar, rumbling down Vermont Avenue. Chapman’s redbrick, ivy-covered buildings surround the quadrangle, where four sidewalks converge at a fishpond and fountain. Students gather at the crescent-shaped benches encircling the pond to chat between classes. The fountain will become a symbol of my four-year metamorphosis.

MARY ELLEN (ZIMMERMAN) BARNES ’50, an English graduate, describes her first evening in her new home on the Chapman campus, which in 1946 was on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. Barnes’ entire essay Windows is at chapman.edu/magazine. Copies of four of her books are in Leatherby Libraries.

A morning treasure hunt for sea glass and heart-shaped stones on the beach gives way to a breakfast that indulges our daughter Maddie’s love of all things syrup. Then it’s on to table games and suspiciously easy wins at Rummikub for Maddie, who beams when our hosts, Ann and Dale Fowler ’58, ask about her thoughts for the future, allowing her to share her goal of one day becoming a Broadway star. Now it’s Ann and Dale’s turn to beam as we delight in their latest treasure — a video of their great-granddaughter Jane, just a few months old, smiling for the camera before a successful rollover. The setting is the spectacular coast of Massachusetts, which is a wonderful place to build a house. But to build a loving home, you need special people like Ann and Dale, whose commitment to family and friends can turn a rainy Fourth of July into the warmest of experiences.

LARRY BOURGEOIS ’05, ’10, his wife Sheryl Bourgeois, Ph.D., executive vice president for university advancement at Chapman, and Maddie visited the Fowlers at their home in Beverly Farms, Mass.

Dale ’58 and Ann Fowler are at home on the coast of Massachusetts.

of Home

I’ve always loved that moment in Graham Greene’s classic novel of Vietnam, The Quiet American, in which the English protagonist, Thomas Fowler, tells a French friend in Saigon that he’s been summoned back to his head office. “Home?” the Frenchman asks.

“No,” says Fowler. “England.”

E

xactly, I think! An Englishman may think of England as the opposite of home, and yet may feel entirely at home in exotic and seductive Vietnam, with which he has no official connection. A typical American today may have so many places she thinks of as home that the word suggests an anthology of places, a mix of her parents’

homeland, the culture her partner speaks for, the city where she went to school — and

the one where she dreams of going.

This summer, I’ll be going back to England, where I was born and spent most of my first 21 years. But I’ll be seeing my hometown of Oxford in part through the eyes of my Japanese wife, and no one has ever thought of me (thanks to my Indian features) as a classic Englishman. Then I’ll be returning to my home in Santa Barbara, where my mother (sari-clad and raised in British India) lives; we’ve been officially based in Santa Barbara for almost 50 years now, but never begin to sound or think like our neighbors. Then I’ll head back to Japan, the country where I truly feel at home, though I’ve been there for 27 years on a tourist visa, and never wear Japanese clothes, barely eat Japanese food and speak Japanese only as a 3-year-old girl might. My real home, I sometimes think, is a place like Chapman University, where so many of the students I meet on campus share the same sensation, of “home” being a sentence they never quite complete.

This is the way the world is going, lightning-fast. There are now 220 million people living in countries not their own; the number is increasing so quickly that soon there’ll be more of us than there are Americans. Many, many of these travelers are, of course, exiles, who never wanted to leave their homes, and ache to go back home. But for the fortunate among us, it makes for a world our grandparents would not have recognized.

Go to the cineplex, and you’re watching an actress who’s Danish and Mexican and French-Canadian and therefore all-American (Jessica Alba). Turn on the Golf Channel, and the longtime king of the Masters tournament is so mixed up — Thai and Chinese and African-American and perhaps many more — that he’s devised words such as “Cablinasian” to try to describe his nationality; most of us find it easiest just to call him “Tiger.” Look at the White House and you see a half-Kenyan man, partly raised in Indonesia, with a Buddhist sister and a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law, whose first book was as thoughtful and passionately honest a look at shifting identities as exists.

It’s hard for a student of undergraduate age to appreciate just how quickly our world is changing in this way. As a boy in Oxford, I never set eyes on another child with dark skin, and when my parents and I moved to California, it was years before, as immigrants from India, we ceased to be a rare novelty. When I was in grad school, Canada’s biggest city was still known as “Toronto the Grey,” because it seemed so uniform and far from diversity.

No one then had heard of world music or fusion cuisine.

This erosion of all the hard-and-fast distinctions of old makes for fresh challenges: Many a young woman doesn’t know what to say when people ask her where she comes from. She doesn’t fully belong to any one category, as her grandparents did, and she can sometimes feel neither here nor there. Not being given a set nationality or single passport when you’re born forces you to take conscious measures to define yourself and decide who you want to be that earlier generations did not have to face so often.

WHERE I COME FROM IS MUCH LESS IMPORTANT THAN WHERE I’M GOING.

Cover photo illustration by Scott Stedman ’14.

Historical image courtesy of Local History Collection, Orange Public Library.

When we launched this once-a-year, eight-page version of Chapman Magazine several years ago, we started calling it “a special publication.” This is our effort to make good on that claim.

Chapman Now

B

In this revamped Chapman Now, we present essays, stories and photography that reflect on a specific theme. This time we focus on “home” — wherever that is and whatever that conjures for various members of the Chapman community. We invite you to share your thoughts as well by writing to magazine@chapman.edu. And look for Web-only content at chapman.edu/magazine.

ut my sense is that such a young woman is part of a fast-growing tribe that is itself a new, floating community of its own. A halfThai, half-Canadian young man will instantly feel aligned with her, because they share the same questions, and the same inclusive

sense of home. And so might an entirely American young woman who feels most at home in Italy. For all of them, home is a work-in-progress, a collage to which they’re constantly adding new elements, a mosaic in perpetual motion.

Most of all, these honorary Chapman students may be tempted to define themselves by their passions, their values or their interests, as Pico Iyer much as by the passports they carry. I often feel I have more in common with someone who loves Thai food, or relishes the Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Rós, or who feels comfortable in airports than with anyone who happens to share my Indian name, my English place of birth or my American passport; and if you ask me who I am, I will probably begin by talking about my wife, the monastery I’ve been regularly visiting since 1991, my favorite book or movie, what inspires me more than I’ll need to talk

NOT BEING GIVEN A SET NATIONALITY WHEN YOU’RE BORN FORCES YOU TO is much less important than where TAKE CONSCIOUS MEASURES I’m going.

TO DEFINE YOURSELF. Many around us, of course, are still deeply about nationalities. For me, where I come from

rooted; they may be living in the same house in which they grew up, and close to their grandparents and generations of forebears. But even they, very likely, are having to think anew about the meaning of home as all the world streams into their neighborhood. Certainly, if they’re living in a modern American city, they’re probably surrounded by Iranian businessmen and Mexican restaurants and Indian yoga teachers and Ethiopians. Even if you’re not moving, the world is constantly moving around you.

This raises questions that humans have never had to address so insistently before; it also brings problems. My feeling, after 40 years

After having to move many times from one city to another because of my father's job during my childhood and adolescence, and then, after being held in two different prisons for a long time during the last Argentine military dictatorship, and after having to move from Argentina to Los Angeles, to Mexico, back to Los Angeles, again to Buenos Aires and, once again, back to Los Angeles, I can say that home, for me, is my writing.

We all know that home doesn't have to be a geographical location. It can also be a mental or emotional place. Or, at least, that's how I really feel it. For me, everything I do and see refers back to the activity of writing. The topics that I write about are hard on my emotions, keep me on edge and cause me to take breaks to protect myself from the effects of that intensity, but that intensity is what I feel as home.

It’s where I feel secure, confident, where I have good and bad times, where I relax, feel under pressure, listen to the music of words and get to pile up enough bricks to build that home and the characters that inhabit it, among which I, in the end, am able to survive.

ALICIA KOZAMEH is a faculty member in the Department of English at Chapman University. Her latest book is Eni Furtado Has Never Stopped Running.

Home is where my family and loved ones are. It is a place of love, hope, faith, creativity, dreams and security. Home is walking in the door and being greeted with kisses by my dog, Teddy. It is sharing a home-cooked meal and conversation with family and friends. It is a sanctuary after a long day at work.

It is the word I used to describe my feelings when I first stepped foot on Chapman’s campus. No matter where I go or what I do, I always carry a little bit of home in my heart.

ERIN GONZALEZ ’08, a vocal performance graduate, made her debut with the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee last November and was accepted into the Santa Fe Apprentice Singer Program for this summer.

spent crisscrossing the globe, is that our sense of distinctness is not going away, and the more old divisions fade, the more new ones appear. If we don’t discriminate against people so often now on the basis of their race or religion, we still treat them differently if they’re young or old, blond or brunette, from Brooklyn or Savannah or North Dakota or Beverly Hills.

I’m one of those people, though, who likes to see the glass as half-full, and wants to rejoice in the opportunities my grandparents could not have known — to taste other cultures, to explore the globe and to meet people whose stories and histories are magical to me.

So I’m delighted to “go home” this summer to England — and to Japan and to Southern California — and all those places are interesting to me in part because they’re all a little foreign.

It’s wonderful to have a very fixed and certain sense of home, as most of us do when we’re asked about our faith, our loved ones, even where we live; but the world sometimes forces us to be adaptable, as it did when my house in Santa Barbara burned down one evening in a forest fire and, suddenly, I lost everything I owned in the world.

The next morning, when I woke up — the only thing I had was a toothbrush I’d just bought from an all-night supermarket — if someone asked me, “Where is home?” I couldn’t point to any physical construction. Home would have to lie in the affections and connections and beliefs I carried around inside of me, wherever I happened to be. Lacking a single, visible home, I — like so many of us now — would have to seek out new ways of making myself at home wherever I was.

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, and the author of The Global Soul and many other books exploring the new meanings of home in our mobile world.

For me, thoughts of home begin with my beloved Alexandria, Egypt, where the fresh smell of the Mediterranean Sea gave me hope and energy every morning. Alexandria is full of firsts – my first car, my first group of real friends and my first and eternal love, which changed my life forever. As life took me and my little family to cities across America, I learned to take advantage of every single experience. When my older son is holding a handstand for almost six minutes, my younger one is winning a national championship in diving or my daughter is doing her first ballet show, this is when I feel that my family is happy. And these experiences are what I call home.

ESSRAA NAWAR is development coordinator for Leatherby Libraries. She’s pictured with her husband, Hesham El-Askary, Ph.D., professor of earth system science and remote sensing at Chapman, and their three children, clockwise from top right, Hania, Seif and Mohamed.

A New Chapter for

Old Towne

Chapman nestles into the community it calls home, helping to foster an academic village.

Story by Dawn Bonker; photos by Scott Stedman ’14

THE CHAPMAN FAMILY HOMECOMING CELEBRATION

You’re invited home to Chapman University this fall for the Chapman Family Homecoming Celebration. The festivities on Oct. 10-12 include the annual Homecoming football game with fireworks, the Chapman University Toyota of Orange 5K and the Fifth Annual Alumni Association Chili Cook-Off. Plus, visit Leatherby Libraries’ newest permanent exhibit, “California’s Gold,” celebrating the life and work of Huell Howser, and view a documentary by Chapman film professor Jeff Swimmer on the making of Howser’s signature PBS series, California’s Gold.

There will also be faculty master classes, and a residence-hall reunion is in the works. The weekend of fun culminates with a Sunday Big Band Bubbly Brunch.

For more information and to register, visit chapman.edu/homecoming.

It is an old and simple house, by Orange County standards — a 1924, three-bedroom bungalow of just over 1,000 square feet, its only hint of pretension being the arrangement of cut stone around the fireplace, positioned to show off a scattering of fossils embedded in the rock. But there’s grace in the way the light pours through the wide windows, the afternoon shade cools the front porch and the wood floors glow like warm honey.

For Professor Vernon Smith, Ph.D., a Nobel laureate in economics, and his wife, Candace, it is home.

“I grew up in a house that had a lot of similarities,” says Smith, relaxing on the sofa in the living room of his Old Towne Orange residence. “I love it here. I feel really at home here.”

Plenty of other folks share that sentiment. Since its grid of tidy streets was first planned out in 1870, the area at the center of the City of Orange has always been a vibrant community for every strata of society.

When the one-square mile area that includes the Orange campus of Chapman University was placed on the National Historic Register of Historic Places in 1997, that charm fledged into a cherished community character.

Old Towne is protected by city building regulations, vigilant preservationists and new generations of homeowners willing to pour sweat equity and elbow grease into vintage homes.

The four-block business district around the historic Plaza Park has changed with the times, too. Called “a hotbed of retro-with-a-twist businesses” by the Orange County Register, the district is now home to trendy boutiques, galleries, award-winning restaurants, a Saturday farmers’ market, walking food tours, brew pubs and gourmet shops.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith says that the Old Towne bungalow he shares with his wife, Candace, reminds him of his boyhood home. Smith and Chapman faculty colleague Steven Gjerstad – also an Old Towne resident – apply their economic expertise to the subject of home in their new book Rethinking Housing Bubbles, from Cambridge University Press.

The Smiths’ three-bedroom home includes a fireplace with fossils embedded in the rock.

To read about the lively history of Old Towne and view an array of historical and current photos, visit chapman.edu/magazine.

Photos by Da Zhang (MFA ’15)

Increasingly, Chapman faculty and staff are also calling Old Towne home, as the University buys residential properties when they come up for sale and rents them to faculty and staff. To date the University owns 87 homes in the historic district, 50 of which are officially designated historic structures. Dozens of professors, administrators and staff members now live within walking distance of the University.

Chapman’s goal is to help foster an intellectual village that starts on campus and extends into the surrounding neighborhoods. In so doing, the University preserves vintage homes while infusing Old Towne with newcomers whose connection to the community aligns with that of longtime residents, says Kris Eric Olsen, vice president of campus planning and operations.

Olsen, who oversees the University’s restoration of historic homes and the refurbishing of non-historic buildings, says the academic village is a tradition at many universities. In Orange, Olsen says, Chapman is helping to build a community akin to Cal Tech’s faculty neighborhoods, where classic California Craftsman homes “are a complement to the university.”

All the buildings purchased by Chapman undergo a thorough transformation, but the historic houses in particular receive painstaking attention. Unlike refurbishing, restoration is an effort to return a structure to its original state. Chapman targets myriad architectural and aesthetic details that range from repairing double-hung windows to finding period-appropriate paint.

As a participant in a $10 million Conte Center study funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, Laura Glynn researches everything from how hormones affect memory to why the mother’s body doesn’t reject the fetus and its 50 percent foreign DNA.

The Mind of a Mom Research led by Professor Laura Glynn explores how pregnancy restructures the brain and how maternal influence helps shape young lives.

Laura Glynn’s thoughts seldom stray far from her research aimed at improving health outcomes for mothers-to-be. From stress hormones in breast milk to chaos in the maternal household, there’s no shortage of factors to address in Glynn’s lab at Chapman University.

Even her own two pregnancies influence how she considers moms and their offspring.

“I had this extra stress layer, because I was stressed about my stress,” says Glynn, Ph.D., who leads the Early Human and Lifespan Development Research Program, which makes its home in a historic Old Towne schoolhouse refurbished by Chapman. “I don’t know if there was an effect; both of my kids were delivered right at term. But I certainly had lots of thoughts during my pregnancies about how my psychological experience might influence my kids.

“I think there’s a good amount of knowledge (for a mother) to have, and then to some extent ignorance might be bliss.”

Now Glynn’s children are healthy 11- and 9-year-olds, and her most blissful working days include those in which she adds to her knowledge about the interplay between biological, psychosocial and behavioral processes in pregnancy.

Glynn and her colleagues are seeking answers to some basic questions. Why do some women experience adverse birth outcomes?

How does pregnancy change women — their emotional states, cognition, etc.? How does fetal and early-life experience shape the health

Kris and Lori Olsen’s restored home (also seen opposite, top) was originally built in 1919 as a Mennonite church. “You can always tell a Chapman-owned property,” says Jeff Frankel, who sits on the board of the Old Towne Preservation Association. “It’s maintained impeccably.”

and development of children?

One thing Glynn knows for sure: A mother is made, not born.

“Becoming a mother is a process,” she

Chapman’s dedication to the process is incredible, says 15-year Old Towne resident Jeff Frankel, who sits on the board of the Old Towne Preservation Association and heads up its preservation committee.

“You can always tell a Chapman-owned property. It’s maintained impeccably, and the restoration and rehabilitation are top-notch,” Frankel says.

A collegial environment is growing. Anna Leahy, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of English, says she and her husband, science librarian Doug Dechow, Ph.D., so enjoyed living near campus that they purchased an Old Towne house of their own.

“We thought it might be too close, but it didn’t feel that way at all. Living in University housing allowed us to become involved in the campus community in unexpected and fruitful ways,” Leahy says. “We also got to know other faculty in the neighborhood surrounding campus and took advantage of Old Towne Orange.”

Lori Olsen says she was pleasantly surprised by the vibrant community surrounding campus. Before they moved into one of the University residences — they’ve lived in three — Olsen says she didn’t quite get what her husband was talking about when he spoke of campus life.

“When Kris first started working here we lived in San Clemente. And he kept coming home and saying, ‘It’s so cool. There’s something going on all the time,’” she says. “When we moved here I totally got it. I love it.”

The Olsens live about a block from campus in a 1919 home originally built as a Mennonite church. As he stands in the great room that was once the church sanctuary, Kris Olsen says that the life story of the structure has affected him in profound ways.

“When we first moved in, you’d sit here with your cocktail and you’d think about all the weddings and christenings and funerals that had been here and how so much of life was represented in this room. At the beginning it was almost overwhelming,” he says.

A look into the misty history of the Smiths’ Craftsman-style home reveals a wide array of past residents, including a garden club doyenne, a World War II air-raid captain, a fertilizer salesman and law school students.

That’s all just mildly interesting to Vernon Smith, one of the world’s leading economists. His first thoughts on the house are that it’s the only one he’s lived in that doesn’t have room for a home office, and he’s found that he enjoys the short walk to his campus office, as well as the separation of work and home.

To Candace, it’s “the dollhouse,” and she’s had scaled-down furniture made to fit its dimensions. Together the Smiths have filled it with treasured art from local galleries, assembled a small library in a front bedroom and planted a robust vegetable garden out back.

But doesn’t Smith sometimes think of all those past lives as he goes about his daily existence in one of Orange County’s most historic neighborhoods?

Smith smiles and shakes his head.

“I haven’t. It’s my home now,” he says.

says. “There is a restructuring of the brain that happens during pregnancy and continues at least into the post-partum period, with the purpose of making a better mother — a more offspring-focused person. It’s the hormones and the interaction. Lots of important things go on between mother and child that continue this process.”

The state-of-the-art research facility is in the renovated Cypress Street Schoolhouse – the last remaining Mexican-American segregated school building in Southern California. The Old Towne site is also home to the Orange Barrio Historical Society and a focal point for community education.

Chapman researchers, including undergraduate students, spend a lot of time studying how mothers interact with their infants.

“We put them in a room, give them a set of toys and say play as you would at home,” Glynn says. “We evaluate on a number of dimensions we think are critical to mothering.”

For instance, is the mother making positive noises and touching in a sensitive way?

Such sensitivity is important for child development, Glynn says. And for those who score low on sensitivity, “we know there are effective, pretty-low-cost interventions that can really enhance mothering,” she adds. “The key is to identify mothers who may need some help.”

Children are also assessed, for cognitive performance and emotional development. Glynn is particularly excited that youngsters are now being tracked through adolescence, “which means that for the first time we’re able to do a clinical diagnostic interview to start screening for things like depression and anxiety,” she says.

“There are very few cohorts like this in the world,” Glynn adds. “To be able to follow children from 15 weeks gestation to 15 years old makes this data a precious commodity.”

For Glynn, this new round of research is another reason she’s glad that as a grad student she switched from a focus on cardiovascular activity to maternal health and infant development.

“As soon as I started learning the physiology of pregnancy, I got hooked,” she says. “And I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Tests of fine motor development, such as climbing stairs, are part of the assessment given to children in Chapman’s Early Human and Lifespan Development Research Program.

Glynn was one of 14 presenters during TEDxChapmanU in June. To view all the talks, visit tedxchapmanu.com.

THESIRENCALLOF

Childhood Thoughts of home usually come delivered in sensory packages — the smell of a baking pastry, the sight of a backyard oak tree, the feel of clean sheets against the skin — and for me, as a child, this wordless impression came from a sound.

By Tom Zoellner

of home — of wanting never to leave the bed.

For an earlier generation of Americans, the town depot was the portal to the outside, far more so than the highway. The train was the gateway to growing up, for ritually leaving home, for the physical manifestation of youthful dreams. This was where you said goodbye to your family. The train sped you away from your childhood, just as surely as time was relentlessly forcing you to grow taller and bigger. The train calls us away from home.

Sirens sing from the tracks.

“Trains — you hear those men talk about trains like they

Not everyone would consider this sound a pleasant or a

were their first lover — the names of the trains, the times of the

musical one, and some might think it downright frightening.

trains,” Toni Morrison once marveled. She speculated that the

It was the blaring of the horn at the front of a Union

railroad played a role in one of the great themes of literature

Pacific locomotive as it barreled through the wheat fields

about African-American men. “That's what they do,” she said.

that surrounded a small town in northeast Kansas. The

“It is the Ulysses theme, the leaving home.”

mechanical scream was enough to take the feathers off a bird at close range.

The train whistle was designed as a danger warning. It can be the last thing a cow or a person ever hears. The driver also

But if you were 8 years old and lying in a poster bed in an upper room of a Queen Anne house half a mile

blows it twice when a train is ready to pull away from a town, a final exhortation for passengers to quit dithering and get on.

away and hearing that muted cry through a light curtain

I loved that muted sound through the windows on a prairie

of rain falling outside the open window on a summer

night, perhaps even as I was dimly aware that childhood would

evening, the sound was magical. It invoked a night-realm

not last forever and that I would be growing up soon enough and

of steel and oil and the lights of unseen cities and adults

going down the tracks that don’t let you return. Timetables are

who spoke in an incomprehensible language. I wanted

not subject to negotiation. It made that temporary home and its

to be on that train. And yet, that long minor-key note

poster bed seem sacred in the moment, if only because I knew

out the windows still spoke of the spectacular comfort

that I would have to leave it soon enough.

Zoellner, associate professor of English at Chapman University, is author of Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World.

A link to the book trailer is at chapman.edu/magazine.

‘You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?’ They — the self-proclaimed fourth-generation Angelenos, the Golden Coast natives — they always knew.

No, I’m not from around here.

They say that Delta, Colo., has more cows than people. I never stopped to count. I was too busy riding red trash-can lids down sand dunes until sunset. Friends and I were always trespassing through my neighbor’s alfalfa field, lying down to look up at the stars. I’m allergic to almost everything green. I’d come home with swollen eyes, sneezing.

I’d come home to fighting and booze and a microwaved TV dinner.

“Never give up!” they said — parents, teachers, politicians, magazines. They always said, “Follow your dreams.”

That’s why I’m here in California. Somehow I felt I could have something better than my previous existence could offer. I’ve migrated west, like so many before me. I’m sleeping on a bed of potential. A bed of

California, I want to give you my memories, and I want you to nod and understand me.

By Ash Stockemer ’14

California’s Gold.

The first day I met my roommate, she told me that she was a cowgirl in her past life.

She felt the inner pull of California, and that it was the remnants of her past life that pushed her to move here from Chicago. She said she felt a deep spirituality with horses and that she knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that her spirit existed in the Wild West. She dreams about it often. I dreamed of California, too. I dreamed of Hollywood, of fantastic people with fire in

their hearts. I came here to escape the unwritten rules of rural life — the early marriage, the kids by age 21, the low-risk, steady-asyou-go lifestyle. Chapman was my train, my Wild West steam engine. I graduated from Chapman and got off at the last station: Home.

My head is spinning. I’m eating out of taco trucks in Echo Park. I’m walking through Orange two miles to a Chapman classmate’s house in the middle of the night. I’m hiking through Trabuco Canyon, and I forgot to bring water. I'm hopping fences in Newport with fellow writers. I'm skinny dipping in Malibu with all of my new California friends. I’m dying my hair and piercing my face. Southern California, you make my mother crazy. I’m crazy for you, too.

I’m just trying to survive you. I’m trying to stand out in your crowds, and I’m trying to fit in. I’m looking for someone to share my dreams with. I want to give you my memories, and I want you to nod and understand me.

I want to take everything that is inside you, and I want to understand it, too. I want to be learned, Southern California; let me be your scholar. Let me grow into my place in the land of opportunity. Let me fill your burden. Let me flourish in your perpetual sunlight.

California, let me become part of you. Let me change you as you’ve changed me.

Stockemer graduated in May with a degree in creative writing. Previously she has written for the Chapman University literary magazine Calliope, Chapman Magazine and other publications.

You never really get to go home. Not to the way it was when you left. But you try anyway.

Yesterday was the perfect day.

Pale skin stretched out over cool sand. Backs arched, worshipers of the sun. We’d roll over and untie the black string of our bikini tops. Our only goal an even tan.

And when the breeze stopped blowing I would wade out, knee deep in the clear, flat water. Sailboats and windsurfers played chess across the horizon. The shock of the cold melts away after a few minutes. Numb.

I watched from my bed as the sky slipped into shades of pink and purple. Balcony doors open, curtain billowing. Flies danced between the indoors and the hazy sky, stopping every once in a while to taste my salty skin.

We dressed up for dinner. Poured white wine over sunburnt lips. Casual conversation doesn’t exist among us. We swap war stories and show battle scars between cigarettes.

Everything glittered. Between the sand and the sea and the wine, everything glittered.

Bryan fell in love in the backseat of my mom’s Toyota, hanging out in parking lots after school. He was fast with his heart and didn’t care that I didn’t give him mine.

By Jessica Fry ’15

It took Will longer; we’d been friends for years. One unreasonably hot night in August when we could still taste childhood, before life got in the way. The ever-present perfume of French fries clung to our clothes and escaped our pores in the muggy dusk. I stood up on the ledge of the pier and asked him to jump with me. He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t stop to take off his shirt or tell me that I was crazy. Took my hand and leaped. And when we came up choking on water and laughter, he told me. We laid on the beach underneath that pier listening to the rhythmic jingle of the Ferris wheel and the dull whir of the amusement park at work as our clothes dried in the salt air.

I could have loved him then.

Hurricane Sandy took out that pier. I watched the news segment on repeat from my Chapman dorm room half a world away. The icon of Ocean City, Maryland. Of home.

Of the time when I could have known love.

Lost.

You never really get to go home. Not to the way it was when you left. But you try anyway.

Leave some things out of place. And if you’re lucky the Earth doesn’t shift too much in your absence. At least that’s what it’s like in my hometown. A town so quiet that most things go untouched.

It was the first place I went when I got home that winter. The pier. More than half of the beach was missing. Broken pylons. Endless planks missing from their places along the boardwalk. An overturned bench, forgotten. A string of broken twinkle lights lay half in the water, partially washed up on the beach. I ducked under the caution tape and walked out onto what little was left. It wasn’t jagged like I thought it would be. No. A clean cut.

It just stopped. Dropped off into shallow water scattered with rocks from the destroyed jetty. Pungent rotting seaweed. And sounds; there were no sounds.

They had plans to rebuild.

But everyone had started hibernation. Locked the shutters. Moved south. People here are afraid of snow. Of what happens when the air thins. So we shut most of it down.

Turn off stoplights. Drag an iron gate across every storefront along the boardwalk.

I don’t go home during the off-season. Usually. But there I was. Stuck for three months in the dead of winter.

This is excerpted from a piece by Fry, a creative writing major, that previously appeared in Calliope. The full essay is at chapman.edu/magazine.

BY ALEXA LEIGH CORBETT ’15

uring my primary education, I didn’t understand why reading was such a struggle. Everyone around me seemed to have such an easy time.

It looked so effortless as they recited words off a page with pride. How’d they know what to say?

I wanted that power, but for me, words flipped, flopped and crossed; my entire perception of language felt inverted. Words were the enemy.

When I was 7, my educators felt overwhelmed by my struggles and abandoned their efforts to assist my needs.

I would later find out during an IQ test when I was 21 that my phonological loop is “impaired.” The phrase the clinician used was a “statistically and clinically significant discrepancy between the working memory and the other three indices” of memory measurement. I had a deficit. I am not disabled; I simply learn differently.

One day when I was 10, I went to my brother Andrew’s room, picked up a science textbook and by chance opened to a chapter on volcanoes. Instead of following methods for reading that didn’t work for me, I got out of the way and let my brain happen. I felt like an observer watching the process I was in. The word “volcano” looked like a volcano; the “V” reminded me of a blown-out crater. I immediately imagined the scene: I felt the heat, tasted the smoldering ash, smelled the sulfur in the air. The images flashed like lightning.

The synesthetic combination of sensations was something inherently familiar to me — as familiar as any home in which I have lived. My process for making sense of language is inherent in the word “home” itself. The “h” resembles a chimney, and Santa Claus goes down chimneys saying “ho, ho, ho,” so I’ll remember this word combination is pronounced like “ho-m;” but the “e” is “extra,” so that vowel modifies “m” and “o” to elongate their sounds.

All the different places I have called home during my life nearly outnumber my birthdays by double. Thus, my life lacked consistency until I discovered the beauty of language.

Using my method to read, words felt familiar — the greatest familiarity I’ve ever known. They became my sanctuary.

When Andrew overdosed on heroin at just 21 years old, I wrote cathartically to cope with his death. A few months later, at 18, I published my first book of poetry and then released five more books over the next two years. I have been fortunate to further my passion at Chapman University, where I have a rich linguistic and artistic life. What has this life taught me? The only limits are the ones I place on myself. Life is boundless possibility, and I’ve only just begun to actualize it.

Corbett is a member of the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society and the National Society of Leadership and Success at Chapman. This summer she plans to release The Drug List, her new book of poems, and The Lovers Tree, her first novel.

F

WE NEED TO DEVELOP A SENSE OF URGENCY ABOUT THE GROWING PROBLEM OF PROVIDING ADEQUATE SHELTE R. rom the earliest settlement of the country, Americans have looked at their homes and apartments as critical elements of their own aspirations for a better life. In good times, when construction is strong, the opportunities for better, more spacious and congenial housing — whether for buyers or renters — tends to increase. But in harsher conditions, when there has been less new construction, people have been forced to accept overcrowded, overpriced and less desirable accommodations.

Today, more than any time, arguably, since the Great Depression, the prospects for improved housing outcomes are dimming for both the American middle and working classes.

Not only is ownership dropping to 20year lows, but there is a growing gap between the amount of new housing being built and the growth of demand.

Our still-youthful demographics are catching up with us. After a recession-generated drought, household formation is again on the rise, notes a recent study by the Harvard

Joint Center for Housing Studies. In some markets, there isn’t an adequate supply of affordable housing for the working and middle classes. Overall, according to the research firm Zelman and Associates, the country is building barely one-third the number needed to meet the growth in households.

Overall inventories of homes for sale are at the lowest level in eight years.

The groups most likely to be hurt by the shortfall in housing include young families, the poor and renters.

These groups include a disproportionate share of minorities, who are more likely to have lower incomes than the population in general. This situation is particularly dire in those parts of the country, such as California, that have imposed strong restrictions on home construction. California’s elaborate regulatory framework and high fees imposed on both single- and multi-family housing have made much of the state prohibitively expensive.

Not surprisingly, the state leads the nation in people who spend

above 30 percent, as well as above 50 percent, of their income on rent.

Sadly, the nascent recovery in housing could make this situation even more dire. California housing prices are already climbing far faster than the national average, despite little in the way of income growth.

This situation could also affect the market for residential housing in other parts of the country, where supply and demand are increasingly out of whack.

Ultimately, we need to develop a sense of urgency about the growing problem of providing adequate shelter.

As a people we have done this many times – with the Homestead Act, and again, after the Second World War, with the creation of affordable “start-up” middle- and working-class housing in places like Levittown

(Long Island, N.Y.), Lakewood (Los Angeles), the Woodlands (Houston) and smaller subdivisions, as well as large-scale cooperative apartment development in places like New York City. Government policy should look at opportunities to create housing attractive to young families, which includes some intelligent planning around open space, parks and schools.

It is important to ensure that a sufficient supply of affordable housing is allowed throughout metropolitan areas, for all income groups.

Nothing speaks to the nature of the American future more than housing.

If we fail to adequately house the current and future generations, we will be shortchanging our people, and creating the basis for growing impoverishment and poor social outcomes across the country.

CRISIS SING

A

IN H O U

By Joel Kotkin

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POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Chapman Magazine One University Drive Orange, Calif. 92866-9911

Periodicals postage paid at Orange, Calif., and at additional mailing offices.

Chapman Magazine (USPS #007643) is published quarterly by Chapman University. © 2014 Chapman University. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

Steven is a chef; Dean a blues musician. Mike has lived in every state that I-10 touches. All were experiencing homelessness when Severiano Garza ’12 decided one day that he would no longer walk right past them in his hometown of Austin, Texas – that he would introduce himself, offer a sandwich and start a conversation. Now the artist and entrepreneur is sharing their stories and creating their portraits as part of his #PeopleOverPaint series, which he hopes “will make our differences less important and encourage people to look at one of our nation’s most relevant problems in a deeper way.” And Garza isn’t alone in his outreach. Homelessness is at the center of enrichment efforts by a host of Chapman people, including students who spend their spring break building beds and serving meals at a shelter in San Francisco. To learn more about these alumni and students, and to view Garza’s talk during TEDxYouth in Austin, visit chapman.edu/magazine.

This is the executive summary from a new report, America’s Emerging Housing Crisis, published by National Community Renaissance and authored by Joel Kotkin, with Wendell Cox. The full report is available for download at joelkotkin.com. Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University.

His next book, The New Class Conflict, will be released in September.

above 30 percent, as well as above 50 percent, of their income on rent.

Sadly, the nascent recovery in housing could make this situation even more dire. California housing prices are already climbing far faster than the national average, despite little in the way of income growth.

This situation could also affect the market for residential housing in other parts of the country, where supply and demand are increasingly out of whack.

Ultimately, we need to develop a sense of urgency about the growing problem of providing adequate shelter.

As a people we have done this many times – with the Homestead Act, and again, after the Second World War, with the creation of affordable “start-up” middle- and working-class housing in places like Levittown

WE NEED TO DEVELOP A SENSE OF URGENCY ABOUT THE GROWING PROBLEM OF PROVIDING ADEQUATE SHELTE R.

F

Joint Center for Housing Studies. In some markets, there isn’t an adequate supply of affordable housing for the working and middle classes. Overall, according to the research firm Zelman and Associates, the country is building barely one-third the number needed to meet the growth in households.

Overall inventories of homes for sale are at the lowest level in eight years.

The groups most likely to be hurt by the shortfall in housing include young families, the poor and renters.

These groups include a disproportionate share of minorities, who are more likely to have lower incomes than the population in general. This situation is particularly dire in those parts of the country, such as California, that have imposed strong restrictions on home construction. California’s elaborate regulatory framework and high fees imposed on both single- and multi-family housing have made much of the state prohibitively expensive.

Not surprisingly, the state leads the nation in people who spend

Periodicals postage paid at Orange, Calif., and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Chapman Magazine One University Drive Orange, Calif. 92866-9911

Printed on recycled-content paper.

(Long Island, N.Y.), Lakewood (Los Angeles), the Woodlands (Houston) and smaller subdivisions, as well as large-scale cooperative apartment development in places like New York City. Government policy should look at opportunities to create housing attractive to young families, which includes some intelligent planning around open space, parks and schools.

It is important to ensure that a sufficient supply of affordable housing is allowed throughout metropolitan areas, for all income groups.

Nothing speaks to the nature of the American future more than housing.

If we fail to adequately house the current and future generations, we will be shortchanging our people, and creating the basis for growing impoverishment and poor social outcomes across the country.

By Joel Kotkin

Steven is a chef; Dean a blues musician. Mike has lived in every state that I-10 touches. All were experiencing homelessness when Severiano Garza ’12 decided one day that he would no longer walk right past them in his hometown of Austin, Texas – that he would introduce himself, offer a sandwich and start a conversation. Now the artist and entrepreneur is sharing their stories and creating their portraits as part of his #PeopleOverPaint series, which he hopes “will make our differences less important and encourage people to look at one of our nation’s most relevant problems in a deeper way.” And Garza isn’t alone in his outreach. Homelessness is at the center of enrichment efforts by a host of Chapman people, including students who spend their spring break building beds and serving meals at a shelter in San Francisco. To learn more about these alumni and students, and to view Garza’s talk during TEDxYouth in Austin, visit chapman.edu/magazine.

rom the earliest settlement of the country, Americans have looked at their homes and apartments as critical elements of their own aspirations for a better life. In good times, when construction is strong, the opportunities for better, more spacious and congenial housing — whether for buyers or renters — tends to increase. But in harsher conditions, when there has been less new construction, people have been forced to accept overcrowded, overpriced and less desirable accommodations.

Today, more than any time, arguably, since the Great Depression, the prospects for improved housing outcomes are dimming for both the American middle and working classes.

Not only is ownership dropping to 20year lows, but there is a growing gap between the amount of new housing being built and the growth of demand.

Our still-youthful demographics are catching up with us. After a recession-generated drought, household formation is again on the rise, notes a recent study by the Harvard

CRISIS

A IN H O U S I N G

This is the executive summary from a new report, America’s Emerging Housing Crisis, published by National Community Renaissance and authored by Joel Kotkin, with Wendell Cox. The full report is available for download at joelkotkin.com. Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University.

His next book, The New Class Conflict, will be released in September.

Chapman Magazine (USPS #007643) is published quarterly by Chapman University. © 2014 Chapman University. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.