The Spectator - Fall 2014

THE SPECTATOR Utica College English Department Alumni Newsletter Fall 2014

On April 24, 2014, the English majors gathered to share in the celebration of their accomplishments. The address by keynote speaker Lewis Kahler (1996), Dean, Center for Arts & Humanities, Mohawk Valley Community College, is reprinted below.

A Winding Path Lewis Kahler (’96) When Dr. Hutchinson first asked me to speak and asked me to discuss the impact that having been an English major has had on my life, I have to admit the first thing that came to mind was the fact that I am in the middle of packing to move, and moving my library of nearly 2,000 books has been a somewhat hellish experience that makes me wish I had chosen a “lighter” choice for my life’s work.

But in all seriousness, the impact of having been an English major on my life is immeasurable.

Unlike other majors, wherein you train for a very specific job function, studying literature, at least for me, was an intensive study in myself, a study of my culture.

Ultimately it was, and continues to be (because I hate to scare you, but the drive to read and to quest and to understand that most likely brought you to this major never diminishes) a study in what it means to be human.

In considering what to say

today, I deliberately chose not to pepper the talk with a bunch of quotes and allusions. I think it is better to let those writers speak for themselves. And though I love literary quotes, I am only going to bother you with two today, and I promise to keep it to that. The first comes from a writer who not many people are familiar with, but this quote has been a bit of a guiding light for me over the years, and, in many ways, encapsulates for me the real impact that being an English major has had on my life. The quote is from Robert McAffee Brown and it is, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas in to the world today.” Several years ago, my wife and I ran a small literary magazine called Portrait, and this quote was in every issue and was our guiding editorial principle.

“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”

To me, that is power. It is through our stories that we

Interim Co-Editors Dr. Mary Anne Hutchinson Professor of English Prof. Dorothy Obernesser ’97 Assistant Professor of English

Contributors

Lewis Kahler Gary Leising Lisa Orr Daniel Cruz Stephanie Selvick Suzanne Richardson The Spectator is published bi-annually by the English Department at Utica College Send correspondence regarding The Spectator to: Dorothy Obernesser doberne@utica.edu

change our world – that we give birth to new ways of thinking, new ways of doing. I didn’t always understand that. After I graduated from Utica College, I took a rather circuitous route to my current position. In fact, if you had told me 20 years ago that I would be an academic dean, I think that I, and probably several of my professors here today, would have gotten quite a good laugh. I was not a bad student, but I certainly Continued on page 2

Lewis Kahler Continued from page 1… was not a disciplined one. I didn’t know what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to write, and I knew that I loved to read, so the decision to study literature seemed a natural one. I had a vague notion that I might want to be a college professor, but my understanding of what that meant was limited at best. So, upon graduation, I did what I thought was best. I picked up more hours tending bar at the place where I worked to put myself through college, I took up residence on the couch of a friend, and I set forth to write the Great American novel. Well, I don’t want to spoil the end of the story, but I failed miserably at that endeavor. I was a decent bartender, and I was a pretty good poet and managed to publish various poems, but the Great American novelist I was not.

So, I had to come to terms with that, and I eventually found my way to a graduate school program so I could revisit that college professor idea.

Again, I did well in graduate school; of course, I left without completing my thesis, something that I took several years to return to, and I came home, went back to work at the same bar and picked up a day job at the local bookstore. Eventually, after some, well, let’s say encouragement from my parents – you know, the daily, relentless, uncompromising “we are going to kill you if you don’t do this” kind of encouragement – I did return to school and completed my thesis.

It was also around that time that I got a phone call that changed my life in some regards. It was a call

from Dr. Hutchinson, who had heard that I was back in town and that I had completed grad school, and she offered me an adjunct position teaching composition. I was both excited and terrified. I had no substantial teaching experience, but I was excited to try. My first day in the classroom was less than an outstanding performance, but over time I learned, and I found that that burning desire to read and to quest and to understand was satiated by my time in the classroom. For the first time I really understood what Dr. McAffee Brown was saying. As I discussed all of the books that I loved, the ideas that I had encountered, as I put to work everything that I had learned as an English major, I watched my students blossom, I saw them struggle with ideas and emerge victorious, and I, too, blossomed. I got better in the classroom, I told stories, we shared stories, we explored stories together, and we did, in some small way, change the world with those ideas. My first students have gone on to become architects and engineers and doctors and professors themselves, and several of them still stay in touch with me today. This is not my accomplishment, it is theirs, I am just thankful that I am able to celebrate these successes with them.

Eventually, for me, the opportunity to take the position as dean presented itself, and I was successful in that venture because, and I truly believe this to be true, I had been an English major. My job now, and my academic field of study has shifted a bit, but in the end it is still all about

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storytelling. It is about molding the world, or in my particular case, an institution, through the power of storytelling. I use that magic every day. And make no mistake, good storytelling is magic, and each of you, in your own way is a budding magician.

I think what I am trying to say here is that the journey that you are on might not always make perfect sense, even to you. And it might not always take a straight path, you might not end up where you set out to go, but if you take with you the fact that having been an English major, you always have that magic in your back pocket, that magic lets you tap into the world’s collective stories, and if you remember that it is through storytelling that you can change your world, the reality is, you can make anything happen.

Oh, by the way, I had told you that I would have two quotes in this talk. The second one comes from one of my favorite novelists, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., when he said, and I think, just as he claimed, that it is very important to say this often, whenever appropriate, and to do so out loud, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” Doing this will help you to cultivate a sense of gratitude that will always guide you well, so, on that note, let me leave you with this thought about returning to my alma mater and having had the opportunity to spend this time with you today. “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Thank you.

Second Annual Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize Awarded to Juliana Gray Professor Gary Leising

This year, Juliana Gray, associate professor of English at Alfred University, was named winner of the second annual Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize. The prize is given for the best book of poems published in the previous year by a resident of upstate New York. This year’s judge was poet Steven Haven, who directs the MFA programs at Ashland University in Ohio and is a native of Amsterdam, New York. Her winning book, Roleplay, features poems in the

voices of various personae as well as poems about acting, movies, and— as the title suggests—playing roles.

Gray is also the author of three other collections, the newest of which is a chapbook titled Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve, a sequence of poems which retells the story of Boleyn’s relationship with, marriage to, and death by order of King Henry VIII. When Gray came to Utica College in April to accept her prize, she read from both of these collections, 3

showcasing her ability to write in various voices and forms, from the blank verse of some of the Anne Boleyn poems to a sestina about attending a Bob Dylan concert. In addition to finely crafted poems, the reading revealed Gray’s rich sense of humor in the prizewinning book, a humor rooted in a kind of wit and irony that always evokes other emotions. For example, the poem “Roleplay” makes fun of its speaker (an English professor named Dr. Gray who vividly resembles the poet) with a wistful concluding tone. A poem about girl detective Nancy Drew all grown up and searching for love on Match.com invites laughter at the language of personal ads framed in poetry while also making us laugh at ourselves for, perhaps, finding her flirty voice engaging and attractive.

Earlier in the day, Gray met with UC students to look at and critique some of their own poems. She offered them suggestions for ways to tighten their work, write clearer images, as well as sending them off with a reading list—from Philip Larkin to Charles Olson—of model poets for inspiration.

The Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize is supported by the generous donation of UC English alumni Steven Critelli (’72), who also spent time with the winner as well as with the prize’s eponym, Dr. Eugene Paul Nassar, emeritus professor of English, and a few others, at dinner before the reading. The prize is open for submissions for next year’s competition. Information is available on the web: www.utica.edu/nassarprize.

New York’s Mixed-Race Riot

By Lisa Orr

Dr. Lisa Orr is Professor of English at Utica College, where she has taught American literature and creative writing since 1996. The following article ran in the New York Times on July 15, 2013, as part of the Disunion series, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. It grew out of Professor Orr’s research for her historical novel, The Adventuress, about the daughter of an Irish immigrant and a free black man in Civil War era New York. Dr. Orr is represented by Joyce Holland of the D4EO Literary Agency.

When draft rioters set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York on the night of July 13, 1863, one man in the crowd called out, “If there is a man among you with a heart within him, come and help these poor children!” Incensed, the crowd turned on him and almost dismembered him. But he had distracted them, enabling the orphans to escape.

The rioters were Irish. So was the man who sacrificed himself. And chances are good that at least some of those orphans were part Irish, too.

In the years before the Civil War, Irish immigrants to Northern cities inhabited the same slums as free blacks, worked alongside them in the worst jobs and often married them. Antebellum New York held no large, specifically black neighborhoods. Many slaves freed in New York’s gradual emancipation settled in the Sixth Ward, along with other low-income people of Irish, German and Jewish descent. Those neighborhoods were unified mainly by the kind of work residents performed: cartmen, corn sellers and prostitutes all plied their wares around the infamous Five Points. With the rapid influx of immigrants during the famine years of the 1840s, the majority of the neighborhood became Irish.

But the hardscrabble, interracial lifestyle remained.

Historians disagree on the extent to which the Irish and their black neighbors clashed or cooperated.

Examples can be found for both.

The Irish and African-Americans lived intimately connected, boarding together and drinking in the same taverns, mingling in the streets and the dance halls. But living closely did not always mean harmoniously.

A fire in June 1863, just a month before the riots, destroyed a tenement housing a liquor store, a black husband and wife and Irish immigrants. The black man and an Irish woman who lived above him argued over who started the fire — but their neighbors testified that both were drunk at the time, and equally likely suspects.

Five Points became something of a tourist stop precisely because of its promiscuous racemixing. Journalists and other writers toured the area under police protection. All found the

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same mixture of poverty and crime, and all attributed it to the evils of amalgamation. A reporter for a New York paper in the 1830s lamented the “white women, and black and yellow men, and black and yellow women, with white men, all in a state of gross intoxication, and exhibiting indecencies revolting to virtue and humanity.” Charles Dickens, in his “American Notes,” described the heavily Irish Five Points almost entirely in terms of the black men and their mulatto partners he found in the basement dance halls, while Davy Crockett, in his ghostwritten account, dwelt on the infamy of “black and white, white and black, all hugemsnug together.”

Harmonious or not, most mixedrace marriages in New York were between Irish women and black men and mulatto children were common.

The year 1850 saw a new racial category, mulatto, added to the census, to account for their offspring. When the draft came, during a heat wave in the bleak middle of the Civil War, the mob targeted mixed-race households, especially those containing Irish women who had children with African-American men.

Southerners used the threat of amalgamation to undermine Northern support for the war. A United States representative from a border state, arguing that Republicans favored total race equality, described “a ball held at Five Points in the city of New York, where white women and negroes mingled `in sweet confusion in the mazy dance.’” (His opponent, Francis W. Kellogg, Republican of Michigan, pointed out that Five Points was within the strongest Democratic ward in the city.)

Two New York City Democrats

invented the term miscegenation during the 1864 election campaign.

“The present war … is a war for the negro,” argued a faked Republican pamphlet, designed to discredit Lincoln. “Let it go on until … the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our President, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.” One subhead was entitled, “The Irish and Negroes First to Comingle.”

The wording was meant to incense, but it wasn’t that far from what Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in response to nativists in 1845: “In this continent — asylum of all races — the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes — of the Africans, of the Polynesians – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages.” His Concord neighbor, Louisa May Alcott, published a short story in 1863 featuring an interracial marriage as the happy ending. Northern liberals had already thought through the implications of race equality.

Irish men’s perception that they were being asked to fight a war that would free more slaves – who would then move North and compete with them – was stoked by politicians and businessmen with ties to the South. Mayor Fernando Wood told an Irish crowd that the true purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to “flood the North” with black mechanics, who would lower wages for whites. He further inflamed his listeners by claiming that rich

Republicans believed the “African … superior to the poor white.” Irish men responded by forming trade unions that specifically excluded black men, pushing them further to the economic margins.

The draft riots followed years of politicians’ and middle-class reformers’ attempts to separate the two groups. Irish mothers were particularly vulnerable to the latter, for as the men enlisted or were pushed out of work, their families relied more heavily on outside aid. When a widow asked the Methodist minister Lewis M. Pease, director of the Five Points House of Industry, to take in her daughter Lizzie for a few days, until she found work, he obliged.

But when she returned, Pease refused to let her have her child, because he had discovered that she lived with a black man. Despite the pleas and tears of both Lizzie and her mother, Pease put the child up for adoption, and sent her on an orphan train to Illinois.

After the riots subsided, a relief committee set up by merchants reported that white wives of black men had been “severely dealt with by the mob.” One Irish woman, the committee reported, had been driven insane by the persecution she endured. Among the mob’s victims were “colored” people with Irish names like Elizabeth Hennessy.

After the war, the organizers of the Colored Orphanage attempted to rebuild, but found themselves unwelcome in their old neighborhood.

Instead they moved uptown, to an isolated area that would become Harlem. The city’s segregation had begun.

What happened to all those mixedrace children? In some cases, their

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ancestry has been forgotten. Working with colleagues on a large-scale DNA analysis, Mark D. Shriver, a Pennsylvania State University geneticist, has found that 30 percent of self-identified white Americans have some African ancestry — including, to his surprise, himself.

Sources: Barnet Schecter, “The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America”; Tyler Anbinder, “Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood”; The New York Times, June 10, 1863; Charles Dickens, “American Notes for General Circulation”; Noel Ignatiev, “How the Irish Became White”; Speech of Hon. Francis W. Kellogg, of Michigan, in the House of Representatives, June 12, 1860; Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation: Making Race in America”; J. Marcus Bloch, “Miscegenation, Melaleukation and Mr. Lincoln’s Dog”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essays and Poems”; Jerome Mushkat, “Fernando Wood: A Political Biography”; “Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering From the Late Riots in the City of New York”; Mark D. Shriver, et al., “Skin Pigmentation, Biogeographical Ancestry and Admixture Mapping,” Human Genetics, 112 (2003).

Meet the New Professors Stephanie M. Selvick and Daniel Shank Cruz are new assistant professors in the English department. Dr. Selvick teaches contemporary world literature, and Dr. Cruz teaches contemporary American literature. Both focus on ethnicity and sexuality in their teaching and research.

What is the most unexpected or surprising event that has ever happened in a class you were teaching?

DC: One time my class was studying the section of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men on hoodoo, and one of my students mentioned that she practiced witchcraft and threatened to use it on her classmates if they weren’t nice to her. My initial reaction was “That’s awesome! Good job making connections between literature and real life,” but in hindsight I probably should have asked her not to threaten her classmates.

The runner-up for this question occurred several years ago when I was teaching J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. When I got to the classroom about five minutes before the beginning of the period, several students were already in a shouting match about the book, and a few students reacted so strongly to the book that they cried during our discussion of it. Despite being ensconced in literature all the time, sometimes I forget how powerful it can be on some sort of unnameable, visceral level instead of just on an aesthetic one.

SS: During the first week of teaching a course that focused on gender and sexuality, I learned that one student’s mother was responsible for “allowing” a transgender woman to receive sexual reassignment surgery. It was the

1970s. We now think of this surgery as “sexual affirmation surgery,” rather than reassignment. But, in the 1970s if you were someone who was “born in the wrong” gender you had to get permission from a doctor in order to surgically alter your body. Our class was filled with tragic stories by transgender people who were met by phobic doctors.

My student’s mother, in contrast, didn’t ask this patient to come in for therapy or treatment, as was the norm. Instead, she looked at the patient a bit confused, and said something to the extent of: “I am not an expert on sexual reassignment surgery. Surely you can make this decision for yourself? Where do I need to sign?”

Shortly before our course began, and thus almost 40 years later, this woman found my student’s mother.

The woman was able to receive her surgery without being subjected to a doctor who may have disagreed with that decision. She was thrilled in her body and wanted my student’s mother to know that she helped save her life.

My student told the whole class this during the second week of our semester. I was literally still stuck on: You talk to your mom about what we read in class? I could not have been more proud.

If a student in one of your courses only left learning one thing, what would you want that to be?

SS: I would be thrilled if students left knowing that Africa, indeed, was not a country. I would also love students to know that there are more than two genders. My first year students last semester identified 63 genders. That seems like a good enough place to start.

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DC: I want them to realize that literature has relevance to life outside of the classroom, that it can be a force for social change in the world, though it also gives us something unspeakably personal and intimate. As William Carlos Williams says, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet people die horrible deaths every day for lack of what is found there.”

What is the craziest book you have ever read, and under what conditions would you consider teaching it?

DC: It depends on what is meant by “craziest,” but for sheer “WTFness,” no one beats Kathy Acker’s fiction. I am actually teaching one of her novels, Blood and Guts in High School, in my ENG 145 this semester, though this isn’t the craziest of her works (Pussy, King of the Pirates probably is). But Blood and Guts in High School does have lots of disturbing sex and also some illustrations. Let’s just say I’m expecting some complaints on my course evaluations.

SS: Nigerian author Chris Abani’s Virgin of Flames is a novel set in East Los Angeles and follows the intersecting lives of a struggling muralist named Black, a transsexual Mexican stripper named Sweet Girl, and a former boy soldier from Rwanda named Bomboy. The narrative is as imaginative as the characters, if not also terribly tragic. I look forward to teaching it someday so that students know the wide-range of forms contemporary African writing takes.

What is your favorite food, sport, hobby, film?

SS: When I was at the very end of finishing my dissertation I found a community of writers who had all identified their junk food of

choice—the comfort food that would get them through the black hole that is writing your first book.

Most had made relatively harmless choices: Red Hots, gummy worms, Doritos. Mine was pizza. I have come to precisely the wrong place if I was hoping to move beyond my eating-pizza-while-writing days.

DC: I love to watch soccer and baseball because they help me make connections with larger communities. In the case of baseball, I feel connected to New York City, my hometown, when I watch the Mets even though I haven’t lived there since 2004. Soccer connects me to the global community. When I wake up at 6:00 a.m. to watch a match in England, it reminds me that there is so much else going on aside from my often narrowly-focused American context. I am super, super excited for the World Cup this summer.

When did you decide you wanted to become a professor, and what moved you toward this decision?

DC: I’d known since high school that I wanted to do some kind of graduate study after college, but it wasn’t until the year after college, when I was working in a non-academic job while deciding what I wanted to go to graduate school for, that I decided I wanted to become a professor. It took me a while to realize how

I could translate my love of reading and my intellectually curious nature into a job. I still can’t believe that I get paid a living wage to read books and discuss them with other people.

SS: I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. But, I didn’t want to teach at university until my assigned guidance counselor during undergraduate studies told me that I couldn’t. I went to the University of WisconsinOshkosh for undergrad—a school that, at least then, didn’t often see its students attend graduate school. I’m sure I said something terribly annoying to my counselor on my first day of school, like: I want to be an English professor (with 18 year old enthusiasm)! He promptly signed me into the adolescent education program without my knowledge.

Four semesters later I was assigned an interview time slot to enter into the education program; I then realized what he had done on my behalf and without my consent. I promptly changed my guidance counselor to someone who thought I was fabulous and have been feeding off of 18 year old jilted anger ever since.

What’s been your favorite thing about the city of Utica thus far?

SS: I appreciate cities that are not surface level. On the surface here you see beautifully haunting abandoned buildings, a pizzeria on every

corner, and signs that say Utica begins with YOU!. But, I have also begun to notice Somali markets in East Utica, a pizzeria run by Russians who adopted Utican food culture, a group of LGBT youth that meet at the Otherside every Thursday, and a Planned Parenthood that appears to be resilience personified, faced as they are by weekly protesters. I love discovering the undercurrents that run throughout this city.

DC: My favorite thing about the city of Utica so far is the variety of delicious ethnic foods available. Thus far I’ve eaten at good-to-excellent Italian, Indian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Japanese restaurants.

Utica’s food scene puts Salt Lake City’s (my previous place of residence) to shame even though the latter is a large city. Aside from New York City, Utica has the best restaurants of the six places I’ve lived, which I was not expecting.

Final Question: Who do you share an office with? And how completely awesome has that experience been?

DC: Stephanie M. Selvick, and she’s awesome! I enjoy how we have copies of lots of the same books.

SS: Daniel asked me on our first day if he could put a rainbow flag in our window, and I knew that I had found the right place.

After reading David Henry Hwang’s play Chinglish in Literature 206, the class went to see the live performance at Syracuse Stage on opening night (February 26, 2014). They had the surprise pleasure of meeting the playwright in person.

In the photo (left to right) are: Calie Taranto, Kishon Grant, Lynsie Ferguson, Cecilia Gulius, David Henry Hwang; Cynthia Nagel; new English faculty member Stephanie Selvick.

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English Majors Courtney Foll and Lynsie Ferguson Win DiSpirito and Wasserman Scholarships for Their Creative Writing

By Suzanne Richardson On Sunday, April 13th, 2014, at an official school wide award ceremony, surrounded by family and friends, Dean Johnsen of the School of Arts & Science presented Courtney Foll and Lynsie Ferguson with arts scholarships for their achievements and talents in creative writing.

Both Courtney and Lynsie submitted about forty pages of creative writing to be considered for this award.

The Henry R. & Rose DiSpirito award is given to a Junior or Senior with at least a 3.0 GPA and a particular talent in the arts. The Dean remarked of Courtney while presenting the DiSpirito Scholarship, “She is quite simply one of the hardest working writers around campus. It takes a lot of time, planning and thought for a writer to produce, and she’s always methodically going through her process, and it turns out great work. Most writers, at this age, don’t have the patience for the kind of work she is willing to put in. I think this is true testament to the kind of relationship Courtney has with her art form; it challenges her and she likes that so she puts in the time to get it right. She has proved time and time again that it’s the process of writing that thrills her, not necessarily the end product and that’s the mark of a true writer, someone who will keep going back to the blank page.”

The Mary Wasserman Fine Arts Scholarship is given to student who shows promise in benefitting from a

formal art education. Dean Johnsen told the crowd as he presented Lynsie with this award, “Lynsie’s voice on the page is very raw, very honest, and over time this rawness will serve her well. She also has a knack for unique description, images that just pop off the page. There is no subject matter that is off-limits for Lynsie and as a writer that is the mark of someone who could be very successful, someone who is willing to investigate themselves, even their less flattering 8

sides, and do it thoughtfully. The ability to reflect in Lynsie’s work is very high and this is a skill that can’t really be taught. She’s able to look at her own self, her own actions, her own past critically and this is a skill every nonfiction writer must have.”

A lovely awards breakfast followed, along with photographs in the courtyard. Congratulations to both Lynsie and Courtney for their excellent work in the field of creative writing.

English Across the Curriculum Creative Writing and Creative Nonfiction courses hold a continued appeal for non-English majors for a variety of reasons. All English courses, whether writing courses or literature courses or linguistic courses, offer an opportunity for students of all disciplines to enjoy the reading and writing experience.

In the Spring 2014 semester, Dr. Gary Leising taught a Beginning Creative Writing course and two non-English major students offered some information about their backgrounds and some of their work.

Shannon Harrington is a local student who commutes from Oneida, New York. She will be a senior this fall.

Her major is psychology. Shannon writes, “I find myself enjoying writing when I’m stressed and consumed by the college work load; it allows me to express my thoughts of topics and ideas not typically covered in a psychology classroom. . . .I feel as if it is extremely important for non-English majors to take a creative writing course in order to stretch their writing boundaries. APA, MLA, and Chicago style writing is burned into students’ minds, yet it is refreshing to discover that an excellent paper, poem, or story can be composed without a universal, set structure.” “Maternity Ward” was written as an assignment to write about a scary place.

Maternity Ward Shannon Harrington Everyone in this place is dying, but in this strange vortex life is born.

Opening the double doors to the maternity ward is like entering a possessed, clown infested funhouse.

Wide, smiling faces of the staff With eyes bright and bulging, Dressed in teddy bear and duck scrubs greet you when you enter.

The walls are pale pinks and baby blues, warm wooden furniture lines the halls.

The smell of sanitizer is numbing, consuming.

Cheers, clapping, crying.

A lullaby sounds the halls, a scream echoes out.

A nurse swaddles the new, heavy burden of responsibility.

Daddy mourns his freedom.

Mommy mourns her body.

No sleep.

No escape.

Trapped.

Everyone cries.

Brian Fitzsimmons is a recent graduate and is from New Hartford, New York. He majored in Liberal Studies. Brian writes, “The creative writing class . . . was something I had never done before and made me keep thinking in new and different ways.”

Rough Draft Brian Fitzsimmons The plot is certain, the story will come, The main characters are solid Their new friends will arrive and build, creating the adventure ahead.

Punctuation is not important, other than the period.

Let the run-ons, run on And the fragments, fragment Spell check is our friend and our enemy Distractions of red and green lines.

This is the time the story will build, Your world will expand, Your life immersed into the life of another, A life you are creating.

Grammar is unimportant Spelling is unimportant Continue the story, don’t get distracted, Ignore those colored lines And write without judgment.

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HFES Hosted Open Mic at The Tramontane Café to Launch Ampersand 2014

By Suzanne Richardson On Thursday, May 1st, 2014, at 7:30 p.m. folks gathered at the Tramontane café for an evening of poetry and selected readings from the latest issue of Utica College’s undergraduate literary journal, Ampersand. The vice president of HFES, Rose Zaloom, the editorin-chief of Ampersand 2014, David Eves, and I cohosted the evening.

Perched on the funky, floral, print couches and colorful chairs, people from both Utica College and the community enjoyed an evening of fantastic poetry and prose. The Tramontane’s casual and friendly atmosphere made for a successful and well-attended open mic.

Readers alternated all night from UC affiliates to locals for an interesting diversity in subject matter:

Dogs, recovery, multiple selves, Star Wars, ice cream, abs, curses, monks, Facebook, malls, and of course, love, both requited and unrequited. Local poets, Mike Cecconi and Roger B. Smith kicked off the evening. Dr. Leising read some of his original work, while Dr. Cruz dramatically read a well-known published piece, “I am the People, the Mob” by Carl Sandberg. Spotted in the crowd were Dr. Scannell, Dr. Selvick and senior English major, Taylor Banovic.

Former Ampersand editor-in-chief Jenn Strife also read an original poem and Ampersand staff wished her luck on beginning her MFA in poetry this fall at the University of Tennessee. Students who read from their work published in Ampersand 2014 included senior English majors Sean

Feener and Courtney Foll, as well as sophomores Rose Zaloom and David Eves. Public congratulations were also given to Ampersand’s 2014 Vogel Award Winners, David Eves (poetry), and Nicole Szalkowski (fiction).

Many UC students told the room it was their first time ever reading their work aloud in public and the crowd always responded with cheers of support. With the smell of coffee and hot chocolate in the air, a good time was had by all at this celebratory event.

Tramontane owners Robin Raabe and Garrett Ingarham look forward to partnering with UC English majors and faculty for other events.

The Tramontane Café has a poetry open mic every Thursday starting at 7:30pm.