English Department Newsletter, 24 May 2005

Faculty News
CCFO ELECTION RESULTS: Several members of our department were elected to positions on the CCFO: Mark Withrow, Academic Affairs; Amy Hawkins, Teaching and Learning; Brendan Riley, Secretary.
GARNETT KILBERG COHEN: Garnett's poetry chapbook, Passion Tour, has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press, where it placed third in the press's national women?s voices competition.
TOM NAWROCKI: A panel Tom Nawrocki developed and proposed was accepted for the NonfictioNow Conference at the University of Iowa in November. Family First: What Problems Arise When Writing Includes Family? will feature Larry Heinemann, Joe Mackall, and Mimi Schwartz. Tom Nawrocki will moderate.

Also, Tom was appointed to the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum committee for the dedication of the new Illinois Vietnam Veteran Memorial being built at Wabash and Wacker Drive. The monument, sponsored by the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois, will be dedicated this year on November 11th. There will be a series of events in Chicago associated with the dedication.
SARAH ODISHOO: Sarah will have a short story published in 13th Moon, A Feminist Journal, and she will be a guest lecturer, in Bath, Maine, at Hyde School, for two weeks in August, teaching a course, Writing your own Myth, in Maine's wilderness.

Sarah was also selected to appear in 2006-7 Marquis' Who's Who Among American Teachers.
JEAN PETROLLE: Jean had a co-written essay come out in On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, edited by Candace Spigelman and Laurie Grobman. (Utah State University Press). The essay is titled "Writing and Reading Community Learning: Collaborative Learning among Writing center Consultants, Students, and Teachers," and is co-authored by Jim Ottery, Derek Boczkowski, Steve Mogge, and Jean.
TONY TRIGILIO: Tony was awarded a residency for September at the Ragdale foundation. Along with Arielle Greenberg and David Trinidad, Tony collaborated on three poems that were published in the May 2005 issue of Admit Two, an online journal of collaborative writing. Poems are at: http://www.admit2.net/gttmain.htm.
DAVID TRINIDAD: David has been very productive recently. He contributed to POET?S BOOKSHELF: CONTEMPORARY POETS ON BOOKS THAT SHAPED THEIR ART, edited by Peter Davis (Barnwood Press) and is also enjoying the favorable reviews his book PHOEBE 2002 recently received in THE HARVARD REVIEW and BOSTON REVIEW. A new poem, "Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been," a lengthy pantoum about the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, appears in the new issue of THE CANARY.

David continues to be busy giving reading of his poetry. Recently, he opened for the singers Damon & Naomi on April 22 at Schuba's. On April 29 he and Tony Trigilio appeared on Neighborhood Public Radio to promote COURT GREEN, and on May 18 he read poetry at Marrakech Expresso (as part of the Homolatte series), on the same bill with musician Tom Yore.

In mid-June David will be a guest poet at the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Vermont. He?ll be giving a poetry reading and delivering a lecture on the friendship between Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and their mutual influence on each other's work.

David has also been invited by AMERICAN POET, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, to introduce an emerging poet in their fall 05 issue. He also looks forward to participating in a Poetry-at-Sea event in May 2006. Poetry workshops and readings will take place onboard a seven-night Princess Cruise ship that begins in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and travels to St. Thomas and St. Maarten. David will be featured with poets Nick Carbo, Denise Duhamel, and David Lehman.
top

Tech/Ped Corner

Disaster Control

A friend of mine more tech-savvy than I tells a cautionary tale about data storage. Once a semester or so someone calls him, gasping over the phone:
"Bradley," they say, "I think my hard drive crashed!"
"No problem," he replies, "Just dig out your backup discs and I'll be right over."
"Um..." they answer. What if they don't have backup discs?

How would you fare in that phone call? We all have to wrestle with information management, especially if we use a computer regularly. It's hard to know how much to worry. Luckily, there are a few things you can do (and should encourage your students to do) to protect yourself from catastrophic system failure.

Prevention--the best defense is a good offense:

Get security software for your home computer and keep it updated. Studies indicate that it takes less than 40 minutes for the Internet to infect an unpatched, unprotected Windows computer; my experience is that it's less than 10. I would recommend automatic updating virus/firewall software (like ZoneAlarm or McAfee). At the very minimum, you should have a working firewall on your home computer--either the Windows firewall (if you have XP), or ZoneAlarm's free home-use no-frills firewall.
Just as you should keep your virus protection and firewall software up-to-date, you should keep your operating system updated too. Windows has a "Windows Update" option that allows you to get the current updates (though they've stopped supporting most everything but XP).
Protect your hardware. Get a good surge protector for your computer. While these will help protect from day-to-day fluctuations in power levels, they will also save you from catastrophic lightning strikes. When the lightning grenade lands by your computer, your power strip dives on top, destroying itself in the process but saving your valuable equipment. I speak from experience when I say this is a must. When you're shopping for your surge protector, be sure to get one that has an in/out jack for phone lines or cable lines, depending on the type of Internet connection you have. Just this week I had a student who told me that his computer was damaged by a lightning strike because he had his power lines protected, but his phone line was not.
Stop using Explorer. Download Firefox or Opera or Mozilla.
System recovery--like "insurance" for your computer and your files.
Long term backups and system recovery disks. Windows and other operating systems have utilities that make creating recovery disks easy. If you have a CD burner, take these CDs and put them somewhere safe. You should also regularly (I do it about every 4 months) make CD copies of your important data. This helps insure that a system failure won't cost you any major work. It also allows you to clean out your hard drive. A clean computer is a fast computer, after all.
Short-term backups. It?s a good idea to get a system in place for making short term backups of your data. The easiest way to do that is to get a "jump drive" (sometimes called a "flash drive"). These portable hard drives are about two inches long and hold between 128MB and 1GB of data (compared to the 600MB a CD holds). I make a habit of using my "flash drive" to backup any files I've just worked on, so that if my computer crashes tomorrow, I've lost as little work as possible. You could also use the school's servers (via FTP) to back up your data. Once you're done working for the day, copy your data into your short-term backup source and you have a second copy for safe keeping.
Finally, stop using floppy discs. (The 3.5" plastic ones.) They're notoriously unreliable, since they have moving parts; I've seen lots of students lose data they'd tried to store on floppy discs.

See you next month!
Brendan

Department newsletter compiled by M. Killian McCurrie.