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English Department Newsletter
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Dear Luther English alums near and far,
 We are seven days past Easter, and this morning I had one of those time warp moments. First, there was snow on the ground when I awoke, and then in chapel, the speaker was our own emerita colleague Mary Lou Mohr. For a split second, I imagined it was 1990, and I was in my very first spring semester teaching at Luther College. My 24th year has been rollicking. As Department Head, I led the hosting for the Luther College Writers Festival, and was thrilled that writers like Mark Salzman and Anne Lamott could be part of the program. In January I taught the London Theatre course, and attended plays for 12 nights in row--my all-time high! As you can see from the following notes, we are richly blessed with new voices as well as the presence of retired colleagues. Next month we say goodbye to Diane Scholl--someone whose gentle wit and gracious presence we will sorely miss. When Diane moves out from the fifth floor, all of the members of the department who hired me will have retired. It makes me laugh to think of David Faldet and myself as the "senior colleagues." Between his sense of direction (see below) and my inability to keep track of time, it's a wonder our majors manage to graduate! We hope you are well, and that whatever words you are reading and writing these days are strong, funny, and true. Send us the news from your own Lake Wobegon, wherever it may be. Whether you left these halls one year ago or 50--we are still hanging out in the office, glad to welcome you in, and hear about what the poet Mary Oliver describes as "your one wild and precious life." Be well. Nancy Barry Department Head barrynan@luther.edu |
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From the English Department
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John Bale
Greetings again from Vennehjem ("Home of Friends") in Decorah, Iowa, to which I came just over six decades ago to teach at Luther College. Allowing for some ravages of time, I am doing reasonably well. I am fortunate in having many friends in Decorah who are also retired Luther faculty or alumni. We have continued meeting and working together over several years. We have regular Thursday breakfast at Ruby's, once a month Whist games, and monthly meetings of Symra (an old literary organization with a Norwegian name). I also engage in "academic" seminars for retirees, meetings which are held in the Luther Development Building in the room which years ago was the Boarding Club. My travel outside of the Decorah area has been more limited than in earlier years (I sold my car), but I have been able to travel nearly every year to visit my daughter Ruth at her home in Allentown, Pa., and my brother Harold in N.D. (Fargo is my "birthplace!"). With my daughter I visited both New York City and Boston (great theater and history) last year and had a wonderful visit and dinner in January at the home of my good friends Robert and Blanche Jenson. Finally, I am still "up and around" and especially looking forward to the Luther Homecoming in October when I hope to see many of you!
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This year was particularly trying with the long, cold winter weather, but we managed and now my husband and I look forward to warm weather activities. Our bicycles have not left the garage yet, but hopefully soon. Fishing poles are ready to go and trips to the trout streams are soon to happen. Our travels will also take us to Charleston, S.C. and then on to the Florida Keys this summer with friends. Our big news is that my husband, who also worked at Luther, retired this February, so as I rush out the door in the morning, he is enjoying another cup of coffee.
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 As I look back over my second year at Luther College on this beautiful spring day, I can't help missing January--not the sub-zero temperatures, but the J-term course I taught on letters and letter writing, "Reading Other People's Mail." In the course, my students and I read, among others, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton, as well as Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, and the first issues of a new literary journal, The Letters Page. We also wrote letters, in class and out, independently and collaboratively, in both closed and open forms, and sent many of them to family and friends. We were able to visit the Luther College Archives, as well, and work with letters written by Luther students stationed abroad during World War II. I am pleased to report that many students left the course confirmed letter writers. For me, it was a high point in an all-around wonderful year teaching at Luther. |
 On the first day of class, back from a year on sabbatical, I walked into the wrong restroom on the ground floor of Main, realizing my confusion when I saw too much pink tile and a woman checking her makeup in the mirror. At the first department meeting of the year I looked around the room and wondered where everybody was, realizing that the "everybody" I was checking for now enjoyed retirement. Beyond these initial disorientations, I've enjoyed being back teaching Paideia, rhetoric, and the journalism course. As Rachel will also testify, we had a remarkable experience again this January, tramping through the streets and countryside that inspired Lewis' Narnia and Tolkien's Middle Earth. Chips, which I advise, won a couple of awards at the Midwest conference of ACP this year. I've also had some success placing poetry in journals around the country. I've also enjoyed bumping into alums, whether in the local co-op or at a national convention. Flag me down if you see me. Who knows? Maybe I'll need your help getting my bearings! |
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 Being hugged by Anne Lamott twice and shepherding Mark Salzman around campus was my September pedagogical high. They've been my invisible co-teachers for over a decade. I first taught Anne's Bird By Bird during 2000 in Nottingham, England, where my companions were LC students studying abroad for year. Stateside, I routinely ask Effective Writing students to ponder Anne's advice about writing and life; every few semesters, I assign True Notebooks in Intro to College Writing. I've read more thesis-driven essays about Mark, in his guise as volunteer writing teacher in a juvenile detention hall, than he would ever want to read. In January 2014, David and I accompanied 20 LC students through Northern Ireland, England and France, following footsteps of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. No lost passports. No lost people. I continued my quest to see a member of the House of Windsor in person. Didn't happen. But David snapped a photo of me standing by a life-sized cutout of William and Kate by one of those wacky machines that squish pennies into good luck near a tourist information office in Cambridge. |
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Last year I wrote from our lovely London flat on the Regents Canal, where Mark directed the ACM London Theatre program. After his course ended, we traveled to stay with friends at a huge stone farmhouse in Brittany (15 minutes from Mont St. Michel) and then on to scout our January 2014 course, Walking in Spain and Morocco. We spent time in Barcelona and Granada in Spain and then explored Marrakech, staying in a riad in the old city and weaving our way through the souks, plotting our course. After a summer that included the requisite two weeks at our cabin on Flathead Lake in Montana, we threw ourselves into the planning of the Luther College Writing Festival 2013 (formerly the Lutheran Festival of Writing) directed by Nancy Barry, with keynoters Mark Salzman and Anne Lamott. Then we looked forward to our January: with 10 female students we traveled to Spain and Morocco, studying the theory, art and culture of walking in three very different cities (Barcelona, Granada and Marrakech), reading books about walking, and watching, thinking, writing, and discussing what we read, saw, and experienced. We hooked up with Jason Schaefer (English '10) in Granada and even managed to squeeze in a day-trip to visit and hike with Luther alums Matt (management, physical education '07) and Lisa (Savre) Busche (psychology '08) in Girona, just a short train ride from Barcelona. Wonderful times! This spring has been more homebound: in mid-February I had foot surgery to correct a misaligned toe joint and was in a cast, lying toes-above-the-nose for six weeks, so Mark had to do all the household chores as well as wait on me (he deserves a medal!). Now I'm in a surgical sandal for six weeks and can walk with crutches, but I hope to be walking by the time our first grandbaby arrives in May! Warm greetings to you all. Please remember to email me your news--I love to hear!
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Hageman (left) with Zizek
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Spring greetings! Two Luther highlights for me this year were giving my first Paideia lecture to the entire first-year class--the topic was Karel Čapek's 1921 play, Rossum's Universal Robots, a great read I'd recommend to anyone. The second highlight was co-writing and co-presenting a Paideia Texts & Issues lecture with my colleague in Biology, Dr. Eric Baack. We talked about representations of science and scientists in science fiction films. In addition to these lectures and teaching American literature and Film Studies courses, I published an essay on whales in the journal Evental Aesthetics, and I've got two essays coming out later in 2014 in the leading Environment & Literature journals in the U.S.A. and the U.K.: ISLE and Green Letters. Most recently, I was thrilled to rub shoulders in person with a thinker who has inspired and shaped my own work, Slavoj Zizek at a conference where I presented a forthcoming chapter in a collection dedicated to bringing his philosophical work into literary studies. Finally, my family expects to increase by one around the fourth of July, and my three-year-old, Sofia, can't wait to become an older sister.
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At the opening convocation of this 2013-14 academic year, I had the honor of being installed as the 12th holder of the endowed chair of the Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities. I immediately invited all the previous Jones professors (including six other English profs) over for dinner, where I was inspired by their stories of the many wonderful projects and initiatives they undertook during their appointed years. My own project grows out of my work translating the quirky and lyrical microfictions of Danish author, Louis Jensen. I am asking, what is the role of story and storytelling in our accelerated, electronic-media enhanced, and short-attention-span culture? So far this year, I've brought a Chicago photographer to campus to show her amazing photos of urban schools; I've explored creativity and social media at the Luther College Writers Festival; I've invited Reverend Hans Jorgensen to speak to students and in chapel about his creative re-imagining of the parables as Square Stories; and I've chaired a national conference on Danish innovation where I gave a paper on Louis Jensen (and we hosted the remarkable Søren Hermansen as our keynote speaker). These projects have been, well, various and assorted, but to me they all make sense together, as they all explore the challenges, rewards, and pleasures of telling stories in this day and age. Next up is a sabbatical year, and when I return I'm planning further adventures in flash fiction, pocket art, lyrics, minute waltzes, square stories--and, if Facebook and Twitter are still around--that, too.
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Hi everybody. I'm in the middle of a quite wonderful sabbatical. I returned in late March from two months in Johannesburg, South Africa where I was a visiting scholar at the University of Witwatersrand's Diversity Studies Center. I didn't teach a course but rather met with colleagues and attended seminars and grad classes on arts activism, such as Wits U's Drama-for-Life program which develops socially meaningful theater in marginalized communities. I also interviewed three black South African friends who attended the U of Iowa grad school with me 25 years ago for a feature story in the Iowa Alumni magazine. Last but truly not least, I volunteered at Children of Fire, a non-profit organization that aids children who have been severely burned--for example, in shack fires or by paraffin stove accidents. I "directed" them in scenes from Macbeth and mentored their personal writing. They are a courageous and lively group! I am also writing about this, not knowing what will come of it but trusting my essay will find an audience. Children of Fire will be one of the sites Nancy Barry and I will visit with students in our 2015 J-term course, Stories in South Africa. We're looking forward to it! As they say in South Africa, stay well.
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Martin Mohr (mohrmart@luther.edu) 
Martin M's life these days consists mostly of the following: 1) Reading-NYT, NYRevBks, LondRevBks, NewRep, Time, NewYrkr, mysteries, the occasional new novel. 2) Messing around with plants--indoors and outdoors. 3) Going to Coffee--with other golden age Lutherites and on those rare days that chapel is convened, we might be there. 4) Going to Life Long Learners--with the aforementioned golden agers. 5) Attending stuff at Luther--an activity so demanding it requires self-discipline to find time for 1-4. Actually, I squeeze in a lot of time trying to put together a flash drive resource of family history (all peasants!) made up of slides of places in old Pomerania from which they came, and primary source church documents (births, marriages) from 18th and 19th centuries. It's an interesting hobby from which I keep learning new things. And finally, I watch political programming a lot so I can yell at the TV. And at 85, that's about as rich a life as I can stand.
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One of the most exciting happenings this year at Luther College is the hiring of the first woman (Paula Carlson) to be our president. As I reflect on my 50 years at Luther, I am so grateful for the many changes of attitude about the roles of women which have taken place. We have had a quiet year, with our usual trip to the Grand Tetons to hike and to go to music events. Along with most of the First Lutheran choir, I joined a community chorus to sing "Part I" of The Messiah again this year, which brings back memories. We continue to go to the Guthrie, last week seeing Othello and remembering our years of teaching it in the first-year program. A family highlight was attending, in the Quad Cities, the beautiful wedding of Martin's nephew Steve which allowed us to reconnect to so many of his relatives. We have survived a very cold winter with the ice on our boulevard finally completely melting this first week in April. So spring is finally here. Best wishes to you all.
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Mark Z. Muggli (mugglimz@luther.edu)
The natural question: "So how's retirement going?"
In fall Carol and I helped organize another successful Luther College Festival of Writers--thanks to all of you who have joined and supported us for these marvelous tri-annual events. In October I was pleased to see the publication of my edition of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale in the New Kittredge Shakespeare series (available from Focus Publishing and Amazon). Then many hours of preparation for Carol's and my January 2014 "Walking in Spain and Morocco" course. In January, naturally, we walked (and talked and read and wrote) in Spain and Morocco. It's a long story how two retired faculty came to teach the course, but it was a great experience for us, and, we hope, also for our 10 female students. In spring I served as a full-time volunteer nurse (see Carol's note above), although I did manage to get in some reading (Jane Austen gets better every time through). So what's retirement, exactly? In May we will be house sitting in the Twin Cities so that we can be close at hand for the birth of our first grandchild. Whoopeee!
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It's been a bracing winter, crisp temperatures and bright sunshine. As one of those oddities who find walks in the cold invigorating, I loved January and February. Last fall was a bit rougher, as I suffered a series of medical adventures. I almost wrote medieval adventures, which I'd be up for, since I have Ian Mortimer's Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England at my bedside. Suffice to say that the classroom was the best medicine. When deep in a conversation about Shakespeare, all else fades out of consciousness. Now I'm back to normal, riding my bike, gearing up for sabbatical. And I had the thrill in February of receiving an award for an article I wrote on John Donne.
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Harland Nelson (nelsonhs@luther.edu) 
Glancing at last year's newsletter, I see that I reported some spring 2013 doings there (David Kamm's "Art (still) Matters" as a Lifelong Learner, a trip to the Guthrie to see a Brit all-male company do Twelfth Night). Hereafter I'm going to report April to April, which will put less strain on my memory (as long as there's any left to be strained). Corinne and I were Lifelong Learners again, in February: Peter Scholl's course on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; we saw the 1960s movie too. And we saw Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Guthrie last October. Visitors last summer: Paul and Marilyn Jersild, Bob and Sally Schultz, at Homecoming many former students (I remember your faces very well). Travel in September and July, to family haunts in South Dakota and Minnesota respectively. The usual activity in the community: Good Shepherd, Vesterheim, Habitat for Humanity. Less usual, but to be expected in our life zone: deaths of half a dozen old friends. Otherwise, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Until next year, deo volente.
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Along with a classroom of 26 Luther readers, ranging from seniors to sophomores and from education to science to management majors, I am currently immersed in stimulating reading and insightful conversations around Young Adult Literature for English 334 this spring. While browsing in bookstores, I gravitate to the shelves for the young adult reader--only occasionally receiving wide berth and sidelong glances from teens! Advanced Education Methods for Secondary English conversations revolve around expertise in content, philosophy and pedagogy; the students' idealism and commitment to their profession; and more and more--the many current challenges to young professionals entering the field. It is privilege to correspond with our new professionals in their student teaching and in the early years of their careers. As the snow melts, Dave and I are planning our next prairie burn, gathering seeds for the garden, mapping summer travels, tuning our bikes for the trail, and piling up books for quiet late afternoons of reading on the deck!
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 The most inspirational event in my year has been walking another section of the Chemin de Compostelle in France, the medieval pilgrimage trail from Le Puy to Santiago, Spain. It is 1500 km long, and my wife and I are walking it in 150 km bits during Luther's spring breaks. It is a great experience; highly recommended to the adventurous. On the homefront, Kari Grønningsæter, who teaches Norwegian here, and I are working on a translation of letters she has from her grandmother, who voyaged on her captain/father's square-rigged ship from Scandinavia to Australia and back. A first-person account of a woman at sea on one of last sailing cargo ships, the trip also took place the year World War I broke out. It is a fascinating piece of maritime writing and history. And as for teaching, I especially enjoy my British Novel course, which is just embarking on its journey through Middlemarch. Best to all ... |
Lindsey Row-Heyveld (rowhli01@luther.edu)
Greetings from Iowa! As a first-year assistant professor at Luther, I'm especially delighted to mention my location since the thrill of being in Iowa has not begun to fade. (If anything, it's increased with the arrival of spring!) Originally from Nebraska, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and came to think of this state as home. For the past two years, I was an assistant professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York; I enjoyed my time "out east," but couldn't be happier to be back in Iowa and in Decorah in particular. As a specialist in 16th and 17th century British drama, I'm often introduced here as "the new Mark Muggli," and I'm honored by that uniquely rich inheritance. This year, I've gotten to teach a number of classes Mark oversaw, including Shakespeare, Paideia, and Writer's Voice, and I had the opportunity to introduce a new J-term class, "Superpowers and Disabilities," which sprang out of my scholarly work in disability studies. I'm looking forward to a long summer of research (I'm working on editing an anthology of early modern English plays featuring characters with disabilities) and strolls to the Whippy Dip.
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Diane Scholl (schollde@luther.edu)
It's a strange feeling to be easing into retirement with one Paideia section, and time to work on other projects. I'm excited about a future life as free-lance researcher and writer, but also a little scared--eager, nonetheless, for travel time and grandchildren time. This year I've worked on more poems, and expect to see some in print in Sow's Ear, Poetry Review and Christian Century shortly. Last fall I taught a seminar entitled "Possession: Narrative Voice and the Creative Daimon," which inspired a number of senior projects that once again amaze me with their ingenuity and careful analysis. We stumbled on links between Bronte's Jane Eyre and Frederick Douglass's Narrative after a bit of collaborative detective work, a high point. Traveling to Savannah, Georgia, for the Sigma Tau Delta convention was a welcome reprieve from Midwestern winter--my favorite historic city, with its rich intertwining of English, Scottish, Irish, Jewish, and African-American original colonists! Our eight presenters from Luther handled themselves admirably. Hope the year has been a rich one for all of you!
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I'm in my first year as a retired person and in denial. I go to campus almost every weekday. But I'm not just lurking around. Really. I took Chinese 201 in fall and am in 202 now (a hobby that is way out of control) so some days I think I'm an undergraduate. But in February I taught a "Seminar for Lifetime Learners" focused around a dramatic production of Fahrenheit 451. (Among my students were Martin and Mary Lou Mohr, Harland and Corinne Nelson, and John Bale. The teacher isn't always older than the students.) And then I am still editing the campus journal Agora--but this spring's will be my last issue. I think then I might start realizing, hey, I'm retired!
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Nancy Simpson-Younger (simpna02@luther.edu)
Yesterday, as I watched my Paideia students flapping their binders in front of the overhead projector to make Platonic shadow-birds, I couldn't help smiling. As a new visiting assistant professor this year, I have been thrilled with the creativity and brightness of my students--who have adapted Shakespeare sonnets into origami and musical scores, done a March Madness bracket with thesis statements, and gone above and beyond to make me feel welcome in this new place. My family and I came from Madison, Wis. in July, and I was informed by a student in September that I now "bled blue"--despite my continued enrollment in the Ph,D. program at the University of Wisconsin. After graduating with my doctorate in December, I've taught Paideia, Literature by Women, Literature and Medicine, and a J-term course called Playing with Shakespeare. I've been delighted to experience life at Luther, and am looking forward to teaching courses in Shakespeare and detective fiction next year.
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Amy Weldon (weldam01@luther.edu)
Hey, y'all. It's another busy year ahead of and behind me, full of the joys of writing, teaching, advising, and (I'm devoutly hoping as a cold spring lingers) gardening (soon!). Alongside big new fiction and creative nonfiction projects in development, I'm publishing critical review-essays regularly in the online site Bloom and in the online and print versions of the Los Angeles Review of Books; my essay on teaching The Sound and The Fury is out in William Faulkner: Critical Perspectives (Salem Press, 2013.) As the new faculty sponsor for Luther's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta (taking over from the excellent Peter Scholl), I was pleased to accompany eight Luther senior "Deltans" to Savannah, Ga., this spring to present their creative and critical work at the international Sigma Tau Delta Convention.
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Novian Whitsitt (whitsino@luther.edu)
Hello all. It's that time of year to catch you up on what's happened this year. I had had plans to take the entire year away from Luther and teach two courses at the University of Southern Indiana, but some family concerns compelled me to be in Decorah during the spring. Thus I ended up teaching on campus this semester. That said, my fall semester was a restful one, spending time reading a number of antebellum and post-bellum slave narratives. I also made quite a bit of time walking the kids to and from school, a habit I loved dearly. Spring has been a rich experience as I have taught a Paideia 450 course with Professors Guy Nave and Lauren Anderson, The Color of Change: Black Intellectual Thought and Social Engagement. The survey course in African literature has also kept me busy and fulfilled. This summer will be a year of transition as my wife, Katherine, moves to the Twin Cities for work. We'll try to keep the three kids in the proper frame of mind as mom and dad negotiate their professional lives in different cities. Life constantly keeps a brother on his toes.
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Kate Narveson
