Bonnie Jo Campbell ('98) publishes new novel

Bonnie Jo Campbell ('98) wins Guggenheim Fellowship

Bonnie Jo Campbell, an English Department alumna (MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction, 1998) nominated two years ago for a National Book Award, is one of the recipients of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction for 2011. For information about the fellowships, see HERE.

Emeritus Professor, Arnold Nelson, dies at age 92

Arnold G. Nelson

Arnold G. Nelson, age 92, of Verona, WI, died peacefully at the Hospice Center in Fitchburg, WI on November 13, 2010.

He was born July 10, 1918 to Frank and Anna Nelson in Stillwater, MN, where he spent his childhood. He graduated from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN, and after serving in the Army Air Corps in World War II (where he was stationed at Truax Field in Madison, WI), he returned to school at the University of Minnesota to earn a Master’s degree, and a PhD in American Studies.

He enjoyed a long career as a college professor teaching English and Communication. He spent a year at Stout Institute (now the University of Wisconsin-Stout) in Menomonie, WI, and then settled down for twenty-six years in the English Department of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. During this time he and a colleague produced a radio program on communication called “We Mean to Say” for the University radio station, and he received a Fulbright Grant to teach American Literature in Turku, Finland for the 1964-65 academic year. He approached teaching with a creative flair, always seeking new American writers and other artists to engage his students. He retired as a Professor Emeritus in 1980.

Upon retirement, he and his wife Helen moved to Ludington, MI and took up many projects and adventures. Their travels included rafting on the Colorado River, camping on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, and trips to England, Sweden and Iceland. He received a grant to journey to Alaska where Helen’s grandfather, Edwin M. Randall had traveled and taken many photographs of the mining operations and living conditions during the height of the Gold Rush. He and Helen spent the summer taking photos and doing research, which led to publication of an article in the Alaska Journal.

Since moving to the Madison, WI area in 2003, he spent his time exploring the internet, e-mailing friends and keeping current on politics and the newest generation of writers. At the age of 90 he completed a memoir and critique of writing titled How to Write a Good Sentence: A Manual for Writers Who Know How to Write Correct Sentences, which was published in the Spring & Summer volume (Volume 27, Number 1 & 2) of the Alaska Quarterly Review.

His family and friends will remember him for his sense of humor, his great wealth of obscure knowledge about books, art and architecture, and his passionate interest in the panorama of American culture and liberal thought.

He is survived by his wife Helen, and his daughters Kristine Seaman (Barney) of Chattanooga, TN, Ingrid N. Kelley of Madison, WI, and Linnea Nelson (John Martin) of Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. He is also survived by grandchildren Zack Czengoldi and Robin Seaman of Chattanooga, TN, Carmen Nave (John Verne) of Waterloo, Ontario, and Lenore Brooks (Ryan) of Toronto, Ontario; and great-grandchildren Maia and Logan Disbrow of Chattanooga, TN and Ada Verne of Waterloo, Ontario.

Memorials may be made to the Heifer Project through their web site. Please go to the Nelson Family page at http://www.heifer.org/myregistry/anelson.

In Memoriam William Rosegrant

A memorial service for William Rosegrant, a 29-year member of the faculty and emeritus in English, will be held Saturday, Oct. 2, at 1:30 p.m. at People's Church.

Announcement of the Winner of the 2010 Maurice Prize for Fiction

Melinda Moustakis


2010 Maurice Prize for Fiction

Prize Winner



The UC Davis English Department and novelist John Lescroart are pleased to announce Melinda Moustakis the winner of the 6th annual Maurice Prize in Fiction contest. Melinda will receive the $5,000 prize for her winning entry, Bear Down, Bear North, selected from 11 novels submitted this year. She is a 2006 graduate of the M.A. English program for creative writers. The $5,000 prize is a gift from John Lescroart in honor of his father, Maurice, for whom the contest is named.


Bear Down, Bear North was selected the best novel submitted by alumni of the creative writing program at UC Davis who haven't published a book-length manuscript. It is John Lescroart's hope to inspire the department's graduates to publish their literary work. Three previous winners have gone on to achieve that goal.


Benjamin Percy, judged this year’s contest. He is the author of The Wilding, Refresh,Refresh, and The Language of Elk among many other publications. He is the recipient of the Whiting Award, Plimpton Prize and anthologized in Best American Short Stories. He is assistant professor in the MFA program at Iowa State University as well as a member of the faculty at the Low Res MFA Pacific University program.


This year's 2010 finalists are Kate Swoboda, (Class of 2004), Palimpsest, and Halina Duraj, (Class of 2003), Fatherland: A Novel.



Previous recipients of this award include:

* Angie Chau, 2009 winner (Class of 2005), A Map Back to You
* Melanie Thorne, 2008 winner (Class of 2006), Hand Me Down

* Elizabeth Chamberlin, 2007 winner (Class of 2006), these people, they crawl all over the place

* Shawna Ryan, 2006 winner, Locke 1928. (Class of 2001). Locke 1928 was published in 2007 by El Leon Literary Arts.

* Spring Warren, 2005 winner, The Breaks.(Class of 2002). Her first book Turpentinewas published in September 2007 by Grove Atlantic.

Adam Schuitema's new book

Come celebrate the release of Freshwater Boys by Adam Schuitema

Published by Delphinium Books

This Saturday at 6:00 p.m.
Kendall College of Art and Design
17 Fountain St. NW, Grand Rapids, MI 49503

For details, click the link below:
http://adamschuitema.wordpress.com/book-release-party/

Freshwater Boys goes on sale today.
To purchase the book, follow the link below:
http://adamschuitema.wordpress.com/pre-orders/

In Memoriam Rodger Swan (1986-2010)

On January 26, WMU alumnus Rodger Swan (1986-2010) passed away from a sudden illness.  In 2009, he had completed an English major and Japanese minor, and at the time of his death, he was teaching English in Iwate, located in northern, rural Japan.  Rodger was an outstanding student in the English and Japanese programs, and during his time at WMU, he was an active part of the Writing Center, where he helped many people throughout the university with their work.  He was also a member of the Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.  Because he was such a fine student, he was the recipient of an all expenses-paid scholarship to study abroad at one of WMU’s study abroad partners, Keio University in Tokyo, for the 2007-2008 academic year. 

Rodger had a passionate love for Japanese culture, literature, and film.  In fact, his Honor's Thesis was a translation of a piece of Japanese fiction from the 1920s, which he completed with the assistance of his advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Angles from the Department of Foreign Languages.  The translation will be published later this year in a collection of Japanese ghost stories forthcoming from the publisher Kurodahan Press.  While in Japan, first as a student and then as an English teacher, Rodger created a series of extremely popular YouTube videos in which he introduced various aspects of Japanese culture and talked about his daily life in Japan.  (http://www.youtube.com/user/rodgerswan ) Currently, his YouTube channel shows almost 8000 subscribers.  There were Facebook fan pages dedicated to his films and, after his death, there was a great outpouring of grief on Facebook and his YouTube channel from fans who stated that his films had encouraged their love for Japan. 

Because Rodger was such a fine ambassador for Japanese culture, Rodger’s family and Dr. Angles of the Department of Foreign Languages have cooperated to create the Rodger Swan Memorial Fund for Japanese Studies.  Donations to the fund will help support the study of students who, like Rodger, are working on Japanese language or planning to travel to Japan.  Through the fund, they hope to keep alive his eagerness to foster a love for Japan in others, as well as keep his name a part of the activities of the department for years to come. 

Donations are being accepted via credit card through the following link.

Rodger Swan Memorial Fund for Japanese Studies https://shopwmu.wmich.edu/ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=718&SINGLESTORE=true

Bonnie Jo Campbell, MFA

Bonnie Jo Campbell is a fiction finalist again--this time by the National Book Critics Circle Award, announced Saturday at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York. The Awards are given annually by the critics' group and will be handed out March 11. It was for her novel American Salvage.

In Memoriam: Emerita Nancy Cutbirth Small

Dr. Nancy Cutbirth Small passed away after a long illness on Friday, 27 November 2009. Nancy joined the Department of English in 1971 and retired as Associate Professor with emerita status at the end of 1995. Her career was distinguished above all by the nurturing care that she lavished on her students, by her teaching of numerous courses in Renaissance Literature (particularly poetry), by her editing of The Anthony Powell Newsletter, and by her labors in conjunction with her future husband Tom in organizing what were then annual Shakespeare Festivals sponsored by the Department.

Following retirement Nancy pursued her passions for peace and the natural world. She was an early opponent of the war in Iraq, an early and active member of the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, and a founder of the Kalamazoo chapter of Wild Ones, an organization that advocates for natural landscapes. She lectured widely and wrote numerous letters and essays advocating for the preservation of natural spaces and all critters that live in, on, or above them. In a sense she never stopped teaching, as those who gardened with her, or received plants from her hands, or sought her advice on what to plant and where and why would testify.   T. H. Seiler

See also the Obituary in the Kalamazoo Gazette. Please also note that the family has established an online Guest Book until 12/1/2010.

Bonnie Jo Campbell (MFA 1998) finalist for National Book Award

Bonnie Jo Campbell is among the finalists for the National Book Foundation's "National Book Award" for American Salvage. Please read the full article in the NY Times.

Bonnie Jo Campbell's "American Salvage" Has Once Again Gained Success

"In her new short-story collection, American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell looks at working-class life in Michigan. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says both roughness and beauty can be found in Campbell's stories about cold, meth-drenched small towns."

The following is the transcript of the National Public Radio broadcast relating to her book:

NOAH ADAMS, host:

From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Noah Adams.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

And I'm Melissa Block.

Michigan has been one of the hardest-hit states in the economic downturn. The unemployment rate there right now is 15 percent. And it is among Michigan's struggling working class that Bonnie Jo Campbell sets her new book of short stories. It's called "American Salvage."

Alan Cheuse has this review.

ALAN CHEUSE: Campbell sets most of her stories in a small Michigan town that's been saturated with methamphetamine, a place suffering from a declining Rust Belt economy and all of the usual small-town modern pains: loss of love, splintered families, despair about the future.

Even the happy families, such as that of the yard man, Jerry, and his wife, Natalie, must fight off assaults from invading nature, from ermines to bees to snakes. Jerry can't sleep because of a hole in the baseboard of their bedroom. He's afraid that anything could move into that empty space and lurk there.

That worry turns up in many of the other stories. In "King Cole's American Salvage," an ex-con named William Slocum, Jr. holds up an auto salvage yard owner, beating him nearly to death, all so he can buy his beloved girlfriend, Wanda some meth - to keep herself going, we hear, since she'd lost her job.

In one of the most chilling passages in recent fiction, Slocum presents his girl with a wad of blood-spattered cash.

Campbell writes: Here's your house payment, babe. Look at you, Wanda says, but she was looking at the money. With two fingers, she lifted a $50 bill from the stack and held it away from herself. Willie, this money's covered with blood. Sorry about that. Slocum looked at his hands, which were also covered with blood. We can wash it in the sink, Wanda said.

What these people do to each other can't be washed away. But in these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, modern, working-class, small-town Michigan life, there's a roughness and even beauty.

Few of the stories have endings that seem resolved. Because of their despairing feel and their shape and form, they seem quite lifelike, all too real.

BLOCK: The book of short stories is called "American Salvage" by Bonnie Jo Campbell. Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse. And Alan's latest book is "A Trance After Breakfast."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112651628

Vincent Reusch

Vincent Reusch, recent PhD graduate, got a job at Concordia College, Minnesota--a fiction position.

Laura Feffer (2008) wins prestigious award

Laura Feffer (2008) just learned that she is the recipient of the prestigious Farmer Award from the Editor of English Journal, with a circulation of over 30,000 the largest circulation academic journal in the world! Laura's essay about her students engaging in ensemble theater, written with Allen Webb as an independent study during her MATE program, was one of two essays selected this year to be given this national award at the secondary section of NCTE at the luncheon at the conference this November in Philadelphia.

American Salvage

National Public Radio book reviewer Alan Cheuse has just reviewed
AMERICAN SALVAGE, Bonnie Jo Campbell's (1998 MFA) third book of fiction,
which has just gone into a third printing. Cheuse says many all good
things, compares Campbell to D.H. Lawrence, and refers to a particular
scene in the title story as "one of the most chilling passages in recent
fiction." AMERICAN SALVAGE was published by Wayne State University
Press as part of the Made in Michigan series.

One of the stories in the collection, "The Inventor, 1972,"
has won the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize from /Southern Review./

Campbell teaches at the Pacific University low residency MFA program in
Oregon, and currently she is is running around promoting AMERICAN
SALVAGE, so if you want her to come to her town, just contact her on
facebook or at her website: www.bonniejocampbell.com.

'American Salvage' delves into lonely, modern working-class small-town Michigan life

Bonnie Jo Campbell creates stories that somehow dig deep while also soaring

By Alan Cheuse |Special to Tribune Newspapers

July 25, 2009

Well, it looks as though Illinois writer Jean Thompson, with her recent collection "Do Not Deny Me," has middle-class Midwestern life pretty well covered for the year. Now here's Bonnie Jo Campbell in "American Salvage" taking on the question of life among Michigan working-class folks, and making stories that dig deep and somehow soar at the same time.

She sets most of her stories in a small Michigan town that has been saturated with methamphetamine, a place suffering the torpors of a declining Rust Belt economy and all of the usual small-town modern times pains -- loss of love, splintered families, despair about the future -- as well. Even the happy families, such as that of Jerry and his wife, Natalie, must fight off assaults from invading nature, from ermine to bees to snakes. Jerry can't sleep because of a hole in the baseboard of their bedroom, fearing that anything "could move into that empty space and lurk there, a bat or a squirrel or bugs or some awful art of himself, maybe."

That worry turns out to be in many of the other stories, except it's people from town, the neighbors, who assault one another. In the story "King Cole's American Salvage," from which Campbell takes the title for the collection, an ex-con named William Slocum Jr. robs an auto salvage yard owner, beating him nearly to death, all so he can buy his beloved girlfriend Wanda some methamphetamine "to keep herself going since she had lost her job" and help her pay her mortgage. He beats the salvage yard man so badly with a length of galvanized pipe that the victim's blood spills over the money Slocum finds in his pockets.

In one of the most chilling passages in recent fiction -- all the more so because of the matter-of-fact way the writer presents it -- Slocum presents his girl with the cash. " 'Here's your house payment, babe.' 'Look at you,' she said, but she was looking at the money. With two fingers she lifted a 50-dollar bill from the stack and held it away from herself. 'Willie, this money's covered with blood.' 'Sorry about that.' Slocum looked at his hands, which were also covered with blood. 'We can wash it in the sink,' Wanda said."

Alas, what these people do to one another can't be washed away or erased. Even the children suffer from a deadening of expectations, as we hear when a schoolgirl, run over by a man racing along the road on a foggy morning, lies waiting for help, considers the miseries of what may come in her life. "What if the future were camouflage and gray and sour, phlegm and dirty snow, wounds and scars and boys killing helpless pond creatures?"

Humor is a toothless meth addict, joking with her earnest ex-husband that she has committed incest with her former stepson. And though the future envisioned by the most level-headed adults, as in the mind of Doug, the victim of an accident, takes on a certain lyrical force, it remains bleak nonetheless: "The universe seemed darker than he'd realized, and larger, which made each thing in it, including him, smaller. Years ago, smart-aleck schoolboys like him ... should have learned more than their grammar and arithmetic. Why hadn't they learned the way bodies could break and how slow and difficult it was to heal?"

In these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, working-class Michigan life, there's a certain beauty reaching something like the sublimity of a D.H. Lawrence story. Few of the stories have endings that seem resolved. Because of their despairing feel, and their shape and form, they seem quite lifelike.

Alan Cheuse is an author, a writing teacher at George Mason University and a book commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered."

"American Salvage"

By Bonnie Jo Campbell

Wayne State University Press, $18.95, 171 pages

Former English Faculty, Ken Macrorie, Dies

From Las Cruces Sun-News "Ken Macrorie was born in the Mississippi River town of Moline, Ill., in 1918. He graduated from Oberl[l]in College in Ohio and served in the Army during WWII. He then earned a master's degree in English at the University of North Carolina where he became a civil rights activist and began his lifelong dedication to breaking down racial bigotry and bars to equality wherever he was. He taught at Michigan State University and was active in forming the teachers union. When he began work on his doctorate at Columbia University, he studied perception, concentrating on how it affected journalists and accompanying New York Times reporters on assignments. He wrote his doctoral thesis on objectivity/subjectivity in reporting. After receiving his degree, he returned to Michigan State, eventually moving to San Francisco State and then to Western Michigan University where he made the breakthroughs that led to his national leadership role in re-educating teachers trapped in unproductive teaching methods to learn how to express themselves in print and pass that knowledge on to their students." For the full obituary, visit the Las Cruces Sun News.

WMU Alumni Kelly Sandoval's Update

Kelly Sandoval just got her BA in English/Creative Writing.  She wrote "How to Win in Reno" in a 5660 workshop last year.  The story was a runner-up for the 2009 Undergraduate Fiction Award, and is now going to appear in Esopus Magazine.

Bonnie Jo Campbell (MFA 1998) publishes American Salvage

Bonnie Jo Campbell's third book of fiction, AMERICAN SALVAGE has been released into the wild. Booklist gave the story collection a starred review, and on Sunday, Julia Keller wrote a feature about BJC and her book in the Chicago Tribune. Read the story HERE.

After only three weeks, Wayne State University Press has done a second
printing of AMERICAN SALVAGE. Be sure to attend her Kalamazoo Book Release Party at Bell's Brewery, on May 24, the Sunday before Memorial Day, from 2-8 pm. As well as books and beer, there will be readings, art, music, pin the tail on the donkey, Kalamazoo's biggest ball of string, lots of temporary tattoos and more. BJC will read at 3:00. If you have any questions, contact BJC at bonniecamp@gmail.com.

Three English Alumni Publish

Dennis Hinrichsen (1975), winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize, 2008 (Kurosawa's Dog)

David James (1977), publishing his second book after a 25 year hiatus (She Dances Like Mussolini, March Street Press)

Marc Sheehan (1977), winner of the Ashland Poetry Prize for 2008 (Vengeful Hymns, Ashland Univ. Press)

Party for Arnie

Dear All,

On behalf of the faculty and staff of the English Department, I would like to invite all of you to attend a retirement party honoring Arnie Johnston, since July 2008 Professor and Chair Emeritus after 42 (!) years of service to Western. Please join us and spread the word. All of Arnie's friends, students, staff, collaborators, and colleagues are invited. The event will take place on Tuesday, April 21, from 5-9:00 pm in the Lee Honors College Lounge.

All best,
Richard