"The Play's the Thing" in this Summer Research project

When Grace Gardiner ’15 puts pen to paper, she usually writes poetry that focuses on an image. But when English professor Gary Dop asked if she would like to write plays with him and another experienced playwright this summer, she jumped at the opportunity.

Gardiner is working on several plays for a Randolph College Summer Research Program project titled “The Play’s the Thing: A Communal Creative Jaunt through Dramatic Structure.” She and Dop began the summer by examining the dramatic structure in existing plays, then they set out to craft their own.

When Dop was interviewing for a position on the faculty, he taught a practice class on the opening image of a play. “That stuck with me,” Gardiner said.

Dop and Gardiner are meeting regularly with Jim Peterson, a Randolph English professor who retired last year, to read and discuss the plays that they are writing.

Gardiner’s play is about a college student who is accused of rape but has no idea whether he is guilty because he had blacked out on the night of the alleged assault. The play portrays him searching his soul and wondering whether he really is capable of harming someone. At the end of the play, the audience may have opinions, but not a definite answer, about his guilt or innocence. “It’s more about his journey,” Gardiner said.

Dop said handling the question in this way requires mastery of complex storytelling, and Gardiner is doing it well.  “We don’t know how to feel about the protagonist. He is, at moments, an unlikeable character, and that makes the journey more interesting to watch,” he said. “We’re wrestling with his guilt or innocence as well.”

Dop described the play he is writing this summer as a “postmodern magical realist surrealist absurdist play” as well as an over-the-top comedy that tells the story of a character looking for a job. “It’s certainly a non-traditional kind of drama,” he said. “I’ve played with conventions in some of my scripts, but never this much.”

Gardiner said the project has helped her expand her knowledge of how to structure and tell a story. “In a play, you can’t just take a step back and describe an image. It focuses on the dialogue and the characters’ actions,” she said. “That has been added to my arsenal of writing skills.”

Later this summer, they will send their plays to the National Playwright Center for critical feedback. They also will participate in a high school summer playwriting class that Dop has taught for a couple of years. Gardiner also hopes to organize a reading so people can experience a small performance of her play.

Kelley Swain ’07 publishes three books in 2014

Behind Randolph’s Red Brick Wall, Kelley Swain ’07 pushed pens and critiqued poetry with the writing group “the Quill Drivers.” Now across the Atlantic Ocean, she continues her prolific writing.

In fact, the London author is publishing three books this year.

photo credit: Marcos Avlonitis

In March, Valley Press published Opera di Cera, a poetry collection written as a series of monologues about the creation of the anatomical Venus, a life-sized waxwork figure she saw at a museum in France.

This spring, Cinnamon Press will publish Atlantic, a collection of poems that she has worked on since 2009. Although much of Swain’s writing addresses the history of science, Atlantic is more introspective. “It is a very personal collection which engages with family, grief, exile, and love,” she said.

Swain’s first novel, Double the Stars, will debut in September. Also from Cinnamon Press, the historical novel is about Caroline Herschel, an astronomer best known for discovering comets.

These books follow Darwin’s Microscope, her 2009 poetry collection about science history, and two volumes of poetry she has edited.

She said there are a couple of factors that led to her prolific success. “Half of the answer is hard work and discipline. If you want to be a writer, you have to write,” she said. “The other half is having an astonishing system of support. Since writing my first poem at the age of seven, my family, teachers, friends, and relationships have been supportive and constructive in my aim to become a writer, and this support has made all the difference in the world.”

Swain said a lot of that support came from friends and professors at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She said the faculty encouraged her interests in writing as well as science and helped her develop her talent and understanding. “I would not be the writer I am today without them,” she said.

Swain added that the liberal arts curriculum prepared her for life after graduation and her position at the Imperial College of London, where she teaches medical students about the confluence of science and the arts. “Though we used to joke that graduating from a liberal arts college with a degree in English would lead to dubious job prospects, it is exactly that unique educational background which has led to my being a guest lecturer at one of the top science universities in the world,” she said.

You can learn more about Swain’s work, and read excerpts from Opera di Cera and Atlantic, in an interview in the Inpress Catalogue.

Randolph junior becomes poetry contest finalist, gets poem published

During its 50-year history, december magazine has published the early works of authors like short story writer Raymond Carver, the novelist Rita Mae Brown, five United States poet laureates, and six Pulitzer Prize winners. Hannah Cohen ’15 is happy to find herself in such good company.

“Filter,” a poem that Cohen wrote for a creative writing class at Randolph College will appear in december magazine later this year. It was one of three poems she submitted for the Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize, for which she was listed as a finalist.

“I sent them out on a whim. I didn’t really expect to hear back,” she said. “I wasn’t really that sad that I didn’t win. I think just having the chance to be published in a recognized magazine is great. It really excited me. It made me feel important.”

Cohen described “Filter” as a poem about “cigarettes, death, love, and art.” It begins with a speaker noticing cigarettes discarded on the side of the highway, moves on to memories of the speaker’s grandmother, references to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and the artist Michelangelo, and returns to the car and images of cigarettes.

Cohen, who transferred to Randolph last year, enjoys exploring the ways in which her favorite subjects—art history, writing, and religion—intertwine. She is majoring in art and English and minoring in religious studies.

She has enjoyed writing for a long time, but became more serious about it in high school. At Randolph, she has benefited from working with professors who helped her sharpen her talent and find motivation to write. “I feel like I got the criticism and revision from my professors that I wouldn't have had if I had gone somewhere else,” she said.

“Hannah’s poems are full of surprising imagery and syntactic energy. She also has a dedication to writing and the life of writing that is rare in undergraduates,” said Laura-Gray Street, the Randolph English professor who taught the class for which Cohen wrote “Filter.”

Street added that it is very significant that Cohen’s poem was accepted by december, considering the other poets who have gotten started there. “That kind of company can exert a strange kind of pressure on a developing writer, of course. But it can also serve as creative stimulus, which I hope and believe it will be for Hannah. I’m very proud of her!”

Recent graduate gets book contract for stories she wrote at Randolph

A collection of short stories written by Sara Taylor ’12 for her senior project at Randolph will be published soon.

Taylor recently signed a contract to publish the collection with Random House Publishers imprints in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. She will spend the next six months working with editors to prepare the book for publication (while also studying for her Ph.D.).

Taylor, an English major with an emphasis in creative writing, started working on the collection the summer before her senior year at Randolph when she decided that she wanted to complete an honors project. “I was told that honors meant 100 pages minimum and no maximum,” she said. “I figured that if I was going to write that much, I might as well write a whole book.”

English professor Bunny Goodjohn, Taylor’s senior advisor, provided guidance and challenged Taylor to perfect the stories’ plots, characters, and language. “Working with her was one of the best experiences of my entire time at Randolph,” Taylor said. Their work brought rewards before long: one of the stories from Taylor’s senior project won the coveted Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize last year.

Goodjohn already knew that Taylor was a talented writer, but seeing her senior project come together taught her something else about her student. “She was also a dogged writer—fully committed to learning two other skills a modern writer needs: self-promotion and marketing,” she said. “Sara knew it wasn’t enough to sit down and write; she had to take control not only of craft but also of her own publishing success.”

Most stories in the volume take place in a fictionalized version of Eastern Shore, a region on a peninsula on Virginia’s eastern coast where she lived when she started writing the stories.

While studying for her master’s degree at the University of East Anglia (UEA) last year, she met a literary agent who started marketing the book. The agent called with frequent updates, and she finally had good news a few weeks ago.

“She called me to say that there was no news, and then she had to leave because she was getting a call. Then she called back and said an offer had been made,” Taylor said. “By the end of the evening I had a publisher.”

The book is currently titled The Shore, but that might change as the book is prepared for publication. It will be about 360 pages and will appear in hardcover and paperback. It is scheduled to hit bookstore shelves in 2015.

“I still can’t believe it’s happened,” Taylor said. “It’s given me a lot more energy to do the next book.”

Her next major project is a novel that she started during her master’s program. She would like to be a professional writer, but she also plans to look for opportunities to teach after completing her Ph.D. at UEA.

New English professor publishes poem on first day teaching at Randolph

Gary Dop had good news to share on his first day teaching at Randolph College.

Dop learned today that a literary journal at Iowa State University just published his poem “The Last Thoughts of the Dying Girl.”

Dop wrote the poem for a series of persona poems that center around a murder. The poems are written from the viewpoints of a variety of people, such as the mother of the murder victim or the manager of her apartment complex. “The poem imagines the fractured thoughts of this girl as she's dying,” Dop wrote in a description of the poem. “I wanted what she said to mean nothing and everything, to sway between the moment and the dream of the moment, the dream of life.  I hoped it would be somewhat incoherent but to convey the gravity of the impending grave.”

You can read the poem here in Flyway.

Dop, an English professor, joins Randolph College after serving as the writer-in-residence at North Central University and the screenwriting faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s master of fine arts program. In addition to writing poetry, Dop dabbles in screenwriting, comedy, nonfiction, and playwriting. Father, Child, Water, his first book of poetry, will be published by Red Hen Press.

Poetry Tree Tradition Marks Arrival of Spring

You can always tell when spring has arrived. Green grass. Singing birds. Bare feet. And the Poetry Tree.

Every spring, the weeping cherry tree between the corner of Main Hall and the Sundial sprouts green leaves, pink blossoms and verse. Students and faculty use ribbon to hang copies of their original and favorite poems to the tree’s branches.

Jim Peterson, an accomplished poet, playwright, novelist, and Randolph English professor, likes the tradition. “Poems and creativity are as organic to our lives as leaves are to trees. The impulse to shape our thoughts and feelings into a written form that can be shared is one that many people have, and the poetry tree provides them with a non-academic, non-threatening way to do it. And besides, it's just fun.”

Like the origin of many campus traditions, the history of the poetry tree is a bit mysterious.

Retired professor Mary Brewer Guthrow ‘65 places it back as far as the 1960s. “My best memory is that my professor, Margaret Raynal, hung the ‘Loveliest of Trees’ by A.E. Housman out there every year and then other poems from other poem-hangers appeared.” 

Like spring blossoms, however, the beauty is short lived. When the rains came this year, the ink ran, obscuring the words. If you look closely, though, you can still make out a phrase on one stained parchment... “Vita Abundantior.”

Acclaimed poet Ira Sadoff set for reading at Randolph

This Wednesday, the Randolph community will be treated to a reading by poet Ira Sadoff. The author of eight poetry collections, Sadoff has published poetry in works such as the Harper Anthology of American Literature and Great American Prose Poems. He has received the Creative Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Most recently though, Sadoff has been serving as Randolph’s Writer in Residence as a part of the English Department’s Visiting Writers Series. During his stay at Randolph, he is teaching a one credit, special topics English class that is open to Randolph students. He will also make appearances in several other classes.

“It is an advantage for Randolph students to be exposed to a wide range of authors,” said Laura-Gray Street, an English professor at Randolph. Street is responsible for bringing Sadoff, who served as her thesis advisor, to campus. “He was a role model for me. He has such warmth, energy, and generosity as well as a remarkable presence,” Street said.

The poetry reading will start at 8pm in the Alice Ashley Jack Room. Refreshments will be served. This is also a Passport program event for First Year students. Any questions about the event can be sent to Street lstreet@randolphcollege.edu.

Later in the semester, be on the lookout for one more reading by author Allison Hedge Coke.

"Flashes of War" author visits Randolph, will give public reading on Feb. 6

“What is it about a small college that feels like opportunity?” Katey Schultz wrote in a recent entry on her website. While teaching a creative writing course at Randolph College, she has found an environment that fosters her creativity as she pens a novel about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Schultz has been writing fiction about the wars in the Middle East for a few years. Although she has never been to the Middle East and does not have family members or friends serving in those wars, she became keenly interested in the topic when she realized that terms related to those wars had become a part of the normal lexicon for students in the arts-centered high school where she taught.

“I was amazed how the language of the global war on terror had infiltrated the everyday speech of the average teenager,” she said. “They don’t have any memories of this country when we weren’t at war. They have grown up in such a different world, with a familiarity of warfare and violence and oppression and power.”

“My little cousins, in 5th or 6th grade, they know what a jihadist is,” she added. “I think that’s changing society.”

Visiting Writer Series

Public reading by Katey Schultz

Wednesday, Feb. 6, 8 p.m.
Alice Ashley Jack room,
Smith Memorial Hall

Schultz began reading first-person accounts of the wars, watching footage from YouTube and documentaries, and making lists of military words. That research grew into her first book of short stories, Flashes of War, which will be published in May. Each story explores a question, such as why someone enlists in the military during wartime, or what it is like to be fighting a war that many at home are not thinking about. Some of those stories inspire the novel she is writing now.

A couple of years ago, Schultz learned that she had lost a writing prize she had sought, but she noticed that the winner had been an Emerging Writer in Residence at Randolph College. That piqued her interest, and she contacted Randolph’s English department.

The Emerging Writer program is part of the College’s Visiting Writer Series. It brings young writers who have not yet published a full-length book to teach a course for several weeks and to present a public reading.

Schultz has enjoyed working closely with Randolph students and teaching them about the creative process of writing. “They are curious about what you can do with creative writing, and they want to do a great job,” she said. “Everyone here is trying to learn and wants to be here. When you share those two basic principles, a lot of things can happen.”

Schultz will present a public reading of stories from Flashes of War on Feb. 6 at 8 p.m., in the Alice Ashley Jack Room on the second floor of Smith Memorial Hall. She hopes that her audience will feel the passion behind her work and think about the implications of war. “My stories are really bearing witness to something that we’ve done a pretty good job not looking at,” she said. “I hope it invites people to look at these wars again.”

Former Emerging Writer-in-Residence gets book contract and offers advice for Randolph students

Anthony D’Aries arrived at Randolph College last year with two tasks ahead of him. The first task was to teach a course for seven weeks. Second, he wanted to finish a book he had worked on for years.

Bunny Goodjohn, a Randolph English professor, dropped him off at an apartment where he would stay on campus. When she returned to check on him a few hours later, she found him sitting on the floor surrounded by copies of his manuscript.

“When I got to Randolph, I had a big chunk of material. I was at a point where I felt I needed to print all this and physically cut things out and move them around,” said D’Aries, the College’s 2011 Emerging Writer-in-Residence. “By the end of my time there, I felt really solid about it.”

D’Aries has now secured a publisher for The Language of Men, the memoir he polished at Randolph. The book is due out from Hudson Whitman / Excelsior College Press this summer.

Watch this video to hear Anthony D'Aries read from The Language of Men during his time as Randolph College's Visiting Writer-in-Residence in 2011. At the time, his memoir was under the working title Aural History.

Goodjohn said D’Aries’ achievement demonstrates the value that students can receive from Randolph College’s Emerging Writer-in-Residence program. Each year, that program invites an author who has recently received a master of fine arts but has not yet published a full-length book to teach a creative writing class at Randolph.

“Working with someone who is a fine writer, who is pursuing the grail of publication but has not yet found it, makes the process seem more do-able for a novice,” Goodjohn said. “If students can work with an emerging writer who then completes that emerging process and becomes a published author, it becomes more real.”

The experience also helps students understand the hard work required for becoming a published writer, Goodjohn said.

D’Aries said his time at Randolph provided him with an excellent opportunity to complete his book while also working with talented students. “The students at Randolph brought a lot to the class. A lot of them were strong writers to start with,” he said. “I was really excited to work with all the students.”

Advice for Aspiring Writers

D’Aries offered a few bits of advice for his former students based on his experience since he visited Randolph:

     1. Trust your instincts. “You have to really trust what you're writing about, even if it seems totally irrelevant. If certain things keep appearing in your work, your subconscious is telling you something.”

     2. Avoid getting too much feedback too early in the writing process. Give yourself time to develop your voice. “You still need feedback, but getting that too early can be more stunting than helpful.”

     3. Don’t put too much faith in writing habits—such as what time of day to write and how to get started—just because they have worked for others. “You've got to develop your own habits.”

     4. Don’t be too much of a perfectionist. “You have to get to a certain point where you allow yourself to be satisfied with it, where you allow yourself to feel like it’s finished.”

Bunny Goodjohn wins poetry prize

Bunny Goodjohn teaches English, writes poetry
and fiction, and recently won a poetry prize

Bunny Goodjohn ’04 answered what she thought was a routine phone call, only to find out about an exciting honor she had not expected.

“I answered the phone and discovered I was on a conference call with the Reed Magazine editorial staff,” said Goodjohn, who teaches English and directs the College’s writing program and tutoring services. “The editor told me the good news.”

Goodjohn learned that she had won the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, a prize sponsored by Reed Magazine and San Jose State University. The award comes with a $1,000 prize and publication in the magazine. Then the editors added to her surprise and delight by reading the remarks that the contest’s judge, Kim Addonizio, had written about Goodjohn’s work. (Addonizio is a poet whose work Goodjohn admires.)

Addonizio praised Goodjohn for “an ability to tell a story not just for the sake of narrative, but to get at a deeper truth; sentences that were complex and layered, as well as musical; and a sense of real presence on the page.”

“To have her consider my work and find it worthy is such a tremendous honor,” Goodjohn said.

Goodjohn submitted several poems to the contest, including two that she wrote during graduate school, one that she wrote after a camping trip in West Virginia two years ago, and one inspired by Paula Rego’s painting Family. The newest poem she entered, titled “Running 24 North,” came to her after she saw two stray dogs stop traffic outside Rustburg, Virginia.

Goodjohn studied writing and wrote a novel during her time at Randolph, and then she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Southern Maine. She then returned to the College as an English professor.

Her work has also been published in The Cortland Review (in 2002 and again in 2004), The Texas Review, Connecticut Review, and Zone 3.