USCTIMES SPRING 2018 NO. 2
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
USCTIMES STAFF Craig Brandhorst Managing editor Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Mary-Kathryn Craft, Chris Horn, Page Ivey, Megan Sexton, Julie Turner, Dana Woodward Photographer Kim Truett Campus correspondents Patti McGrath, Aiken Cortney Easterling, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College Printer USC Printing Services USC Times is published twice per semester during the regular academic year by the Office of Communications and Public Aff airs, Wes Hickman, director. Questions, comments and story ideas can be submitted via email to Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@ mailbox.sc.edu or by phone at 803-777-3681.
SPOILER ALERT Have we got a story for you. Actually, we’ve got several. And we’ve got the storytellers to prove it. From creative writing MFA faculty reflecting on their evolution as writers, to new graduates from USC’s Graduation with Leadership Distinction program retracing their road to self-discovery, to TEDx Columbia alums revisiting their 15-plus minutes of fame, this issue packs so much fortifying narrative goodness you could spread it on toast and eat it for breakfast. And we’d encourage you to do so, except we don’t want to spoil your appetite. We’ve got a big lunch in store. How big? Well, let’s see. It wears a ten-gallon hat, features a naked bow hunt, runs six pages and lasted approximately 13 years. It was also presided over, at least in spirit, by the ghost of a former poet laureate of the United States — to the memorable tune of “Dueling Banjos.” OK, put down the phone. Delete the concerned email. Suspend your disbelief. We’re talking about Meet & Three, here. We’re also talking about a world-class storyteller and scholar, specifically the late James Dickey, whose arrival at Carolina 50 years ago ushered in an exciting era for the literary arts on campus — and led, over time, to a literary friendship for the ages. In case you haven’t figured it out — and honestly, the typewriter on our cover should have made it abundantly clear — this issue is devoted to storytelling. Why? Because. Because, as more than one MFA faculty member explained, storytelling is how we make sense of the world. Because, as so many of our students have realized upon completing their e-portfolios for Graduation with Leadership Distinction, storytelling tells us something about ourselves. Because, as we discovered putting together this very issue, good storytellers tell the best stories about storytelling, and we’ve got some of the best storytellers around. Don’t believe us? Run your eyes down our table of contents and try to decide what to read first. Have we got a story for you? You’d better believe it. In fact, we’ve got several. Once Upon a Time,
The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.
ABOUT THE TYPE: The James Dickey typewriter on our cover is currently inoperable, but that didn’t slow down our fingers. We simply used Joseph Heller’s trusty Smith-Corona and swapped the paper. Both typewriters are housed at the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
CRAIG BRANDHORST MANAGING EDITOR
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GALLERY
SPRING. SPRANG. SPRUNG. 4 Campus blossomed everywhere you looked this semester, and in more ways than one. MEET & THREE
POWER LUNCH & POETRY 16 It’s been 50 years since the arrival at USC of National Book Award-winning poet James Dickey. Two of Dickey’s closest faculty colleagues discuss the late poet’s life and legacy. FORWARD THINKING
GUESS WHAT’S COMING TO DINNER 22
p. 6
Insects could help address food insecurity — but only if we address regulations first. FEATURES
CORD & GOWN 6 p. 4
p. 16
Earning the Graduation with Leadership Distinction cord takes a lot of hard work. Five new graduates reflect on the experience.
MENTOR. FEEDBACK. ART. 12 USC’s graduate program in creative writing teaches the craft and instills professionalism.
TALKING TEDx 26 p. 20
p. 26
TEDx is coming to USC in October. Faculty who have delivered Ted Talks in the past share their insights about taking the stage.
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PHOTO GALLERY
SPRING. SPRANG. SPRUNG. It wasn’t just the azaleas outside the President’s House that blossomed this spring (below). From the steps of Thomas Cooper to the Koger Center for the Arts, campus was in bloom all semester. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: President Pastides, U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn and a host of onlookers attended the unveiling of a statue honoring the university’s first African-American professor, Richard T. Greener; students participating in Dance Marathon’s signature spring event helped raise more than $1 million for Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital; March tulips brightened the historic Horseshoe; a cast of more than 200 musicians, dancers and other performers from across campus wowed audiences with three rousing performances of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS.
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CORD & GOWN Carolina students distinguish themselves in all sort of ways. Students who complete USC Connect’s rigorous GRADUATION WITH LEADERSHIP DISTINCTION track, however, take their college careers to another level. USC Times asked three May and two December GLD graduates to reflect on their experiences both in the classroom and beyond. AS TOLD TO USC TIMES
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SARAH TAYLOR B.A. global studies, May 2018 GLD in Global Learning
I was born two months premature. As a newborn, I frequently stopped breathing and spent weeks in an incubator. At six months, I contracted a life-threatening RSV infection and was hospitalized yet again. Throughout my childhood I suffered from frequent respiratory and sinus infections. Interestingly enough, the never-ending sicknesses and treatments — along with the many different clinicians who cared for me — fascinated me. From an early age, I knew someday I’d have a career in health care. USC turned that desire to help others into a desire to become a pharmacist. My multicultural family tree, along with time spent studying abroad in Costa Rica, Cuba and Panama, taught me vital lessons about culture, communication and compassion. While it is imperative for me to understand the science behind pharmaceuticals, I know I must also practice with compassion for people and respect their unique situations, cultural beliefs and traditional remedies. While in Cuba on a USC study abroad trip, the lessons of the classroom intersected with real life when I experienced two painful bouts of stomach flu. Both times, my host mother believed I was suffering from “empacho” — that undigested food had become lodged in my digestive tract. She sought to provide relief by finding a knot in my arm and rubbing it with oil. Though her remedy didn’t likely contribute to my recovery, her comfort and compassion greatly improved my misery. While my time abroad underlined my responsibility to be a global citizen, I’m keenly aware that a multicultural mindset can enhance health care delivery in the United States, too. As professionals, we’re taught that good health isn’t merely the absence of disease and infirmity; it’s a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing. More and more I’m realizing how poverty and income inequality jeopardize the health of our citizens. One eye-opening moment happened during a role-playing project in my intro to sociology class. I’ll never forget. My role was that of a single mother working for minimum wage, and my Sarah Taylor begins at the USC College of Pharmacy this fall.
task was to find a home, child care and transportation, and to make a life on my limited income. I felt the desperation of calling housing and child care options only to realize how unaffordable life can be. Trying to synchronize the family schedule and a varied work schedule with a complex bus route that offered no flexibility only compounded the financial stress. While the role was only a simulation for me, I understand how terrifying life can be for a growing number of American families. Our nation’s health care system is complex but there is room to simply connect with people and advocate on their behalf at every encounter. As a pharmacist, I will provide medications to help people get well and recover from illness. I’m committed to helping them achieve a deeper sense of overall wellness by helping them navigate and understand insurance, seek alternative options when necessary, and ensure they have a path to affordable, sustainable care. Empathy is one of the most valuable tools we have. Whether connecting respectfully with those with unique cultural beliefs or with a worried single mother who needs affordable medication, I will always remember what it’s like to be on the other side of the counter.
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JANELYS VILLALTA May 2018 GLD in Diversity and Social Advocacy
I’m Cuban-Honduran-American. My mom’s side is Cuban, and my dad’s side is Honduran. I was born in Miami, then we moved to Beaufort when I was four, and I lived there until I came here to college. I’m first-generation American, but I’m also a first-generation college student. I’ve always been interested in journalism — eventually, I’d like to be a producer in a newsroom so my passion for social justice can affect marginalized communities — but when I came here I actually wanted to go into entertainment news. I started at SGTV (Student Gamecock Television) and did a segment called Truth or Nah? We talked about whether a celebrity rumor was true, which is so far from what I want to do now. My transformation started in an Opportunity Scholars Program section of University 101. This was in 2014, right after the Michael Brown shooting, and our professor talked a lot about current events. That really got me thinking about the world we live in. I started to get more interested in the Black Lives Matter movement. The semester after that I took a sociology class that really opened my eyes to issues of social justice. I also started looking for more opportunities outside the classroom. OMSA (Office of Multicultural Student Affairs) was doing a lot of programming related to Black Lives Matter and race in general, and I went to a lot of those events. I was also taking the sociology class, which helped me realize how important all of these issues really are. My roommate was a
social work major, and I remember coming to my dorm after my sociology class and just ranting about all of the world’s issues — health care, welfare, all of these things. At that point, I kind of switched gears. So I took more sociology courses, and sociology became my minor. I couldn’t take as many as I wanted because I still wanted to major in journalism, so I got more involved with social justice outside the classroom. At the end of my freshman year I applied to be an OMSA peer educator, which meant I got to go to different U101 classes and talk about diversity, inclusion and social justice. I also started going to LASO (Latin American Student Organization) meetings. While I didn’t go as often as I could have freshman year, the president of LASO knew that I liked community service and nominated me for a new position, community service chair. Now, I’m the organization’s president. In that role I’ve learned that USC is more diverse than a lot of colleges and universities, but it could be more inclusive — even within the marginalized communities, which I know is a strong criticism. That’s why as LASO president I’ve tried to recognize intersectionality. We’ve partnered with IRIS, which is the LGBTQ+ organization, to talk about what it means to be a person of color on campus but also to identify as queer, and we’ve partnered with the Black Graduate Student Association to talk about racism and the Afro-Latino experience. While I wish that the university would do a little more to encourage students to learn about other communities, I love this school and would encourage anyone to come here and take advantage of the same opportunities I’ve had, a lot of which I had thanks specifically to President Pastides. Students at other universities probably don’t have a president who is as open and willing to hear student opinions. If you asked me freshman year if one day I’d be having monthly meetings with the president, I don’t think I would have thought that was possible. But now, doing GLD, I look back and say, “Wow, I’ve done all of these things,” and I’ve really changed. When I got here, I really only cared about issues that affected me personally. Immigration was important to me because a lot of people in my family are undocumented, but it wasn’t until college that I truly started to think about all of these other issues — police brutality, Black Lives Matter, queer issues — that should matter to me as well.
Janelys Villalta is currently applying for positions in media and to AmeriCorps VISTA.
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AMY ZYCK B.S. marine science, May 2018 GLD in Research
I grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, far from the ocean, but I always had a love for the ocean and the animals that lived there. I lived near the Brookfield Zoo so we’d go there fairly often. I think that developed my interest in marine science. They had an exhibit devoted to coastal species, and they had a dolphin exhibit. Those were always my two favorites. In high school, I ended up doing a program that was partnered with the zoo. From there, I decided I wanted to do something in marine biology and I looked at schools, mostly on the East Coast. I liked that USC has a marine science program and not marine biology because it allowed me to take classes in chemical oceanography, physical oceanography and marine biology, which helped me decide to do marine biology-focused research. It also gave me a well-rounded background in the science fields. My freshman year I went to a workshop through the Office of Undergraduate Research. That taught me how to reach out to potential research mentors. The first professor I emailed asked me to come talk to him. That was Dr. (Jerry) Hilbish, who I’ve spent the last three years working with. I’ve gotten so much out of the research. I was able to present at multiple conferences, which is really beneficial for anyone who wants a career in research, and since then I’ve been able to use my experience in that lab to show how well I’d fit in with other programs or scholarships. I also got to go to the United Kingdom for a summer and do field research with Dr. Hilbish and one of his graduate students. Those two months were spent traveling between Scotland, Wales and England collecting image samples of settled barnacles in the rocky intertidal. The images were going to be analyzed to understand how settlement competition between two species of barnacle changes over a latitudinal range. I’ve been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Rhode Island in their biology department, but I’ll be doing research with marine systems. Right now, I’d say I want to go into research more than academia, but that’s just because I
haven’t had too much experience teaching, so I’m hoping to do a teaching assistantship during my Ph.D. to see if I like it. If so, I’ll probably pursue teaching. The e-portfolio for the Graduation with Leadership Distinction helped me summarize my whole research experience as an undergrad, which was great when I was applying for graduate school. It was a great time to reflect on everything I’ve done, and I was able to repeat that reflection in my grad school applications. It also helped me remember why I got interested in research.
Amy Zyck begins the doctoral program in biology at the University of Rhode Island this fall.
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ONTONIO GRANT Associate degree (USC Sumter), May 2016; B.A. global supply chain management, December 2017 GLD in community service
I was born and raised in Sumter, S.C., and joined the military in June 2000, 16 days after high school graduation. My mom and I had a conversation about college, and she basically said, “Tony, I don’t have any money for that.” Not understanding the dynamics of scholarships and financial aid, I just kind of took the route that was there. The Army was like, “Hey, we’ll give you $50,000 to go to college.” I thought, “OK, I’ll join the Army and then go to school.” Well, 13 years later I got out. I was in Kuwait for the Iraq invasion. I went in November of 2002, the day after Thanksgiving and was there until October 2003. During my last deployment, I was in Mosul, Iraq, and one day I found myself in a bunker trying to re-evaluate my life. I kept thinking, “At any moment, a bomb could drop on this scud bunker, and I’m over and done with.” That puts things in perspective. Because of my contract, I had three more years, but I knew I wanted to make some changes. When I got out I moved home and started at USC Sumter, and while I was there I had a work study assignment assisting with the YouthBuild program at the South Sumter Resource Center. It’s a federally funded program for kids from lower income, high-risk families who have either dropped out of school or been expelled. Anyway, one of the things the kids participated in was a living museum about African history. I had just taken an African history course at USC Sumter. The stuff I was learning in class went hand-in-hand with what they were learning, so I
was able to help them appreciate a little more about their own ancestral history. The other thing I helped with was math, and math was tough. Not doing anything other than basic addition and subtraction in the military, I lost my skills. So I took a course for people who don’t score high enough on the placement test, and that got me where I needed to be. But also, that course allowed me to help those students trying to get their GEDs. Showing them how to work the problems made me look smart, but actually, I was learning at the same time. I told them, “Look, I’ve had the same problems you’re having. I’m going through a refresher course right now.” If you struggle, you appreciate the process when it’s over and done. But the entire time I was at USC Sumter, I knew I wanted to get the degree in global supply chain management at the Darla Moore School of Business. I worked supply in the military, and I wanted a degree in the same field. I graduated from the Moore School in December 2017 and had already accepted a federal job as a logistics management specialist working with the U.S. Army. The big takeaway is leadership. In the Army, I was an enlisted soldier, so the level of leadership came with a cap. You’re only empowered as much as they empower you. As a graduate of USC, there is no measure for your potential — as much as you want to take, the university will give it. It’s like President Pastides likes to say — “No limits.” There really are no limits once you get that degree.
Ontonio Grant begins a job as a logistics management specialist for the federal government this summer.
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ALEX BARNHART B.S. electrical engineering, December 2017 GLD in Professional and Civic Engagement
I’m a completely different person than the 18-year old who showed up at USC in August of 2013. I started out as a procrastinator, sometimes waiting until the last minute to do assignments. I didn’t see the point in team projects, and my long-term goals weren’t very well thought out — I just wanted to graduate, get a decent job and not rack up a ton of student debt. The turning point for me was my junior year, when I started a student worker position in USC Housing and took 18 credit hours instead of the usual 15. Suddenly, I didn’t have time to goof off and wait until the last minute to get things done. I had to plan out my week and actually schedule time to do homework and projects for my courses. That paid off in my senior design courses in electrical engineering, where you don’t have a professor telling you what you need to do — as a team you decide on your own timeline for the project. That semester really changed my work habits. I’m still benefiting from it. When I was in high school, I have to say that I didn’t like group projects. It seemed like one person always ended up doing the work, and it was the same early on in college. But then I had ELCT 302, a real-time systems laboratory, where we had to work in teams to build a small car that could drive itself around a 90-foot track in less than 19 seconds. We were split into groups of three, and I realized right away there was a reason for that — it was too much work, too many tasks for one person. We split up the work and brainstormed together, and we were able to have our car working, and all of our assignments finished, on time. We got an A in a course that is often seen as one of the most difficult in our curriculum. I was only a year from graduating when I heard about Graduation with Leadership Distinction, and I didn’t know if I had time to do it. But I met with USC Connect, and they showed me that I had the time if I wanted to do it. The hardest part was having to think about and write out the three key insights that I took away from my college experience. This process involves a lot of self-reflection. As an engineering student, I can do an
experiment and write about data all day, but self-reflective writing is difficult. Theresa Harrison, my instructor in the UNIV 401 GLD course, gave us good critiques, and that gave me the confidence to keep pushing forward. I’m glad I did it. I was able to talk more confidently about my experiences in college and what they meant for my potential career path while interviewing for jobs. I can’t speak for my employer, but I like to think they were impressed. I’ve been encouraging my younger friends at USC to pursue GLD if they have the time; it is more than worthwhile. T
Alex Barnhart works for the Engineer, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in Charleston, S.C.
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Mentor. Feedback. Art. GRADUATE PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING DEVELOPS ARTISTS, CULTIVATES PROFESSIONALISM BY PAGE IVEY
Storytelling is how we make sense of our world. Whether we’re scientists, mathematicians, poets or preachers, we tell ourselves stories to understand the world around us. The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program helps hone this natural talent into a craft — a craft that turns stories into art. “We build our program on the writers we bring in,” says MFA director David Bajo (pictured). “Then we give them time to work on the craft of writing. Along the way, they are getting feedback from faculty and their peers. Mostly, they learn from each other.” The program is intentionally small — four new students in each track every year, creating a cohort of MFA students on campus at one time. “What I love about the program here is that you have the camaraderie of a small program with the resources of a large university,” says Elise Blackwell, a writer and professor in the program’s fiction track. “We get to know the students well and have that close mentor relationship. We tend to follow their careers rather closely.” Another key to the program is that it’s fully funded, meaning all the students have enough teaching assignments and financial assistance to pay for all three years. That allows the
program to bring in writers from a variety of backgrounds with a variety of styles. “There is no ‘MFA style’ of writing,” Bajo says. “If you saw the four theses that are being defended this year, you’d see that diversity.” During the program, each writer creates a book-length thesis, whether in fiction or poetry. They also take classes, of course, and teach undergraduate classes in English literature and writing. “Ninety percent of our students finish in three years,” Bajo says. “That’s pretty impressive, to get a book done in three years while working full-time. But that’s part of the professionalization of the craft. If you’re going to be a writer, you have to make money.” The last year of the program is usually spent on the second, third, fourth, whatever draft of the thesis. Then, in the spring of their third year, if all has gone as planned, the students defend their work. “The defense is a conflicted experience,” says Bajo, who went through the process himself at UC-Irvine. “You feel you know your work better than anybody in the room, but it’s intimidating. That’s what being a writer is. As you present
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your work, there is this vulnerability. Getting past that is part of the professionalism we try to teach.” By the time the students reach the defense, however, there should be no surprises, according to Bajo. “Outside the workshop environment, they get a lot of feedback,” he says. “There is a lot of one-on-one time with faculty.” Blackwell and Bajo understand the demands of a writing life. The two met as MFA students at the University of California-Irvine and came to Carolina as a married couple. They
spend their days teaching; Bajo runs the MFA program and Blackwell is director of the Open Book Series, which brings in several authors each spring to discuss their work. They also find time to produce their own literary fiction. “Most of our students understand they are going to have to do something else. Maybe they want to have my job somewhere,” Blackwell says. “What I hope they get out of the program is the motivation to write for themselves, no matter what else they do.”
Origin Stories From novelists to poets to journeyman racounteurs, the world is filled with storytellers, but not everyone becomes a dedicated writer. So where does the impulse to become a writer come from? And how does it grow? USC Times asked two MFA faculty members and one current MFA student to share their journeys from the initial itch to the printed page.
Elise Blackwell, writing professor and director of USC’s Open Book Series, is the author of five books: Hunger, Grub, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, An Unfinished Score and The Lower Quarter. “Writing is the way I have made sense of the world,” she says. My maternal grandfather one summer offered me and my cousins $1 for every story we wrote. My cousins did a couple each. I wrote 20 in one week — $20 was a lot of money to hand off to a 6-year-old. He told me he wasn’t going to pay me anymore but that he hoped I would keep writing. I think storytelling is an innate human capability. We tell ourselves stories to live. In some people, the impulse is stronger for poetry or art. My daughter is a mathematician; both my parents were scientists.
The great thing about writing is that you learn a lot about a range of things. In my process, typically, I’ll get a set of ideas while I am finishing a project, things like characters will
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come to me. I’ll take some notes, and when it’s time, there is the day when you start writing it. My book Grub was the only one I wrote start to finish. Others have been written in different orders. Sometimes I make discoveries along the way. I typically don’t know the ending when I start. That’s part of the fun, I get to find out what’s going to happen, too. There’s usually a point where I have to stop and do some research. My last book is set in post-Katrina New Orleans and I needed to take some time to get my facts straight.
Then comes the hard part, selling it. With literary fiction, you can’t really sell it until it’s finished. I have an agent who does the selling. I work with her on some edits, then I work with my editor. Finally comes the promotion. Some people hate self-promotion; some love it. I am a little more involved in the promotion than I used to be before, with social media, interviews. I don’t love that part, but I really do love the opportunity to interact with readers.
Jim Barilla is a writing professor in the MFA program, specializing in creative nonfiction, nature writing and ecocriticism. His 2013 book My Backyard Jungle: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard into Habitat and Learned to Live with It explores the limits of coexistence in urban environments. “I was also one of those people who had buckets of creatures great and small so I have always had an interest in being outdoors and exploring things ‘out there,’” he says. One of the first books I ever read — I think I was 9 years old — was Watership Down. It was all about anthropomorphic rabbits. I was captivated by both the story and the rabbits. In grad school, I had an adviser who was on this path — ecology and the natural world. So I did my dissertation project in creative writing and that ultimately has led to the books I’ve written. My first book was about a trip where I set out from Massachusetts and wound up in California, fly-fishing my way across the country.
Another book was about turning our yard into a wildlife habitat. It was just an experiment to make our yard more wildlife-friendly. We had a mini-wilderness area and a garden for tomatoes and other vegetables. We set boundaries up between the two, but the wildlife didn’t respect them. Things showed up that we didn’t expect, like two enormous snapping turtles and muskrats swimming in the pond. So I just tell the story in first person about the natural world. I write about the human relationship to the natural world. My stories are the interplay between my own thoughts and feelings vs. what’s going on around me. I think writing is
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making sense of the world — making sense of your place in the world, how humans interact with other species. I’m always looking for creative ways of looking at what’s out there. Focusing on nature writing in grad school, I found a variety of writers who had done similar work. Then I found the
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. That organization was really a gathering for various people, scholars, it was a community of like-minded people. And I began to think there’s a place for me in the broader scheme of things.
Destiny Hemphill, fi rst-year MFA student in the poetry track, is a graduate of Duke University with dual majors in African-American and global cultural studies, as well as a certificate in Latino studies. She didn’t begin the formal study of creative writing until she came to Carolina but has been practicing the craft since childhood. “When I was young, I had a speech impediment and people had trouble understanding me,” she says. “Through writing, however, I was able to articulate myself more clearly.” Around 10, I knew I wanted to be a writer; I just didn’t know how. I recall doing an AskJeeves search and saw that Toni Morrison was a lecturer at Rutgers University so I thought, mistakenly, “I have to teach to be a writer.” My parents encouraged my creative writing and never questioned its practicality. Even so, as a first-generation college student, I had internalized other opinions about its practicality, which influenced my decision to become a professor. Although I didn’t take any creative writing courses, I had other outlets like the campus’s spoken word poetry organization. I start with just a kernel of an idea. It might be just a word or a phrase and I pick up the rhythm. I’ll write it down and start rehearsing the word or line in my head till something else comes. I don’t work in any particular form. I focus on the sound first, the rhythm.
After graduation, I worked but carved out intentional space to write about my poetic obsessions — grief, cosmology and liberation. I’m grateful for the mentors and the community of support I had in Durham. What I wanted, though, was sustained time for immersive critique and conversations about craft. I chose USC, in part, because I was drawn to Nikky Finney. I also found that the MFA program had an ethos of generosity fostered by both students and faculty. Its commitment to intentional criticism and collaboration rather than competition was important to me. T
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MEET & THREE
POWER LUNCH & POETRY
Q&A BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
JAMES DICKEY — National Book Award winner, United States poet laureate, author of the bestselling novel Deliverance — was USC’s poet-in-residence from 1969 until his death in 1997. He was hired in 1968, though, and gave the commencement address on the Horseshoe in May of that year, making 2018 the 50th anniversary of his arrival at Carolina. In tribute, USC Times invited Carolina Distinguished Professor of English emeritus DON GREINER and Distinguished Professor of English emeritus BEN FRANKLIN to discuss their friend’s legacy over lunch at McCutchen House, where the three dined together twice a week for nearly 13 years.
Ben Franklin (left) and Don Greiner
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Ben, you didn’t come to USC until 1976, but Don, you were here when Dickey arrived, right?
DG: I’d come in ’67, and I was the greenest assistant professor
in the history of this university. I’d gotten my assignment for spring of ’68, including a course called Modern American Writers. I thought, “OK, I’ll do Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and then move on up to recent writers.” And I wanted to add a hotshot poet. I knew nothing about James Dickey, but I did remember that someone named James Dickey had won the National Book Award for a book called Buckdancer’s Choice in 1966, so I assigned Buckdancer’s Choice. This next part is literally true. The department was in Davis College at the time, and I walked down to the secretary’s office to place a book order. A professor named Calhoun Winton, who knew Jim and his wife Maxine from their time at Vanderbilt, was walking toward me with this tall, nice looking man, and Cal stops to introduce me, “Don, this is James Dickey.” I fumbled around like a kindergartner — “Cal, look at this syllabus I just filled out!” and, “Mr. Dickey—!” That probably got me in well with Jim. I mean, here I am, the acolyte, fawning at the great poet’s feet.
Dickey obviously liked Columbia. He called it “the starry place between the antlers,” I think in Esquire. He meant the geographic location, being right between the mountains and the coast.
DG: And Jim could have gone anywhere, but one time I asked
how he was recruited and he told me, “I had a one-on-one meeting with President Jones and I asked, ‘Why would I come here?’” Jones is supposed to have responded, “Do you like flowers and birds?” He knew how to get to a poet.
DG: And an outdoorsman. It was the perfect pitch: “Do you like
flowers and birds?” There’s your starry place between the antlers. And now we’re eating lunch in the same spot where the three of you dined together for more than a decade — how did that tradition begin?
DG: Ben and I bonded when he got here. He had two small
As you say, he’d won the National Book Award. Life magazine commissioned a poem commemorating the Apollo 7 mission. He appeared in Time. Nowadays, you probably won’t see a poet commissioned by a glossy popular magazine.
children, I had two small children. We’re both Americanists. I’m anti-Puritan [Ben taught Puritan literature], but I nonetheless welcomed him here. [Laughter] We both liked baseball, but he liked the wrong team. I love jazz, but I despise bebop, and he loves bebop. I like cool jazz — you get the idea. [Laughs] Ben and I taught on Tuesday on Thursdays, morning classes. Jim had afternoon classes. One day, I was on my way to my department mailbox before I met Ben at what at the time was the Faculty Club —
DG: That’s absolutely correct. But you’ve got to remember, it
BF: This was in 1984.
was the ’60s, the Cold War. I know this sounds extraneous, but it really isn’t. The big writers — Hemingway dies in ’61, Faulkner ’62, Frost ’63, T.S. Eliot ’65. These were American cultural heroes at the time because it was important to say, “Our writers are better than your writers,” meaning the Soviet Union’s. So, when a new poet suddenly burst through, I thought of that poet — and the students did, too — in the same vein. It was, “Oh, here are the replacements for lost Frost, lost Faulkner, lost Eliot.” What did it mean for the English department to land such a renowned figure?
DG: Oh, it soared. As I understand, the president, who was a
forward-looking president, Thomas Jones, selected four departments for an infusion of money — history, English, mathematics and chemistry. I came in as a beginner with three full professors and three assistant professors — six hires in one year. Two of the three full professors were already well-known, and the third became well-known. Then to hire Dickey and Morse Peckham, and the next year, Matthew J. Bruccoli — the department just took off.
DG: And Jim had shambled in with his big old ten-gallon hat,
etc. — by that time, Jim and I were good friends — and he says, “Greetings! What are you getting ready to do?” He was supposed to go up for office hours, I think, but I said, “I’m getting ready to meet Ben for lunch. Why don’t you join us?” It was automatic from then on, even as he was dying. His assistant would drive him over with his oxygen tank and wheel him in his wheelchair. What was so special about these lunches? He clearly enjoyed them.
DG: Jim was always interested in what we had taught that day. We talked about literature, obviously, but we also talked about sports, music, movies. Ben knew more about music, I knew more about movies, so conversation was easy. And after a while I think Jim knew that we weren’t going to rush home to write an article about “The Great Poet,” so he confided in us. Well, you didn’t have a recorder running — and I won’t ask you to betray confidence now — but did he talk
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about any struggles with his work? I’m thinking of Alnilam [1987], which he worked on for decades.
DG: Well, it’s so experimental. Many of the pages are split —
like split screen in a movie. On one side, you’ve got what the hero is thinking, because he’s blind. On the other, you’ve got what is really going on. And that’s an extraordinary technique. Plus, the novel is awfully long. But I think Alnilam is one of those novels that will be rediscovered. To answer your question, he talked a great deal about how to film his work. He became particularly interested in the movies before Ben got here, while he was writing the screenplay for Deliverance. The movie was a smash hit. There was an opening here in town at the old Jefferson Square Theatre on Main Street and the place was packed. Jim walked up and down the aisle, with his ten-gallon hat on, talking to strangers — “Do you like it? I wrote this.” Inevitably, it always comes back to Deliverance.
DG: But he always wanted to be remembered as an American poet. BF: And yet he wrote, I think, three really terrific novels. The
last one, To the White Sea [1993], was a common topic of conversation. Some critics have argued that his poetry fell off after Deliverance.
DG: He changed his style. The earlier poems — sorry, now I’m getting professorial — but they were compact. He liked Poe’s rhythm. I think he called it a “blood rhythm”: “All dark is now no more” [from “Sleeping Out at Easter,” 1960] — iambic trimeter. In “The Firebombing,” a great poem in Buckdancer’s Choice [1965], you see these wide, wide lines. But it was so personal. It was about the guilt of not feeling guilt, dropping napalm during a bombing mission in WWII — The detachment.
DG: That’s right. “As I sail artistically over...” He latched onto
that style. Then he became more mystical. With the collection Puella [1982], which is his attempt to get to the heart of womanhood, based on his second marriage, he began to lose some of his public. You mentioned how Deliverance took the fame to another level — first with the book, then the film. Is it too much to say he became obsessed with celebrity?
BF: He was pretty interested in it. [Laughter] No doubt about
that. DG: When Jim was a consultant with the Library of Congress — every consultant was to have a little program through their
term — he decided to bring in authors to speak and to record, and he had the young John Updike in. Updike had won the National Book Award in ’64 for The Centaur. He was barely 30 years old. After that, he and Dickey kept in sporadic contact. So, one time I asked Updike about that, and he sent me a letter. I’m paraphrasing, but he said something like, “For all of Dickey’s brilliance, I think he had too much sense of himself as the great poet celebrity, walking Madison Avenue with that big ten-gallon hat, declaring ‘I’m a poet!’” He was very drawn to celebrity. At the expense of the poetry?
DG: You know, Frost coined a phrase, “barding around”—
making money by giving readings and talks. Dickey, if he wasn’t tipsy, was really good on stage. I think a lot of that poise declined, and he stopped getting invited. BF: Well, because of his behavior. But he referred to it as “barn-
storming for poetry.” DG: On that subject, he once gave a reading in the old business
school auditorium and read one of my favorite Dickey poems, “The Lifeguard,” about a boy who drowns and a lifeguard who can’t save him. That poem just kills you, the last line — “Water, water, water…”
DG: That’s it, that’s right, but it needs to be read slowly, “Water, wa-ter, water…” And when he read that, we were all mesmerized. It’s a cliché, but you could hear a pin drop — and then Jim looks up, grabs the mic and says, “Isn’t that good?” [Laughter] The spell was broken. “Isn’t that good? Isn’t that good?” Now, you called these lunches “power lunches.” Was that Dickey’s name for it?
BF: I don’t know. It just occurred. The PLG — the Power
Lunch Group. DG: It was mocking. BF: Oh, heck no! [Laughter] It was dead serious! He also described your group as “the haggard heroes.” I think that’s in the Henry Hart biography of Dickey [The World as a Lie, 2001].
BF: That’s right. I haven’t thought about this in a long time.
Though it’s actually “harrass’d” — “culture’s harrass’d heroes.” DG: He wrote a poem in a kind of mock 18th-century style.
There were two copies. One he gave to me, and one he gave to Ben. He was serious about what it meant, but he wasn’t trying to be Pope or Swift or Samuel Johnson. I’ve forgotten all the lines, it’s short, “Where culture’s harrass’d heroes find repose—” BF: “And safe in intellect defy our foes…”
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McCutcheon House, where the “harrass’d heroes” lunched from 1984 to 1997, was once home to the Faculty Club.
DG: That’s right, “And safe in intellect defy our foes.” Jim took
it seriously — and we did, too. Harrass’d heroes defying their foes, meaning the anti-intellectuals — and there are a few of those in Columbia, you know. [Laughter].
You joke about them needing to “perform.” How performative was Dickey?
DG: When it was the three of us, he was not. But with the
mystery guest?
BF: I interpreted that gesture as him saying how much he val-
BF: Maybe to a degree. He wasn’t over the top, but he knew
ued the Power Lunch Group. In one copy, he inserted Don’s name at the end, and in the other he inserted mine.
he was the focus of attention. And he could become kind of ugly. When he’d have a few drinks, and maybe he hadn’t eaten enough, he could be cutting. Not often, but I saw that.
But you sometimes invited a fourth person to lunch, what you called a “mystery guest.”
BF: Yes. And that could be anybody. Other faculty, students,
people from the community. Anybody. We might see someone walking toward us on campus — let’s say her name is Kim. We would say, “Kim, why don’t you join us for lunch?” And then at the lunch I would begin by saying, “It is so nice to have you here, Kim. We try to find people we consider interesting, who might edify us or somehow amuse us, and we think you will. Now, we want you to feel at ease, no pressure, but really, we expect you to perform. And not only that, but at the end of this lunch, the three of us will get together, discuss how you did and decide whether to invite you back. So far, though, we have invited no one back.” The guest always caught the humor, of course, and good conversation ensued. DG: Ben was masterful at that! [Laughter] Of course, word got
out that he was doing this, so occasionally we’d have a guest say, “Well, that’s great because I don’t want to come back!”
DG: I did too. And I mean, the drinking myth was obviously an issue. If you go through the stars of 20th-century American literature, it’s just — alcoholic, alcoholic, alcoholic. I didn’t detect any problem with Jim’s drinking so long as he stuck to his two Heinekens. It was when he went to the double martini — sometimes he would have a couple of those, too. BF: To me, the amazing thing about these lunches was that
following them, he would teach — and people raved about his teaching. But there was a cumulative effect. Once, Jim made an extraordinary effort to meet us. We were on the patio, and Jim was late. He could barely get from the sidewalk to the fountain. Within an hour or so he was sweating, he was yellow with jaundice. That was right around the time when he collapsed, and his wife, Deborah, had to tear down here and take him to the hospital. Th at was the beginning of the end of Jim Dickey.
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But he was a poet to the last — even in the hospital.
DG: Absolutely. Late one afternoon – whether he knew he was never going to get out of the hospital, I don’t know. But it was brutal. I pulled a little chair over, he took hold of my hand, and we talked about whatever it was we talked about. This will sound melodramatic, but he knew that one of my favorite poets is Robert Frost, and he looked up at me and said, without warning, “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree.” That’s the first line of my favorite Frost poem, “After Apple-Picking.” So, I picked up, “Toward heaven still.” Then Jim, “And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill.” I won’t recite the whole thing — and we started stumbling toward the end, we had to help each other — but by the last lines Jim had become really somber: “Were he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, / Or just some human sleep.” And, of course, the woodchuck will hibernate and return, but the human sleep — nothing, no resurrection. Our hands were gripping at that point. The nurses did not interrupt.
early American novel. Jim said, “What book are you teaching right now?” I said, “Last of the Mohicans,” and Jim didn’t wait a second — “Don! Do you remember that scene two thirds of the way through where Natty Bumppo, Chingachgook and Uncas are trapped in the thicket and Magua and all the Hurons are all around them, and Natty says” — whatever Natty says. I forgot what Natty says. Jim didn’t. He asked, “What do you think he meant by that?” I thought, “My God, where’s my book? Where are my notes?” BF: Worse than that — Hemingway is not a specialty of mine,
but I was teaching a survey course on American lit, and I included a Hemingway story, something like “The Three-Day Blow.” Well, I walk into lunch and Jim asks, “What did you teach today?” He does the exact thing Don’s talking about —“Do you remember this line?” Well, no. I was prepared to teach that story, and I think I did a pretty good job, and yet there was that detail I didn’t remember. But Jim, who undoubtedly hadn’t read it in 20 years, he just knew it. What we’re talking about is his literary memory.
Was that the last time you saw him?
There’s a quote from the late Matthew Bruccoli, also a close friend — “James Dickey had the most retentive literary mind I’ve ever encountered. Drunk or sober, when he talked about literature I paid attention.”
DG: I think it was. Ben?
BF: I visited him several times in the
hospital, but once I stopped at the nurses’ station and looked across the hallway. The door was open and there was Jim with his daughter, Bronwyn, and I didn’t recall her having been on the scene for some time. Her presence indicated that the situation was dire and not a place for me, so I departed. He died that evening. DG: His death was so significant to the university. Jim had col-
lected an anthology of his students’ poems called From the Green Horseshoe, so President John Palms insisted that the memorial service be on the Horseshoe. We put out 300 chairs, but over 700 people came. And we sent out formal invitations to major writers all over the country, really as a tribute to Jim. At the funeral, Ben and I were invited to help carry his coffin.
DG: That’s a great line from Matt, and we just gave you two
examples. That line appears in the Hart biography, which I know is kind of a polarizing book.
BF: There was a movement by Al Braselton — Alligator Al
— and some other friends of Jim’s who were involved with Deliverance to make sure that Don and I and a few others participated in that biography. Al pitched to us the advisability of cooperating with Henry Hart, maybe at this very table, and we ultimately spoke with him. DG: Ben and I were not going to talk to Henry at all. But we
He was a towering figure, but he was also a scholar. And Ben alluded to his teaching, how popular he was.
were convinced. Al had a session with him, and he validated Henry’s seriousness of purpose. We had no idea that he would turn the thing into what it became.
DG: Ben’s heard this story a thousand times, but this one lunch
BF: There was a seriousness of purpose about that book, but
occurred right after I’d taught my graduate seminar on the
what he did with it is another matter.
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So when you saw the book, what was your response?
DG [Sighs]: Frustration? A little bit of anger? James Dickey: The
World as a Lie is the title. Jim was fond of saying, “The poet doesn’t tell the truth. The poet makes the truth.” You take a mundane event and turn it into something. It’s not “lying.” It’s storytelling.
DG: That’s right. But Henry would track down something that
In that poem, the poet figure sees the deer — this is country surrealism — and takes off all his clothes and runs with the deer. He laughs at his own foolishness, but he has been enhanced. Did you guys ever accompany him on any of his hunting trips?
DG: [laughing]: No! I’d have to take off my striped tie!
really happened and then compare and contrast what Jim wrote or said about it and say, “See? He lied.”
In terms of legacy, I’m curious how you think he’ll be remembered?
BF: It’s called art. Here’s an example. Jim told me that once
DG: There was another contemporary writer, unfortunately
he was asked how, since he’d never been to Hokkaido, he was able to describe its landscape so memorably [in his novel To the White Sea]. He said that his description is the way it ought to be. He was a creator, not a duplicator. DG: One poem that upset Henry was “The Performance”—
“The last time I saw Donald Armstrong...” Armstrong was a flyer in WWII whose plane went down. In the poem, he’s captured by the Japanese and they chop off his head. But before they do, Armstrong tries to do this trick that he’s never mastered, and that’s to stand on his hands. Then he kneels down before the swordsman like a knight [before he is executed]. It’s a short poem, but moving. But Henry tracks all this down and says, “It wasn’t Donald Armstrong. It was the other guy in the plane. Donald Armstrong is the one who survived.” I thought, “Henry, who cares? The poem is great!” That’s the kind of thing that ended up in the biography. Do you think that biography has adversely affected Dickey’s reputation?
DG: My sense is that his reputation as a poet was already in seri-
ous decline. I collect rare books, first editions, and one way to tell that — not the only way, but one way — is that Jim’s books are rarely in the catalogs anymore, whereas they once were. BF: Hart’s book brought welcomed attention to Jim, but I
doubt that it much influenced how the poems are read or influenced his reputation. Regarding the work — he once described his style as “country surrealism.” It’s an intriguing description.
DG: Jim truly believed in this mystical relationship between
humanity and the non-human, what you and I would call nature. If the human could exchange momentarily with the spiritual — he doesn’t mean religious, but spiritual, mystical— that particular human being’s humanity would be enhanced. And he tried it himself. And he wrote poems about it. “Springer Mountain,” where the guys are hunting deer with bow and arrow, which of course is sort of an idealistic way of hunting.
deceased, named Frederick Busch. Jim liked Fred Busch. He came down here several times and we had lunches together. Fred believed that Jim would always be remembered, at the appropriate moments, as America’s great poet of WWII. Because it was more than just “The Firebombing.” There was “Drinking from a Helmet,” “The Performance” — he had many. In a way, that’s a wonderful compliment, but it’s also — Limiting.
DG: That’s a good word for it. Because Jim would not want to be
known only as that. I like Jim’s nature poems — I love “Springer Mountain,” which I’ve described. It’s comic — can you imagine taking off the striped tie and running with the deer? Remember, the poet figure has to come back to his regular life afterward. Any other favorites? Or poems people should run out and read?
DG: I’ll mention four. Two are in the style that brought him
national fame among people who care about poetry — “The Performance” and “The Lifeguard.” And then on the other side, the page-long lines of “The Firebombing” and “Falling.” Weird poem, “Falling” — about a flight attendant who gets sucked out of an airplane, a true story.
DG: Yes. And a long poem, published in the New Yorker, prob-
ably in the late ’60s, before Deliverance. Jim rarely went back to the style of “The Lifeguard” and “The Performance.” He continued to work in the style of “Falling.” BF: I’d say my favorite is “The Shark’s Parlor,” if only because
I know it best. Don knows everything about the poetry; I’m a fan of the novels. Incidentally, at the time of his death, Jim had been working on a novel called Crux. I don’t know if you know this, Don, but Jim once showed me the dedication page of Crux, which said, “To Don and Ben.” DG: I did not know about that. What an honor. BF: Well, he did not complete the novel. But at least at one time
he intended to dedicate it to us.
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FORWARD THINKING
LAW PROFESSOR EXAMINES FDA REGULATIONS AND INSECT-BASED FOOD BY CHRIS HORN
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Unless you have an unusually adventurous palate, it’s a safe bet that crickets, termites and mealworms are not a regular part of your diet. Western cultures tend to take a dim view of entomophagy — human consumption of insects — and U.S. regulatory policies don’t exactly encourage the presence of insects in food. But insects are regularly consumed by an estimated two billion people, a practice that has its roots in culture and sometimes necessity — they can be a cheap or even free source of protein. Marie Boyd, a School of Law assistant professor at USC, got interested in studying the regulation of insects as food as part of her research on the Food and Drug Administration. She says insect-based food has a long way to go, both from a cultural and regulatory standpoint, in the United States. “A lot of people in the U.S. don’t think about insects as food, even though many people eat insects around the world,” Boyd says. “Insects are used in other cultures as both a delicacy and a way to address food insecurity, but in the U.S. you have to look at how the FDA has dealt with insects in the context of food.” The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act prohibits the introduction of adulterated food into interstate commerce, and adulteration can mean either food produced in unsanitary conditions or outright contamination with filth. “And there’s a lot of law saying that insects are filth,” Boyd says. “The FDA’s current regulations define insects among those pests that need to be excluded from food production.” So what’s a food producer to do when the main ingredient in its product is whole insects or insect parts — technically defined as “filth” by the FDA? Boyd filed an FOIA request to find out what FDA staff are saying in an official capacity about insects as food. She found that a few employees have addressed the topic in speeches and articles, noting some of the issues that could arise in that context. “But there has not been a formal recognition that insects can be food under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which would be an important first step,” Boyd says. “The fact that there hasn’t been that affirmative recognition leads to a lot of uncertainty for food companies that are thinking about going into this area. You have all of this law on one side saying insects are filth, and a few informal statements in speeches or articles acknowledging insects as food but, otherwise, largely inaction on the other side.”
“What we see as food really is a cultural perception.” — Marie Boyd There are a couple of instances in which the FDA has regulated insects in the context of food, though not as an actual food ingredient. Two insect-derived color additives — carmine and cochineal extract — are harvested from scale insects. But because of reports of allergic reactions to these color additives in food and cosmetics, the FDA now requires labeling to warn consumers of potential allergic effects. Boyd thinks that there is a need to take a closer look at insects as a potential way to meet the demand for food and address food insecurities. Recognizing insects as food requires a framework for distinguishing between, say, mealworms that have infested stored grain versus mealworms intentionally grown as a food product. “There are different issues that come up in those two contexts because if you think about the mealworms that infest grain, they haven’t been produced under any environmental controls,” she says. “If mealworms are intended as food, they could be produced under current good manufacturing practice just like any other food.” Boyd’s students have supplied her with a small collections of insect-based products, including several snack bars made with cricket flour, but hasn’t become a connoisseur of insect foods. “There are lots of things that are edible that we don’t eat. What we see as food really is a cultural perception,” Boyd says. “Think about horse meat or how lobsters previously were not treated as a delicacy. I think tastes and food practices can change fairly quickly — sushi is a good example of that. “If the FDA were to recognize and regulate insects as food, it may help to change the perception of insects in the U.S. by countering the perception of insects in the food context as filth.”
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FORWARD THINKING
NO PAIN, NO MIGRAINE NEUROLOGIST STUDIES TWO NEW TREATMENTS FOR MIGRAINE PATIENTS BY CHRIS HORN
When Michelle Androulakis sees patients suffering from chronic headaches, she truly feels their pain. Chief of neurology at Dorn VA Hospital in Columbia and an assistant professor of clinical neurology at USC’s School of Medicine, she has experienced plenty of migraines and has vivid memories of the debilitating headaches suffered by her mother. But Androulakis offers more than empathy. She has conducted clinical trials for a non-invasive migraine procedure involving a tiny nasal catheter as well as for a new migraine drug. The catheter procedure is available now, and the FDA is expected to approve the drug for release later this year. “Neither of these is a cure, but both offer significant improvement,” she says. In the 1990s, a class of drugs known as triptans were developed for migraines — they targeted serotonin, a neurotransmitter that causes narrowing of blood vessels in the brain. The new drug tested by Androulakis acts as an inhibitor of calcitonin gene-related peptide, a neuropeptide associated with pain. CGRP levels are usually elevated among migraine sufferers. The drug works by blocking activity of CGRP and therefore reducing pain and the body’s sensitivity to light and noise. Androulakis says potential long-term side effects of the CGRP inhibitor are not yet known, though preliminary studies suggest it has no serious effects on the cardiovascular system.
The migraine-alleviating procedure Androulakis has tested uses a very thin nasal catheter that is threaded to the sphenopalatine ganglion, a group of neurons under the nasal mucosa. The catheter delivers a small dose of marcaine, which temporarily blocks pain signals traveling through the ganglion and nearby trigeminal nerve. Participants in the study received the treatment twice per week for six weeks. “We looked at their number of migraine days before and after the treatment and used the Headache Impact Test to measure how their headaches were impacting their functionality,” Androulakis says. “The most interesting thing we found was in the fMRI studies of chronic migraine patients who experienced medication-overuse headaches. Their scans showed significant improvement in the brain networks related to migraine headaches.” These include the central executive network, which modulates the perception of pain, and the salient network, which detects internal and external stimuli. The networks appeared dysfunctional in the fMRI scans done before the nasal catheter treatment. The complex function of the brain networks and their underlying role in migraines highlight the complexity of treating such headaches, Androulakis says. “It’s not just one region of the brain or one neurotransmitter involved. It’s more an issue of a brain network or several regions of the brain not working together.” Androulakis says the benefits from the sphenopalatine ganglion block tend to wane after six months, requiring a booster treatment. “It definitely helps improve quality of life for chronic migraine patients and with relatively few side effects,” she says. “The challenge with these treatments is insurance coverage. Insurance companies see this as investigational, not a standard of care treatment for migraine.” Androulakis credits a $10,000 ASPIRE (Advanced Support for Innovative Research Excellence) grant from USC’s Office of Research that allowed her to start fMRI research at the McCausland Center for Brain Imaging and get published in Neurology, a top journal in her field.
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AGE-OLD COMPOUND, MODERN-DAY USE Emodin may lessen side effects of chemotherapy drug BY CHRIS HORN A natural compound found in rhubarb that’s been used for millennia in traditional Chinese medicine might find modern day use as a complementary treatment with a cancer chemotherapy agent. Biomedical scientists at USC’s School of Medicine are using a grant from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health to determine the extent to which emodin could help relieve some side effects of 5 fluorouracil, one of the oldest chemotherapy agents. Developed in the 1950s and still in use today, 5FU kills cancer cells effectively. Unfortunately, like many chemotherapy agents it also attacks healthy, fast-multiplying cells in the liver, spleen and nerves, says Alexander Sougiannis, a Ph.D. biomedical sciences student at the School of Medicine. “With 5FU and many other chemotherapy agents, a chronic immune response is stimulated in the body that causes a lot of inflammation,” Sougiannis says. “Emodin tamps down the inflammation — though no one understands the molecular mechanisms yet — and it also seems to help reduce the tumor burden.” Emodin might help regulate the microenvironment of the gut, Sougiannis says, adding that changes in gut bacteria play a significant role in the cause of colon cancer and chemotherapy toxicity, and might drive the disease pathology. “We believe emodin may help reverse this ‘dysbiosis’ or microbial imbalance to help reduce the tumor burden and the detrimental effects of chemotherapy,” he says. Sougiannis is working in the laboratory of Angela Murphy, an associate professor in pathology, microbiology and immunology, and would like to see the research progress to a formal clinical trial to better determine emodin’s effectiveness in reducing symptoms associated with inflammation. He also wants to do research to determine the molecular mechanisms by which emodin works. For now, those mechanisms remain a mystery.
ANTIMATTER MATTERS Physicists explore origins of universe BY MARY-KATHRYN CRAFT Searching for clues on how the universe began has taken a team of USC physicists more than a mile underground. Vincente Guiseppe, Frank Avignone and David Tedeschi, all of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are part of an international project searching for a phenomenon that mighty further explain what followed the Big Bang and why matter exists. “We owe it to ourselves to understand the world around us, and this is an important piece of what we see around us — the fact that matter does exist and it created the universe as we know it,” says Guiseppe, who is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s MAJORANA Demonstrator experiment. The nearly decade-long project brought together an international team of 129 researchers from 27 institutions who hope to use germanium detectors to identify a hypothesized process called neutrino-less double beta decay. The experiments, which have been conducted in a clean room at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (housed in a former gold mine in Lead, South Dakota), show that the detectors can be shielded from background radioactivity noise, paving the way for future experiments. By working underground, the researchers are able to better study neutrinos free from outside influence like natural radioactivity, dust and fingerprints. To further protect the experiment, Guiseppe oversaw construction of a multi-layered shield made of more than 4,000 lead bricks surrounding a copper enclosure. Avignone’s role was to develop a process for producing the highly pure detector material. Tedeschi’s role is to ensure that quality data is collected from the experiment, which has now been up and running for a few years.
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BY MEGAN SEXTON
TALKING
In October, USC will host its first-ever TEDx event. Like the parent TED conferences, which invite speakers to take the stage and present “ideas worth spreading,” TEDxUofSC will feature short, powerful talks on innovative ideas. Speakers for the fall event have yet to be announced, but in the interest of spreading what we consider a really good idea, USC Times approached faculty who have spoken at TEDx events in the past and asked one simple question: “Just what is it people are talking about when they talk about TEDx?”
alk to some people who have given TEDx talks in the past and their advice sounds strikingly similar: Don’t underestimate it. Focus your ideas. Be imaginative. Delivery matters. Practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter whether the talk is about climate change or letting go of anger — the short speeches described as “ideas worth spreading” can be daunting, liberating, humbling and invigorating. Or, as history professor Bobby Donaldson says: “It’s one of the most challenging things I’ve done.” Donaldson, who frequently speaks to groups about South Carolina’s civil rights history, says his task was to boil down everything he knew about that topic to less than 20 minutes and pitch it to an audience that wasn’t intimately familiar with the subject. And his words, the final TEDx Columbia presen-
tation on Martin Luther King Day 2015, needed to be both informative and inspiring. “I was more mindful about how I said things and what I said. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to frame details that would normally take an hour to go through. And I went through a lot of practice,” he says. “It was one of the most exhilarating public programs I’ve experienced.” Donaldson and other university professors who participated in Columbia’s previous TEDx talks say the rehearsals and critiques by TEDx coaches helped them focus their ideas and their delivery. One of those professors was Ed Madden, poet, English professor and director of USC’s women’s and gender studies program. He used his 2014 TEDx talk to share his story about going home to Arkansas to care for his dying father — and staying with his family, from whom he was estranged.
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“When I met with the committee, they liked the story I had to tell, but they really pushed me to think what was the idea I had to share,” Madden says. “There’s a difference between a story you want to tell and having an idea worth sharing. That’s the focus of TED – to have an idea worth sharing. Part of my thinking was I wanted to tell the story well and honor the integrity of the story, but I had to figure out what was the idea. That was the hardest part of it.” Madden talked about having to let go of his anger before he could help his father, but his main point was about learning how to lift someone — literally and metaphorically. He pantomimed picking up his father and putting him in a wheelchair, and so pushed his TEDx talk into something more theatrical. To prepare, he wrote a script. “Some people don’t. I did,” he explains. “I’m a writer and I wanted the words to be right. So, I treated it as a script. I practiced and practiced and practiced. And I thought carefully about the images that go with it. “I had people afterward telling me how moved they were. A lot of people have had, if not that experience, alienation from a family member. The two big experiences (in the talk) are alienation from family members and terminal illness. Most of us have had a variant of that.” Elise Partin is an instructor in the Arnold School of Public Health and the South Carolina Honors College, but it was her role as mayor of Cayce that informed her 2015 TEDx talk. She used her 8 minutes to discuss how everyone should consider running for public office — yes, everyone. It’s something she believes would improve the health of the country. “It’s funny, I gave this talk before the 2016 election, which was a turning point for more people being engaged with elected office,” she says. “I still think it is a big idea worth talking about. Not everybody has gotten there yet, but the numbers of people who are running that have never run before is staggering.” Partin, too, learned the importance of preparation for TED talk, going so far as to practice on stage in a local high school. “There’s a high expectation about what TED means. You’re bringing your ‘A’ game,” she says. “You have something important — whether it is research, or a new way of approaching a problem or whatever it might be — you have something critical to share. This isn’t just everybody who gets to do this. To be picked to be part of that stage was pretty profound. Being in a room full of people who want to open their minds is palpable.” The topic of her TEDx talk has morphed into a political science class in the Honors College to help students understand what it’s like to campaign and serve in public office.
Marine science professor Claudia Benitez-Nelson talked about climate change at the 2013 TEDx Columbia, a time when she says many people weren’t interested in hearing about it. “It’s so depressing. Everything you talk about with climate is so depressing. I get it,” Benitez-Nelson says. “So I wanted to think about some ways to get people to think about it in not such a terrifying way. What did I really want to say in a short amount of time and how could I say it in a way that might be more engaging and accessible to people who weren’t sitting in my introduction to marine science class?” The TEDx talk was Benitez-Nelson’s first large talk outside a classroom, and she was pleasantly surprised and relieved it turned out well — and that it spurred thoughtful questions. She also credits the experience with opening the door to give other talks and presentations around the world. “TEDx talks are fun, they are so much fun,” she says. “Yes, they’re a little nerve wracking and it’s a little tense, but it’s an opportunity to perhaps reach audiences that, for me, I never interact with. I talk with students and colleagues and my friends, but this is an opportunity to talk to a broad and diverse audience about the work that I do or things I think are important in a way that is completely open. That’s liberating and exciting and terrifying at the same time.” What advice does she have for other faculty or staff members nominated to be TEDx speakers? “Say yes. I could understand how you might want to say no. But say yes. And remember this is fun. Then think really hard about the one thing you want people to take away. Because of the shortness, it has to be one thing. Then pound that one thing.” T
Photos of Claudia Benitez-Nelson (opposite) and Ed Madden courtesy of TEDx Columbia.
ENDNOTES
From cuneiform tablets to flash drives, USC’s Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections holds a variety of items that document the history of communication. Some of the most popular artifacts, though, are the typewriters. “We’ve acquired a number of typewriters over the course of the past 20 years, not by design, and not by accident,” says Elizabeth Sudduth, the center’s director. “Knowing how a writer works, whether they write in longhand, use a typewriter, or work on a computer, and understanding their habits, gives you a special insight into their life and work.”
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1) This German field typewriter dates back to WWI and is part of the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection, which also features wartime books, manuscripts, sheet music and posters. 2) The Elmore Leonard Collection includes two typewriters owned by the famous crime writer — the R.C. Allen VisOmatic manual pictured and his last typewriter, an IBM Wheelwriter electric. 3) Joseph Heller’s manual Smith-Corona is the same one used to compose his novel Catch-22. It was acquired by USC English professor and scholar Matthew Bruccoli the year the First-Year Reading Experience assigned the 1961 classic. 4) James Dickey’s light blue Olivetti-Underwood Lettera 32 (featured here and on our cover) is part of James Dickey’s Library. USC’s Irvin Department also houses two additional Dickey-related collections: the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of James Dickey and the Donald J. and Ellen Greiner Collection of James Dickey.
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