CAS Newsletter Fall 2010

Page 1

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Fall 2010

VOL #1 ISSUE #1

Nazareth College is the place where you will learn not only ways to make a living, but also ways to make a life. Knowledge is considered valuable for its own sake as well as preparation for future endeavors.

Image designed by Catherine Haven Kirby

Message from the Dean

IN THIS ISSUE ♦ Community Partners ♦ Faculty Scholarship ♦ Faculty Out and About ♦ China Recruitment ♦ New and Noteworthy

Layout and design by Pamela Griffin (Executive Assistant to Deborah Dooley)

During my now thirty-year lifetime as a teacher and a writer, I have had a rather disorderly habit. (Anyone who has seen my office will know that I have many disorderly habits!) When I am stuck, knowing at some deep level that I need to move forward on a piece of writing or a plan for class, but without the rational means to do so, I go to the bookshelves in my house or office, or to the nearest local bookstore, and just stand in front of the shelves. I look at the colors of the jackets and at the different kinds of print-face on the spine. But mostly, I wait for a title to leap out at me. In this way, I have found critical connections through the most unlikely books that have helped me immeasurably in moving forward with my writing, often in the most unplanned, but also remarkably fruitful, and often creative ways. To stand before a crowded bookshelf is a leap of faith, contrary to what most rational people would say is the best way to focus and advance an argument, or to meet a deadline. But I must say that it has always worked for me. It helped me to find Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book on aboriginal song, and Adrienne Rich’s extraordinary poem from which came a part of the title for my own book, Plain and Ordinary Things: Reading Women in the Writing Classroom. It helped me find Starhawk’s book, Dreaming the Dark, and Ulric Neisser’s study, Memory Observed. And all of these-- and more--helped me to write a book about writing. So this morning, thinking about this opening for the first newsletter of the College of Arts and Sciences at Nazareth, I stood in front of my bookshelf in my 4th floor office—whose view most people would think could provide all of the

inspiration anyone might need—and I found an old favorite, Natalie Goldberg whose work I have myself often used in writing classes. Here are her wonderful opening remarks about life, which, of course, are also wonderful opening remarks about writing, especially on the brink of the first day of another semester. “Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies, with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder, yet we feel peaceful there. What writing practice, like Zen practice, does, is bring you back to the natural state of mind, the wilderness of your mind where there are no refined rows of gladiolas. The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think—well-congenial....Being a writer is a whole way of life, a way of seeing, thinking, being. It’s the passing on of a lineage” (Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life, Bantam, 1990). Goldberg’s book contains many, many of my favorite metaphors and evokes three of my favorite places— the garden, which at my house about this time of year inevitably becomes the forest; the wild place in the mind where thoughts whirl and where every once in awhile a really good idea floats into consciousness just like those book titles leap at me off the shelf; the place of story, where seeing, thinking, and being come together, a place with danger and delight as its inevitable metaphors. I think of the classroom as first and foremost a place of story-- ours, those of our students, the “story” of the materials we handle, of the words that belong to all of the books, the voices, the music, the clay, the paint, the images—the microcosmic and macrocosmic speculations that challenge our days with students and with ourselves. In this new semester, in the new year to come, I challenge us, simply, to live the writer’s life: be of wild mind. And of the journey we can say only: onward. Deborah A. Dooley


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