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went up four years ago. Wow.

Remember when I was blogging all the time? Boy, I really had a lot to say.

Then I got caught up in administrative work and lost the digital sharing spark. I suppose I didn’t have enough fire left at the end of the day to share with you. And most days, I couldn’t talk about what I was working on.

The last four years of my professional life:

After serving as a Director of Undergraduate Studies in English for three years, I then served as an interim department chair for 18 months. During that period, I put together a proposal for my dean. “Here are the things that worked in my department re: recruitment, retention, and placement. Let me build this out for the humanities departments.�� Amazingly, the dean said okay. .

Which brings us to Monday, Jan. 10, 2022, which will be my first day back in an actual classroom since March 9, 2020. I’m incredibly nervous about teaching face-to-face, but that’s not what I want to talk right now.

The Class “Career Talk��

The class I’m teaching in Spring 2022 is ENG 405 Special Topics in Creative Writing. My topic is “Writers at Work: The Business of Being a Writer.��

As the Director of Compass, I’m also in charge of career programming (and yes, I have a course release for this purpose), and so I inserted a weekly career series into my class. Basically, I’m turning the lecture/discussion portion of the class into a public virtual event.

Then, during the second eight weeks, the topics will turn more generally towards how to find a job.

I’m not telling you about this so that you can come, too. Sorry, but it’s for Ball State students, faculty, and staff only.

I’m showing you what I’m doing so that you can do it, too.��

Almost every English department faculty member I know incorporates at least one unit of “career talk�� into certain classes. How to submit your work for publication. How to (or whether) to apply to graduate school. How to make time for writing. Maybe you bring someone from the Career Center in to talk about resumes or interviews.

Yay! Good for you.

The problem with this approach:Only students who happen to be in your class are exposed to these really important and much-desired “beyond craft�� or “off-the-course-topic�� conversations.These conversations could go a looooooooooooong way toward alleviating the anxiety of�� humanities majors who are feeling the normal amount of “what am I going to do with my life?�� stress times Covid times 1000.These “professionalization-unit-within-the-class�� conversations are completely invisible to prospective students checking out your website or the unhappy accounting major who loves to read who follows your department on social media.Your colleagues down the hall don’t know about your professionalization unit within your class. They might be doing the exact same work as you. Or they might have students who desperately want the very information you just shared, but they don’t know you’ve got resources at the ready.Making Your “Career Talk�� More Visible and Accessible

Survey faculty in your area to find out how many incorporate professionalization units into their classes and what they’d feel comfortable presenting on.

Incorporate into your existing visiting writers series, just one or three or four more casual events. No one is flying in and you’re not paying anyone, so these events are candy compared to putting on readings or lectures. If that doesn’t work��

Create a series. Keep it simple, but aim for something more structured than an off-the-cuff chat. If one colleague has a powerpoint presentation, great. Another just has a handout? That’s fine.

Create takeaways. Make it your goal that for each event/presentation, attendees will get a “takeaway�� handout with powerpoint slides and/or links to further resources. Put it all in a Google Drive or Box or OneDrive or Dropbox folder and share the link to that information during the presentation.

Incorporate the series into a class. If you can. That’s what I’m doing, and it means there will always be an audience–the students in the class!

If you can’t make it curricular, make it co-curricular. But you don’t have to do it alone.

Talk to potential co-sponsors to help with organization and promotion: a department administrator, a student organization, the career center, alumni affairs (esp. if the professionalization unit involves Zooming with an alum).

At Ball State, I’ve discovered that there are good resources in the “living/learning community�� arm of residence life. There’s a new dorm for Humanities students with a really nice multipurpose room. There’s an Academic Peer Mentor–sort of like an RA, but just for academics–who is always looking for programming ideas. We’ve worked with them to co-sponsor a humanities activity fair in September and NaNoWriMo events in November.

Promote the hell out of it.��Not just because you want a lot of students to come, but also because:

it’s good for morale (people like to know that there’s an active community they can plug into when they are ready).it’s good for recruitment (obviously).it’s good for alumni relations (an alum sees what you’re doing and gets in touch to say, Hey, I’d be happy to talk about X.)But here’s the rub��

Promoting the hell out it means that you have to do more than send emails. People outside the department can’t read your emails. They also can’t see that cool poster you made and printed and hung in the hallways.

Does your school have a website calendar? Get these events on there.

Does your department have a blog or social media? Get on that.

Does your department have an alumni newsletter? Make sure that you mention that these events are going to happen or that they did happen in your newsletter.

Send an email to the student newspaper and see if they’ll promote or cover the event.

This is where your eyes glaze over. Because who has time to do all that? It’s just soooooooo much easier to talk about the topic in your class on a particular day and be done with it.

I don’t know if there’s anybody in your department who is in charge of making shit happen. Besides the chair. I don’t know if that person is resourced adequately. Probably not.

In the real world, community building and coordination and planning and promoting and getting shit on the internet is JOB ONE. Even at colleges and universities. But at the academic unit level–it’s the stuff no one wants to do. The invisible work. The stuff we delegate. Women’s work. Give it to the secretary, the intern, the GA. If you still have anyone to delegate to, if financial exigencies haven’t taken those resources away.

People outside the academy just don’t understand how difficult it is to make something new happen.

Look. Talk to your colleagues. and ask, “Hey, can’t we put something like this together?�� I’ll bet you can.

Then get the word out as best you can. Whatever you do, I promise it will make a difference.

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On Friday, I took a bunch of my students to a presentation about a master’s program offered at Ball State: an .

Why would I take English majors to something like this?

Well, let me explain.

The room

For eight years, I’ve walked past the conference room for this program. The wall facing the hallway is made of glass, and you can see conference table, computers, whiteboards, and assorted tech-looking stuff. For me, it’s like walking past a Radio Shack, a store where I never shop, a place that has nothing to do with me or with students pursuing degrees in English.

But then I met the new director of this program, Dennis Trinkle. He and I went to college together. We didn’t know each other in college, but hey, here we are 25 years later working at the same place, so why not get some lunch? We talked about how had we gotten from there to here, both of us products of a liberal arts education. I went to grad school in English and got an MFA, and he went to grad school in history and got a PhD.

And so I asked him, “What do you do in those glass-walled rooms with conference tables, computers, and tech-looking stuff?�� and he patiently explained to me:

That in the Venn Diagram where “Business�� meets “Technology,�� there are jobs. Many jobs. His program has a 90+% placement rate.
Even better news: students don’t necessarily need to come in knowing much about business or technology.
“We really need humanities majors,�� he said. “They make great managers. They know how to translate, how to listen, analyze, and explain.��

The explorers

Around this same time, I’d started reading George Anders new book, The gist of this book is: the tech revolution has NOT created lots of new jobs for coders, but rather jobs that are “tech-influenced but hardly tech-centered,�� such as event planners, fund-raisers, graphic designers, human resources specialists, market research analysts, marketing specialists, and tech writers.

Anders calls this the new “rapport sector�� and the “ingenuity economy.��

“What unifies all these jobs is…an explorer’s spirit.��

That’s the spirit you get in the liberal arts. You learn how to learn.

So, I asked my students, “How many of you can see yourself becoming a manager? Specifically, a manager in the sweet spot where business and technology overlap.�� Only a few raised their hands. Privately, one student said, “I feel like I’ll be lucky to find a job at all, let alone be a manager.��

The secret sauce

So, on Friday, I took them to Dennis’s presentation about the M.S. in Information and Communication Sciences, which is comprised of:

Curriculum that can take you “an inch deep�� in either business (management, leadership, consulting, design thinking, etc.) or in tech (networks, data, analytics, storage)–just enough to translate.

Apprenticeships in which you do projects for Indiana businesses–basically, it’s immersive/experiential learning at the graduate level.

Social Learning, a professional development program in which they are deliberate about giving students social capital.

This last aspect of the program, what Dennis called “the secret sauce,�� is what caught my attention.

Just that morning, I’d asked a university data guy if it was possible to ascertain the socio-economic class of our English majors. My hunch is that many of them are first-generation and/or working class students, but I was told that I wasn’t allowed to access this info from their FAFSA applications. For good reasons, I think.

But I’ve long pondered how the heck I can give my students the social capital they sometimes lack. , after all. So many of my attempts to do this are met with howls of nooooooooooooo, as if I want them to be something they’re not.

Dennis listed the “social learning�� his program provides: learning to play golf and ski, how to work a cocktail party or networking event, how to order wine, etc.

I watched my students�� eyes get big, and I thought, Oh my god, if I was 22 years old sitting in this room, I’d be freaking out.

“Things happen around dinner tables,�� Dennis said, and he’s absolutely right about that. “If you don’t ever want to ski or golf again, that’s fine,�� he said. “The point is to get you comfortable in social situations. We want you to be authentically yourself, because that’s how you build relationships.��

Literary citizenship is social learning

You might recall that I spent a few years really focused on the idea of Literary Citizenship, which was in fact my sneaky way of incorporating “social learning�� into my creative writing classes.

I didn’t call it networking, because that’s a word that English majors don’t like. So I called it creating community IRL and online.

It was also my sneaky way of teaching students how the business of writing and publishing works.

It was my sneaky way of giving my students the “secret sauce�� of social capital.

The invisible world

Towards the end of his presentation, Dennis said something that really resonated with me.

“In college, I knew about a few professional pathways I could take. Law. Medicine. Business. But most were just completely invisible to me.��

This, you see, is why I took my students to that presentation. Because it was about that invisible world full of conference tables and tech-looking stuff, a world they walk past every day without realizing they could be sitting in those rooms, too.

This is why college students major in subjects where the name of the major itself lights up certain pathways. Journalism. Architecture. Marketing. Criminal Justice and Criminology.

And why they avoid majors in which the name of the major itself does NOT light up certain pathways. English. History. Anthropology. Philosophy.

For years, my department has been telling our majors exactly what George Anders says: You can do anything! But if we’re going to save the liberal arts and combat declining enrollments in English, we have to do more than give them that pep talk.

We have to show them “anything.��

After the presentation, a few of my students said, “Oh my, that’s definitely not for me,�� but a few said, “I could totally see myself doing that. I just never would have thought about it as a possibility.��

This is what I mean when I say that we need to give our students more stars to steer by.

And so I’ll end by asking:

What good does it do to give students an explorer’s spirit if we don’t also give them stars to steer by?
Whose job is it to give them these stars?
What happens to higher education if we start handing out star maps?
What happens if we don’t?
And the question that drives me the most, actually: What else might I have been?��

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Because I’m a fan of the Laura Moriarty’s novel The Chaperone, I “liked�� her author page. That’s how I entered a drawing and got my hands on an ARC of American Heart; Moriarity asked if anyone wanted to take a look at her new novel, and I said, sure, why not? Please note that I’ve never met the author. We’re not even Facebook friends.

I glanced at the jacket copy:

A powerful and thought-provoking YA debut from��New York Times��bestselling author Laura Moriarty.

Imagine a United States in which registries and detainment camps for Muslim-Americans are a reality.

Fifteen-year-old Sarah-Mary Williams of Hannibal, Missouri, lives in this world, and though she has strong opinions on almost everything, she isn’t concerned with the internments because she doesn’t know any Muslims. She assumes that everything she reads and sees in the news is true, and that these plans are better for everyone’s safety.

But when she happens upon Sadaf, a Muslim fugitive determined to reach freedom in Canada, Sarah-Mary at first believes she must turn her in. But Sadaf challenges Sarah-Mary’s perceptions of right and wrong, and instead Sarah-Mary decides, with growing conviction, to do all she can to help Sadaf escape.

The two set off on a desperate journey, hitchhiking through the heart of an America that is at times courageous and kind, but always full of tension and danger for anyone deemed suspicious.

Eventually, I started reading and did what I always do: logged into ŷ������ to update my reading progress. That’s when I saw what was happening.

I was immediately reminded of Kat Rosenfield’s recent Vulture article,

Disclaimer

I’m a 49-year old white, cis-het, Midwestern woman. I’m a writer, a teacher of writing, an academic–much like the author herself. I think of myself as progressive–certainly more “woke�� than most of the people with whom I grew up, but maybe not as much as others. Staying woke is why I write and why I teach. I want to learn, I want to do better, I want to be the best human being I can be.

And I really do want to understand the point of view of anyone *who has read this book* and believes that it is racist. And I hope you will try to understand my point of view as someone who has read the book and believes that it is not racist, although the main character is.

Sarah Mary as Huckleberry

Moriarty wants us to read American Heart as a novel that’s in conversation with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The main character Sarah Mary lives in Hannibal, MO, and her name rhymes with “Huckleberry.”Her best friend is Tess/Tom, and she’s got a crap parent, too. There are plenty of other parallels, too, and and at times, Sarah Mary’s voice even has the cadence of Huck’s.

I taught Huck Finn in my American literature classes for many years because I believe that it gets at the heart of the American problem: institutionalized racism and white privilege, systems that are so woven into the fabric of our society that they’ve completely warped our sense of what’s right and wrong.

Twain once described Huckleberry Finn as a book��in which “a sound��heart��& a deformed��conscience��come into collision &��conscience��suffers a defeat.��

Huck believes that turning in his friend Jim (what his conscience says) is what’s right, and that helping him escape (what his heart says) is what’s wrong–so wrong that he honestly believes he will go to hell for it. Hence that famous, satirical, so-sad-you-have-to-laugh line, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.��

There are plenty of things wrong with Huck Finn, most egregiously the use of the n-word, Jim’s depiction and dialect, and the crappy ending, but there are things right with it, too. It always got my students talking and thinking about their own warped consciences. I know that in at least a few instances, Huck Finn gave my students courage to follow their hearts.

(How did my African-American students feel about Huck Finn?��No one ever refused to read it, but I know it made them uncomfortable. And honestly, if I ever get to teach American lit again, I don’t know if I’d assign this book. I’m torn about that.)

Sarah Mary conscience has been warped by the Islamophobia of her family and her culture, and yes, it’s hard to read the first third of the book from the point of view of someone who is hateful in the same clueless and callous way as so many Americans. What I *hope* happens when young people and adults read this book is a shock of recognition: Sarah Mary’s “casual�� Islamophobia is their own.

Other Dystopian Fiction

I also think of this book in conversation with the TV adaptations of The Man in the High Castle and The Handmaid’s Tale.

While I love the “resistance�� subplots of these shows, I also find myself fascinated by the hateful, authoritarian characters who are in power. How do authoritarians think, how do they rationalize their actions, and how does that thinking make its way into the culture and the hearts and minds of the people?

Because man oh man, we need to try to understand that so that we can be agents of change.

“People Like That��

I remember in graduate school, I wrote a story about a character who believes that abortion is sin. She learns that her daughter has had an abortion and is trying to figure out how to respond. Now, I’m firmly pro-choice, but my character was not, just like so many people I knew growing up, and it felt important to me for that sake of that story to try to understand that point of view.

I remember a woman in my workshop saying, “I’m sure that there are people like this in the world, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about them.�� That was 25 years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that moment.

Did she mean that:

A.) Should the story be published, she’d opt not to read it?

B.) The story should never be published?

C.) The story should never even be written at all?

Those are the questions I think we’re asking ourselves re: American Heart.

If your answer is B or C, then I please, help me understand that point of view, because personally, I think that’s censorship and very, very un-American.

If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine. Let’s talk about why.

But, like Colonel Sherburn in Huck Finn, I’m not going to engage with a mob. That’s the “pitifulest thing�� because they don’t “fight with the courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass.��

Further Reading, Further Doing

If you’re a Ball State student, get involved in in Spring 2018, “Muslims in Muncie.��
Adiba Jaigirdar in Book Riot: “��
I can’t link to Moriarty’s starred review on Kirkus because it’s been removed by the Editor in Chief. .
Laura Moriarty’s about Kirkus taking down its starred review (with a link to that, too).
Vicky Smith, “On Disagreement,�� in response to the controversy surrounding The Black Witch.
Articles about the continued controversy of Huckleberry Finn �����Ի� .

Free Speech

This post started off as my ŷ������ review of American Heart, but it’s also written in the spirit of a new writing initiative in my department, Last week, the prompt was “free speech,�� and I think this book and the controversy surrounding it speaks directly to that topic. Here’s about why freedom of expression on college campuses is important, and here’s about restricting hate speech.

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This essay in Vox, “�� rang so many bells for me.

A little backstory

I’m from a long line of working-class people. My grandpa’s a fireman. My grandmas are homemakers—one didn’t graduate from high school until she was in her 60’s, the other never learned to drive.

My mom and dad are high school sweethearts who married when they were 20 and had me when they were 21. My dad works for the railroad, and my mom’s been a bank clerk, a homemaker, a babysitter, a secretary. (Later, she’ll get a degree in nursing, but that hasn’t happened yet.)

Understand: I’m a working-class girl from a small town who’s never met a professional. My dad’s friends are all cops and railroaders. My mom’s friends are all secretaries and homemakers.

How do you imagine the life you want when you’ve never even met anyone who lives anything approximating that life?

I still have my nametag from DePauw’s Preview Day 30 years ago.

I’ll graduate from high school first in my class, but I’ll only apply to three colleges: Indiana University, Butler University, and DePauw University (which is where I’ll go).

Why only these schools?

Because I can’t imagine going to college farther than 2 or 3 hours from home. How will my parents get me there? Will any of our cars be able to make the drive? Will I fly home for Christmas? How can we possibly afford that?

Why these three colleges in particular?

IU because I’ve been there. And Butler and DePauw because that’s where my boyfriend (who goes to Wabash) and his mom (a teacher at my school) suggest that I apply.

Junior Miss, 1986

I’m being groomed for something, but I’m not sure what.

Boyfriend’s Mom likes to take me shopping and show me things. This kind of purse. That kind of dress. She talks me into entering the Junior Miss pageant because she says it will help me get into a sorority in college.

A sorority? Really? Me?

I let myself be talked into this (and other things).

When I tell the guidance counselor where I’m applying, she nods her head approvingly. But she doesn’t encourage me to apply to more schools or to different ones.

I’ll never know if I could have gotten into, say, Princeton.

My , but it once had a reputation as a school that offered the M.R.S. degree, and years later, I’ll wonder if that’s why my teachers and guidance counselor thought I should go there: Cathy Day has a chance to marry an important kind of Midwestern fellow, and that’s pretty good for the granddaughter of a fireman and the daughter of a railroader.

If you want to understand the kind of girl I am in 1987, know this: I don’t have a way to articulate or even understand my heart’s desire—that I want to be someone important, not marry someone important.

Cultural Differences

When I arrive on campus, my parents are 40 years old, wearing t-shirts and tennis shoes. I look around at all the other kids and wonder why they brought their grandparents to move-in day—and why are the parents so dressed up?

I go the restroom to wash my face before bed and pump some soap out of the dispensers. And the girls hold out these light green tubes and ask me why don’t I use Clinique, and I ask, “What’s Clinique?��

I’m in a car with friends. “What’s this on the radio?�� NPR, they say. “What’s that?�� I ask.

My favorite class is English, and sometimes I talk to the girls who sit in front of me. Then one night they walk into the Noble Romans where I wait tables. They look up at me and say, “You work? Here?�� And they never talk to me in class again.

I can go on and on, all the comments I get (“Were you born in a barn?��), all the small indignities and slights I suffer. Someday they’ll call these ��,�� but it’s 1987, 1988, 1989, and they aren’t using that word in Indiana yet.

I don’t know how to describe what it feels like to live in a place where every day I’m reminded that people like my family have always worked for—not with—the families of my classmates.

Experiential Learning

But I’m stubborn. I don’t transfer. I don’t even think about transferring. I don’t even understand that transferring is an option, that I might actually be happier at a different kind of school. I just keep trying because I’m a very determined girl and I assume this is the kind of crap you have to put up with in order to get somewhere in life.

Everyone’s heading to the Career Center. They’re going to live with their parents and do an unpaid internship for a family friend.

Me? I’m waiting tables, I guess. I can’t afford to work for free.

Then somebody tells me about this internship stipend that I can apply for. I can go out and get a cool unpaid internship and this magical fund will pay me what I’d make waiting tables! How is this possible? So I spend one summer working for a newspaper and another editing a scholarly monograph—experiences I can’t afford otherwise.

See, at the time, I think I want to be a Rolling Stone reporter.

Why do I want this?

Because I love Rolling Stone, and so surely that must mean I’m supposed to work there.

Sigh.

But I’m so determined, see, that I almost achieve this!

Me and the staff of Interview, circa 1990. Good times. They offered me a job! But I turned it down and went to grad school instead.

My senior year, I intern at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine (not Rolling Stone, but close) thanks to a and wow, I realize that I don’t want to work in magazine journalism at all, so I apply to graduate school in creative writing, and become a different kind of writer.

Later, I will thank God for these opportunities—the internship stipend and the domestic internship program in New York City—because I have no financial safety net. I don’t have the time nor the money to “find out what I really want to do.�� I get to try on different careers while I’m still in college to see what fits.

This saves me years. This saves me money that I don’t have anyway and keeps me from taking on needless debt.

I also thank God that I receive , which pays all of my tuition. My parents take on debt to pay for my room and board, and I graduate from college with no debt. None. Not a dime.

If I hadn’t gone to DePauw, as hard as it was sometimes, I might not have gotten those opportunities. I might not have been able to afford graduate school or the 12 years it took me write my first book.

If I hadn’t gone to DePauw, I wouldn’t have met the man I’d marry 17 years later, a Wabash gentleman (just a different one), the son of a doctor. Only I’m the breadwinner, and he’s the breadmaker.

(This post is getting long, and I haven’t gotten to what I want to say about what all of this–my upbringing, my college experience–has to do with my recent interest in professionalization giving students “stars to steer by,�� so I’ll write about that another time…thanks for reading.)

��

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My #AWP17 panel was at 4:30 PM on the second day of the conference, just at the point where all the introverts need to escape to their rooms and the extroverts need happy hour.

I was also competing with a reading and Q&A with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. . So incredible. I would have been there, too. Believe me.

In the end, turnout was light, so I’m sharing my opening remarks here.

Stars to Steer By:

Rethinking CW Curriculum for the 21st Century

The 50th birthday of the AWP Conference is a perfect time to reflect. I’ve been a part of our discipline (as a creative writing student, then teacher, then administrator) for 30 of those 50 years. And these are the questions that have brought me here.

Question 1: Why do so many of my students believe that unless they become published writers and/or college professors, they have somehow failed?

Question 2: Have we built creative writing programs that (intentionally or not) funnel undergrads into graduate programs? and graduate students into academia? A revolving door?

Question 3: If so, why does this happen, and should we do something about it

Thousands of people earn graduate degrees in creative writing every year, but there are typically only about 100 tenure-track jobs to which they can apply.

[This is where I asked my fellow panelists this question: In all your years of teaching CW, how many of your students have ended up in tenure-track positions?��For me, the answer is: 1, and she was actually in the audience, which was cool. For Mary Biddinger, the answer is: 1. For Terry Kennedy, the answer is: around 10. For Porter Shreve, the answer is: around 10]

Instead of tenure-track jobs, my students�� post-MFA choices include:

contingent faculty positions (some with health insurance, some not, some full time, some not, some well-paying, some not) or
a non-academic career they often feel unprepared to pursue.

Remember too: many more thousands earn undergraduate degrees in creative writing each year.

Based on my own experience, the number of undergraduate creative writing majors and minors is high. That’s the good news. The bad news is that undergraduate creative writing majors feel just as clueless about what to “do�� with their degrees.

I put this panel together because I want to advocate for a paradigm shift in which we are more deliberate about showing students a variety of ways they can lead writing lives–rather than just hoping that they’ll figure it out for themselves.

I want to talk about how new curricular models could facilitate such a paradigm shift��both specific courses that can be added to a creative writing degree and completely new configurations with new requirements.

Putting this panel together was easy. I just thought about writers I know who have administrative experience. People like:

Mary Biddinger

She is Professor and Assistant Chair of the English Department at the University of Akron, where she is on the faculty of the program. Since 2008 she has edited the at the University of Akron Press.

Terry Kennedy

He is Associate Director of the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro, Editor of the online journal and Associate Editor of . In addition to coordinating the visiting writers series, he teaches the undergraduate poetry workshop and a course on entrepreneurship & independent press publishing.

Porter Shreve

He directed the CW program at Purdue and then moved to California and created a new kind of writing program which he now directs: at the University of San Francisco.

But I also invited:

Ashley Mack Jackson

She was my student at Ball State’s MA program in CW. She represents, I think, the next generation of CW students, the ones who will enter a different landscape than the one I entered in 1995. She studied at Howard University, earned a BA in CW at IUPUI, an MS at University of Maryland in Non-Profit Management, and an MA in CW with us. She adjuncted in Indy for awhile, then returned to Ball State as a full-time academic advisor, and then got a full-time teaching position at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

I teach at a university that made a big commitment to experiential learning about 10-15 years ago. Our department now offers five experiential-learning courses that count towards the English major:

: year-long course in which students learn book binding and letter-press printing, as well as how to sell creative products and offer classes to the community.
: year-long course in which undergraduate students edit a national literary magazine
: year-long course in which undergraduate students edit an online scholarly journal of undergraduate research, led by members of our Lit faculty.
: year-long course in which undergraduate students staff a creative agency (design, social media, professional writing) serving their primary client, the English department. This is taught by our Rhetoric faculty.
: semester-long course in which undergraduate students teach kids in underserved communities how to write their own stories and poems (akin to the 826 model) taught by CW and English Ed faculty.

The problem is that at the moment, only some of these classes are “on the books.�� We offer them using various special topics course numbers. Which means that not all of these classes are “visible.

What if we required students to take one of those classes as their “bridge�� class? It could serve creative writing majors in a different way than it does now: Instead of asking CW majors to decide their genre (fiction, poetry, CNF, or screenwriting), our curriculum would prompt them to think about what kind of writing life they envision for themselves�� entrepreneurial endeavors (book arts), literary publishing (Broken Plate), academic publishing (DLR), professional writing/marketing (Jacket Copy), or non-profit/literary advocacy (CWiC).

STARS TO STEER BY

I started using that phrase ��Stars to Steer By�� when I became the Director of Undergraduate Studies in my department. It’s how I’ve come to describe the connection between the English major and career outcomes.

The prospective students and their parents ask: So: Creative Writing? English? What can you do with that?

“Just about anything,�� I always say. “There are as many potential careers as stars in the sky.��

It’s like the poem , which says, “…And all I ask is a tall ship and star to steer her by.��

(I wish I could say I got the idea for this phrase from an English class. No. I got it from an episode of Star Trek.)

What are those “stars,�� those potential careers for creative writers?

Here are a few: archivist, social media strategist, communications director, publicist, content manager, librarian, high school teacher, non-profits, alt-ac positions at universities in student affairs and career centers, fundraising, event planning, law, legal assistant, tech writer, editor, literary agent, author, public relations, human resources, marketing, advertising, journalism, corporate communications, creative agencies…I could go on, but I’ll stop.

But here’s the thing: We don’t ever point out those stars to our students. The only stars they see are us–especially if they’re first generation college students, as I was. CW faculty aren’t “stars�� as in “celebrities.�� We are “stars�� as in “examples of what you can do with a degree in CW.��

So is it really any surprise that, lacking other navigation coordinates, students follow the exact routes we ourselves took when we were their age? I must admit that this is exactly what I did. Unconsciously. My college professors were the first writers I ever met. Is it any wonder that I followed in their footsteps?

WHAT I’VE LEARNED AS AN ADMINISTRATOR

If the name of the major doesn’t imply the career outcome, students won’t choose it.

For example, our Rhetoric and Writing major is very small, but if we changed it to Professional Writing or Professional Communications, it would get larger. All we’d have to do is forsake the word rhetoric, which has been the foundation of a classical, liberal arts education for thousands of years. You know. No biggie!

Many students (in my department) choose creative writing as a major because they think it implies the career outcome.

Creative Writing seems more practical to them. Egads! And to make matters worse, they often feel as if they have failed to “use their major�� if they don’t become authors. Conversely, they believe that unless they have a creative writing major on their transcript, they can’t be a writer, or unless they have our Film/Screenwriting minor on their transcript, they can’t be a screenwriter.

College is not an identity store.

Students want to know what they’re supposed to “be.�� Everyone’s been asking them for years and years, and they desperately want an answer. They choose majors that will provide an identity from the outside in. You major in journalism; you’re a journalist. You major in marketing; you’re a marketer. But creative writing, English, the arts, the humanities don’t work that way.

A year ago, I met a young woman at a small liberal arts college who was majoring in German. A friend asked her, “Why are you majoring in that? Do you want to be German?��

College can be an identity machine.

At other schools where I’ve taught, the first question creative writing students are asked is “Which genre are you?�� Their friends and professors ask, but so does the curriculum itself. But at Ball State, we require students to work in two or three genres. There’s no opportunity to specialize at the undergraduate or graduate level. I really like this approach, but one of its flaws is that when a student wants to apply to an MFA program, and you ask them, “So what genre are you?�� they don’t know how to answer the question—because the curriculum never asked them to choose a star to steer by.

I started thinking: If a curriculum can be constructed in such a way to help students identify their preferred genre, could it also be constructed in such a way to help students find their stars to steer by? their direction after college?

I’ll stop there for now and share the comments and ideas of panelists in a later post! The plane is getting ready to board��

But I want to say this to conclude:��I don’t think I’m going to use the AWP panel as a way to create a conversation about curricular/higher ed/writing program matters anymore. Panels like this don’t fare well against the competition. And that’s fine. Everybody goes to AWP for slightly different reasons, and my reason is probably only shared by a small percentage of attendees. Maybe there’s a better way to spark a conversation about how structural change can be accomplished? I will keep thinking about that, and I welcome your ideas.

Thanks.

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2016 is Indiana’s bicentennial year, and I’m really honored to have work in two projects that celebrate my home state.

The book

First, there’s . My contribution was about growing up in Cole Porter’s hometown which I published in the Lit Hub a few months ago.

This week, the Munsonians (people from Muncie!) in that anthology are giving a reading and selling books, so you if you live close by, please come! Here’s the�� for the reading.

The play

Second, there’s an anthology of short plays set in Indiana that will premiere at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. It’s called��.��

It features some famous Hoosiers like James Dean, James Whitcomb Riley, etc. But my contribution is about a common Hoosier family trying to make it through a railroad strike.

They had so much material, they decided to split the performances in two: Blue shows and Gold shows. Mine is in the Gold show, and I’ll be there on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 2 pm for the premiere and on Sunday Nov. 6 at 2 pm for the talk back. Maybe I’ll see you there?

My Hoosier Identity

Appropriately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why being from Indiana is such an integral part of my identity as a person and as a writer.

This certainly wasn’t the case when I was growing up. All I wanted was to leave. I associated having a Hoosier identity with being a “town person.�� .

I wrote my first stories in college, before I left Indiana, and although all of these stories were set in Indiana, that fact wasn’t actually on the page. As the saying goes, I was a fish who didn’t know she was swimming in water.

That water, by the way, is “culture.��

I left Indiana at age 22 to go to graduate school. Jumped from the Wabash River to the Black Warrior River, and the contrast between those two cultures made me deeply aware of my home waters for the first time in my life.

(This line from the state song always makes me verklempt: When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash, then I long for my Indiana home.)

From the Black Warrior, I jumped into the Blue Earth River in Minnesota.

Then I jumped into the Delaware River, which forms the boundary between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Then I jumped again. To the place where the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio Rivers converge.

I loved living in each of these places. I loved how moving away allowed me to see Indiana with greater clarity. But the truth is that the only time I really felt like myself during that 20-year period was in the summer, when I went home to Indiana to visit my family.

That’s when “being a Hoosier�� wasn’t what set me apart from the people around me. It’s what made me the same. It was–I don’t know how to describe it–such a relief to swim in familiar waters.

There’s a quote I keep pinned on the bulletin board above my desk:

Art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired.

That’s August Wilson, the playwright whose 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle tells the story of the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century.

I like that quotation because it’s saying that who and what we are is a product of where we and when we’ve come. It’s baked into us. Nothing to do be done about that. And that the art we make is a product of that kiln, that fire.

I’m not sure how I found that quotation, but it resonated with me deeply. So, as I was writing this post, I Googled to find out where it came from. It’s from that was published in the New York Times in 2000. And wouldn’t you know it–Wilson used the metaphor of water, too.

I had conceived a much longer story that spoke to the social context of the artist and how one’s private ocean is inextricably linked to the tributary streams that gave rise to, and occasioned, the impulse to song.

Before one can become an artist one must first be. It is being in all facets, its many definitions, that endows the artist with an immutable sense of himself that is necessary for the accomplishment of his task. Simply put, art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired.

Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American. The tributary streams of culture, history and experience have provided me with the materials out of which I make my art.

My charge

One of my biggest complaints about Midwestern literature is how often it comes from a place of sentimentality and nostalgia. Think Hoosiers–one of my favorite movies, but still. If there’s one thing holding Indiana back, it’s our tendency to look backward instead of forward.

Have you ever read A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel? Every time I hear someone say they love that sweet book about the magic of childhood in a small town, I want to ask, “Were you reading the same book I was? Because that book is full of danger and darkness. The little��girl Zippy didn’t see it then, but the adult writer sees it very clearly.��

My writing students are almost all from the state of Indiana, but I’d say that more than half of them never write stories set in Indiana. They want to imagine themselves anywhere else in the world. Or in imagined worlds. I understand this, but it also makes me sad.

Because who else is going tell the stories of this place? To me, Indiana is both the middle of nowhere and the center of everything that’s going on in our country right now.

If you’re a writer and you are living in or from the state of Indiana, I challenge you to think hard about the water in which you’ve always swam and to consider the kiln in which you were fired. Why does Davy Rothbart have to come all the way from L.A. or Michigan to tell the story of ?

��

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Less than a quarter of the people who start NaNoWriMo actually finish the challenge and write 50,000 words. Your chances of finishing a crappy first draft of a novel in November are greatly improved if you prepare in October.

That’s what my class for Midwest Writers Workshop, is all about.��

Registration is now available!

Starts October 1.

Testimonial

A few years ago, I offered a version of this course via my blog, and I’m so pleased that my friend Gail Werner challenged herself to dive in. I think it really changed her life.

of how it happened.

Course Description

This course is for everyone who ever thought, “I think I might have a novel inside me.�� Understand though: you will not “write a novel�� in this course–you will prepare yourself to start (or re-start) one. Think of it as a cooking course in which you spend the first class cleaning the kitchen and prepping the ingredients. Think of it as a marathon-running course in which you spend the first class buying a good pair of shoes.

Your chances of drafting an entire novel increase exponentially when you spend some time preparing yourself for the journey ahead.

You’ll learn a great deal about your process without having to fret about the quality of your work. You’ll generate a lot of writing about the novel you want to write, get to know your characters, learn to think in terms of scenes not sentences, and make some crucial early decisions about point of view and structure that will save you a lot of time down the road.

At the end of the course, you’ll be ready and excited and poised to start writing your novel.��

Learning Goals



intense focus on the writing process and on developing a writing regimenwriting assignments which will help you gather material, develop your plot, and get to know your characters
practice creating an outline or storyboard of your book
analysis of a novel that will serve as a model

The course is broken down into four big-picture units. Each unit offers a series of mini-lessons (about 10 minutes each) that build on each other. It will take you about five full hours to go through all of the instruction. You can pause to write when inspired and review the material on your own. Lessons are presented as audio-visual lectures that you can watch on any device (video/screencast).

What the Course Includes

Four hours of instructional lectures��that you can listen to or watch on your own time, at your own convenience
Weekly assignments��for completion at your own pace—designed to help you put what you learn into action.
Connection and community with others—including me.

Schedule
Week 1: Preparing Yourself

First, you’ll develop a writing regimen and come up with a concrete plan about how to fit writing time into your life. Second, you’ll figure out how to hold yourself accountable by sharing your writing goals with others. Third, you’ll assess your writing process (everyone’s different) and what circumstances make you more likely to get the writing done. And last, you’ll read the short novel Election by Tom Perrotta, paying special attention to how novels are structured and what keeps us turning pages.

Week 2: Characters

Eudora Welty said that in order to enter into your characters, you have to love them. In this unit, we’ll begin that process by getting to know our characters. They drive the plot—not you. Otherwise, a novel reads like a puppet show in which the reader sees you pulling the strings. You’ll complete a series of writing exercises to flesh out and get inside your characters.

Week 3: Through-lines

A novel isn’t just one story. It’s the skillful weaving together of multiple stories, what I call “through-lines.�� Other names include character arcs, plot layers, and subplots. A through-line is the rope that the audience uses to pull itself through your novel. How you decide to structure them determines the form of your novel. You’ll identify the possible through-lines of your novel, assign each one a different color, and create a storyboard of your novel.

Week 4: Scene

The scene is the building block of all novels, and a good one enriches the characters, provides necessary information, and moves the plot forward. A scene paints a picture and brings us into what John Gardner called “the vivid, continuous fictional dream.�� What novel readers want is to be so caught up in a novel that they forget they’re reading. You’ll learn how to sketch and then flesh out memorable scenes.

I’d love to work with you (or someone you know) through this online class.

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I’m going to be honest with you:��You can have a great career with your English major��but you’re going to have to hustle.

Let me explain what I mean by “hustle.��

Over the weekend, I downloaded . You can search by major, sure, but also by��transferable��skills—and this is awesome! I think we are the only university using this app that allows a student to search employers by transferable skills!

Of the 170+ employers who are coming to Worthen Arena tomorrow, how many want applicants with great writing and thinking skills?

169! Isn’t that awesome?

But how many of those same employers say they want English majors specifically?

12.

Ouch. What does this mean?

I asked some Career Center friends of mine, and here’s what they said:

I tend to think that employers are ignorant of what English majors bring to the table and are too passive (too busy?) to be asking that critical question. Hopefully we can be an agent that drives the employer to ask that question. But it does put a unique burden on our humanities students to tell their stories to the employer rather than to assume that the employer understands what the student has to offer.

Another said:

We need to work with employers to help them connect the transferable skills they are searching for to majors they may have not thought of before.

This is what I mean when I say that you are going to have to hustle.

You can’t assume that the world understands what you know and what you know how to do.��

English vs. Pre-professional majors

Pre-professional majors like business, marketing, advertising, public relations, journalism, and TCOM have built professionalization into their curriculum.

A specific class in the major.
The structure of these majors points you in specific career directions.
Plus, the faculty are often people who worked in those fields.

In English, your professors aren’t going to fix your resume and tell you exactly how to get a job. They’re just not equipped to��explain how your skills can translate to the 126 types of jobs you can get with the degree. (I made that number up, but it feels right.)

I consider myself moderately knowledgeable about careers for English majors, but I haven’t used a resume since 1995, and I’ve been doing one thing–teaching creative writing in higher education–my entire adult life.

That doesn’t mean we don’t��care about your future. Far from it. We are a 21st century English department, and we’re always thinking of ways to help you.

We’ve got lots of to offer you, but you have to make time for them, people.

Who’s got time for that?

I know that you are super busy.

You take 5 or 6 classes a semester.
You work part-time, maybe full-time.
You take care of the people in your lives.
You commute.
You volunteer.
You have loans.
You try to leave a little time to, you know, sleep, eat, play.

But your chances of finding a meaningful “next step�� in your life will improve dramatically if you can prioritize even a few of the following opportunities.

Attend the new Stars to Steer By series—next one is Tuesday, September 27 at 6:30 PM. .

Visit the at Worthen tomorrow, Wednesday, September 14��even if it’s just to look around.

Make an appointment with our Career Coach Eilis Wasserman on or send her

Find a summer internship on Cardinal Career Link or on your own and so that you can get credits and count it toward your degree

Read the where alums tell you how their degree prepared them for their careers, like , who works at a start-up in Pittsburgh.

Take part in the Practice Interview Program in your ENG 444 Senior Seminar and consider signing up for the .

Take one of our six immersive learning classes. Think of them like internships you don’t have to drive to!

No, I’m not trying to give you an anxiety attack

I know that you don’t like to think about this. When I was in college, I didn’t want to either, but I did figure out how fit in two internships—one in magazine journalism and one at a newspaper—that showed me that, wow, I didn’t want to be a journalist. Thank God I figured that out.

Looking back, I realize that I spent an enormous amount of time on the High-School-to-College Transition (researching colleges, working on applications, going on campus visits) and a lot less time on the College-to-Career Transition.

And I know why, too. Because I’m a first-generation college student, and I just figured if I graduated, I would get a job doing something. I wanted to be a professional person, but until I went to college, I’d never known one. I was on a journey, but I had no map. Everyone was willing to give me directions, but I was too embarrassed to ask.

In the last year or so, I’ve made an important realization: the only reason that I became a professor is that my college instructors were the first professionals I’d ever known. I’m not saying I regret the way things worked out! It is what it is. And I’m really lucky to do what I do. I just wish that I’d taken the time to find a few more stars to steer by while I was in college.

Let’s make a deal, okay?

This blog post began at 4:00 PM this afternoon as an email. Ha ha. I wanted to urge you to go to the Job Fair, sure, but also to give you a pep talk, get a little fire burning in your belly, get you to hustle it up a bit.

I’m posting this here on my blog because I’m speaking to you right now more as Cathy Day, the person, the writer, not as Prof. Day, the Assistant Chair of the department.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to a meeting of the Career Center Advisory Board, and I’m going to tell��employers about how great you all are and how we’re preparing you to lead awesome lives.

I promise I’ll work to get more employers to seek out and hire English majors if you’ll promise to work on how to tell them your story about what you have to offer.

Deal?

Thanks for reading, and have a great day.

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[Long read. Sorry. Not sorry.]

Since I published��about Cole Porter and growing up “different,�� I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people saying “I’ve never had the words to describe this feeling. Thank you.��

One email in particular has been on my mind. The subject line was “An ExMid from Peru Indiana thanks you.��

It’s from a fellow Peruvian who lives “out East�� now. She still visits friends and family in Peru, but says that some members of her family seem uneasy with her at times. Sometimes they’ll say, “You’ve spent too much time in [City Far Away].

“I cannot help but feel like I don’t belong there anymore when I visit.��

Oh boy, do I know that feeling.

She goes on to say:

“I guess what I am asking you is how did you break the mold on what people in Indiana perceived you to be with who you really are to yourself? Did you find a way to do it that did not result in the ‘too good for us�� label that inevitably follows such a declaration? Indiana will always have a place in my heart and Peru a place in my soul but reading your words about both places made me feel like you understood my plight. I want to thank you for that. Indiana and particularly Peru is where I grew older but I grew up elsewhere. Cole Porter knew this struggle. Of that I am sure.��

Oh boy. Here goes.

Town people vs. Circus people

Well, you might say that your question is what I write about, so please read The Circus in Winter, especially the last story, “Circus People.��

Here’s a line that always seems to resonate with people.

When I was little, my mother told me there are basically two kinds of people in the world: town people and circus people. The kind who stay are town people, and the kind who leave are circus people.

Growing up, I didn’t have a handy word like “circus people�� to describe how I felt. I was just a little bit weird and “different�� and smart. I didn’t think the way town people thought, didn’t act like they acted. Generally, I felt like I made town people uncomfortable—and the message that I got was that this uneasiness was my fault, my problem to solve, my job to be “more normal�� and make them more comfortable with me.

Please note: it was never a town person’s job to be more circus. It was my job to be more town.

I rarely felt “seen�� or truly understood growing up. I had a few very close friends and some teachers who “got�� me, but otherwise, I remember it being a very lonely time. I wish I’d grown up with the internet so that I could have found more like-minded people earlier in life.

Confession

When I was growing up, I felt like my family didn’t support me. I felt loved, certainly, but I didn’t feel accepted, and I think there’s a difference.

When I confessed this to my mother as an adult, she was shocked and appalled. It’s probably the only thing we disagree about. She said of course I was accepted! and I said that that’s just not how it felt at the time.

Both of us are right, I think. Two contradictory truths that have to coexist.

What we all need to hear—no, what we must feel to be true—from the people we love is that we are kind, we are smart, we are important.

It’s funny to me that my truth—that I felt like an outcast, that was I starved for acceptance, that I felt this low-grade rage almost all the time–was the number one thing on my mind growing up, but today, I hardly ever think about it.

As soon as I confessed to my family that I didn’t feel like they ever really got me, we started talking about this and working on this in a more deliberate way. I started sharing my writing with my family and talking openly about it. They asked questions. I answered.

Today, I never feel that uneasiness with my immediate family. Never.

Advice

So: my advice is that you have to talk about how you feel with your immediate family and friends. The people you really care about. Send them if you have to. Let it start the conversation.

Anytime you find yourself being shamed by your family and friends, even subtly, you have to say something. In a gentle way, call them on it.

In fact, anytime they say something that bothers you or feels like a personal dig (or even a political one), say something. Don’t yell or shame them back. Ask them why they feel the way they do and try to have a civil conversation.

But also don’t be so quick to make everybody else feel comfortable. Remember that they have some responsibility, too.

What we all want is for the people in our lives to respect what we value. They don’t have to value these things, too, although that’s certainly nice. All we want is for our families and friends to acknowledge who and what we are��as we are.

And I’ve found that the best way to promote that respect and acknowledgement is to model this behavior for others. Find out what the people in your life value and acknowledge it.

The problem, of course, is that not everyone is capable of reciprocating this behavior. And if that’s true, well, you have to come to terms with it. That’s no easy task.

You asked: Did you find a way to do it that did not result in the ‘too good for us�� label that inevitably follows such a declaration?

The answer is yes and no. My family and closest friends don’t feel that way about me, but I’m sure that others do. People in Muncie where I live now, and people in Peru, too. I’m pretty sure that my essay ticked a lot of people off. You can read what a few had to say .

But I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for you and for everyone who has reached out to me to say, “Thank you for articulating this.��

Red and blue states

Generally, I’ve found that “circus people�� are blue and “town people�� are red, but that’s a simplification, really. Still it might be helpful to listen to which describes the divide and how people try to talk to their friends and family about it.

You can decide for yourself if the concept of red and blue applies here.

Double consciousness

The thing I’ve learned is that you have to be exquisitely yourself in real life and online. This has meant that very few people from Peru are still in my Facebook newsfeed. Either I’ve hidden them or they’ve hidden or unfriended me. I used to worry about this, but I don’t anymore.

I love the people I went to high school with and the people who went to my church and the neighbors down the street. I love them fiercely, but I also don’t want to argue with them. I don’t want all their voices in my head. It was hard enough to become exquisitely myself when I lived there.

It’s hard to be exquisitely yourself in a small town because you are always conscious of what the people around you are thinking. Or what you think they are thinking.

W.E.B. DuBois described this sensation as double consciousness.

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.��

Town people make decisions based on how they imagine others will respond to that decision.

Circus people are aware that town people might not approve of their decisions, but they make them anyway.

I think we all experience double consciousness growing up, and at some point, circus people learn how to stop looking at themselves through the eyes of others, and town people don’t.

Making my own path

A few years ago, my mom wrote me a letter for Mother’s Day, and I got her permission to share it here.

Dear Cathy,

I didn’t do a lot of things right when you were growing up. I let myself get in the way of what was best for everyone, but I always loved you.

Thank you for making your own path when we didn’t know how to help you. We have learned so much from you that has helped us help others and grow individually and as parents. I wish I could have given you more, but please know I love you as much as any mother could. I am so proud of you and the beautiful woman (inside and out) that you have become.

When I grow up, I want to be just like you.

I wish I could back in time and tell 14-year-old me that someday I’m going to get a letter like that.

I wish every circus person in the whole goddamn world could get a letter like that.

Dear Fellow ExMid from Peru, I’m so glad you wrote to me, and I hope I said something here that helps.

I’ll leave you with something else from The Circus in Winter that always seems to resonate with people when I read it out loud.

It’s taken me a long time to figure out one very simple thing: The world is made up of hometowns. It’s just as hard to leave a city block in Brooklyn or a suburb of Chicago as it is to leave a small town in Indiana. And just because it was hard to leave Linden Avenue in Flatbush or the Naperville city limits or Lima doesn’t mean you can’t ever go back.

There’s never been a more important time for us to go home and just listen to each other, for town people to accept circus people, and for circus people to be exquisitely themselves.

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This blog post is for everyone in any English department that’s experiencing falling enrollments.

For most of my career, I didn’t think too much about where my students came from. I turned in my course request and maybe I wrote up a course description for a newsletter, but mostly, I just trusted that students would show up in my class.

And that’s the problem, really. We can’t just trust that they’re going to show up anymore.

Now, we have to ensure that what we offer is��easily “findable.��

��

I happened to find t online. It’s brand new. My fellow DUSs at ADE took a good hard look at this handbook, which will soon be in the hot little hands (or digitally in front of the eyeballs) of incoming students.

Scroll to p. 12. See the long list of majors.

Imagine a student who is looking at this long list and who feels pressured to declare a major. “English�� is in the second column, but our��four specific concentrations within English are also listed, including Creative Writing, which is very popular, along with Literature, Rhetoric and Writing, etc.

The visibility and findability of these concentrations in this list allows us to compete with other storytelling and communication related majors whose names suggest the career that follows, such as Journalism and TCOM and Marketing, etc.

However, scroll to p. 14, “Selected majors by interest area.��

The folks in advising have very kindly tried to take that unwieldy list of 190 majors and group them into six sections: Business, Creative Arts and Design, Government, Law, and Public Safety, Health Care and Human Services, Sports and Recreation, and Technology.

Please note that English is not��included in any of these categories.

Probably this is just an honest mistake, and I need to write to Laura Helms, the very very nice and hardworking Executive Director of Academic Services and Associate Dean of University College and ask if they can add English to at least one of those lists in the 2017 catalog. But that doesn’t help me with the class of 2020.

The editors of this handbook know that students are thinking about the bridge between major and job/career, and they’re definitely trying to help. But for whatever reason, English did not come to mind when they were “categorizing�� majors. Partly, that’s because English doesn’t want to be categorized. We believe that our students can do ANY of those things. But the editors will probably not let me put “English�� into each category, and I’ll have to pick one, and I will feel both victorious (Yay! The first-years can see us!) and I will feel like I’ve capitulated to a kind of niche marketing that I don’t really believe in. Idealism. Pragmatism. This is the life of an English department administrator.

Scroll to p. 16. Note that all of our minors are Yay!

Recruiting students in the core/gen-ed classes

Scroll to p. 18, the Core Curriculum. Study how my department has positioned itself here, because this is really, really important.

We spent a lot of time at ADE talking about the importance of general education classes. Some students come to college knowing they want to major in English, but many more find us because they “have to take�� a gen-ed course and discover that they love it.

Now, for a long time, college students were required to take a literature class to graduate, but this is no longer the case.

Here are the classes every single student at Ball State must take:

Know this: every department believes that all college students should be required to take one of their classes.

If your department offers a foundational class, as mine does, you have the opportunity to touch every single student, which is a privilege. Offering a required class means you don’t have to recruit students. They will show up. In droves.

These days, instead of requiring literature classes, most colleges include them in a menu, and my God, that menu matters so much. When your courses are menu-ized, you’re forced to think in terms of recruitment and “selling�� and curb appeal.

Consider this example from DePaul University, where the gen-ed menu includes Arts and Literature. ��First, any course at the end of that list, such as Women’s Studies, is at a disadvantage. Second, Digital Cinema courses are in this menu, and it’s hard for traditional liberal arts majors to compete with those courses for the attention of millennial college students.

Tier 1 requirement:

The number of options in menu matter, as do the titles of those courses.

At Tier 1, our two classes compete with about 20 total.

Students are using the title alone to make a decision about which class on the menu to take.

Which of these titles will resonate?

Would you be surprised that our Intro to Digital Literacies class always fills quickly? Of course not.

Our “Reading Literature�� course does well, but fills a little more slowly. It would probably fill more quickly if the actual topic of each section was more apparent.

We offer about three sections a term, maybe one on Narratives of Resistance, one on Dystopian Literature, one on Road Novels. The topics are different depending on who is teaching. But what students will see in the system they use to sign up for classes is “Reading Literature.�� This is what they’ll see on Banner.

For various technological reasons, we can’t put the actual topics into this system.

We can put the those sexy, specific titles and course descriptions on and blog, we can make posters, etc., but it’s so hard��especially at a big school like Ball State to make our topics findable by the student who is searching for a class to take.

It’s like running a really good restaurant in a city that’s hosting a big convention and not being able to let the people at the convention know that you’re just a few blocks away. Instead, all the convention go-ers eats dinner at the first restaurant they see.

Would someone invent the Yelp for cool college courses? Thanks.

Tier 2 requirement:

It’s at the next menu, Tier 2, that our department had to really think strategically about what to offer, because we’re in a much bigger menu (about 70 courses to choose from) and therefore the competition is much more fierce. We’re no longer competing with just the humanities courses anymore. We’re competing in a category called “Fine Arts, Design, and Humanities.��

If you scroll to p. 20 of the handbook, you’ll see that this is where we titled our courses much more specifically.

��

Our thinking was that we might attract students via our��“Intro to [identity]�� courses, and then say to those students, Hey, you can take the 400-level version of this course and then encourage them to add the major or the minor.

The importance of course descriptions

People in the English department create fascinating courses that require an explanation.

For example, what does “Narratives of Resistance�� mean? Read the awesome description:

We will use the course to examine how novels, poetry, and plays have been used to challenge ideas of justice in society to create change in the system. We will read Luiz Valdez’s Zoot Suit, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Barbara Shoup’s American Tune, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, in addition to a few shorter essays, stories, and episodes of Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot. Evaluation will be based on quizzes, two midterm tests, two short papers, and a final exam.

Aha! You get to read some very good and important books AND watch one of my favorite shows, Mr. Robot. SOLD!

But what’s going to happen (through no fault of the instructor or me or anyone else) is that most students will show up the first day and only learn then that they get to read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and watch Mr. Robot.

Note that pp. 26-31 of the advising handbook are nothing but course descriptions of the foundational classes.

Note that that the handbook doesn’t include course descriptions of any of the other classes in the core. Because that would make this document incredibly unwieldy and students probably wouldn’t read them anyway. The title of the course alone must attract and inform. And sometimes, that’s just not possible.

You’re thinking: Why not call ENG 206 Social Justice Lit?

Because we can’t promise that we’ll always offer it with that topic. Even the instructor might not want to do it time and time again.

Why not create ENG 206 Social Justice Lit, 207 Dystopian Lit, 208 Road Lit, 209 Southern Lit, etc.

Because there are not enough numbers to contain all the cool things we could teach.

I have more to say about this topic of findability, but for now, I’ll stop. Suffice it to say that it’s really important for English departments to take out their own eyeballs and look at everything with a student’s eyeballs.

We can offer the most interesting classes in the world, but if students can’t find them, no one will take them.

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