Washington College: A Top-Tier Maryland Liberal Arts College

Readings: Writers and Scholars

Sean Meehan, Assistant Professor of English - "This is a Fragment
of Me": Emerson and the Poetics of Metonymy

Dr. Sean Meehan began his scholarly focus on the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson with a dissertation on photography in nineteenthcentury American autobiography he completed at the University of Iowa. He recently published a book based on that dissertation, Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman. His lecture on Emerson and metonymy is part of his current work-in-progress, a study of Emerson’s engagement with the practice and theory of education and an exploration of Emersonian ways of learning both from the past and for the future. He was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Fellowship for 2005- 2006 from Houghton Library, Harvard University. He published an article based on research he did at Houghton in Emerson Society Papers (2006), “Living Learning: Lessons from Emerson’s School.” In addition to teaching “Emerson and Whitman” and “American Environmental Writing,” Professor Meehan teaches “Literature and Composition” and is the Director of Writing for the College.

In-House Events

Join our monthly Community Meetings for networking, event planning, conversation, and, above all, for sharing a love of language, stories, and the creative life. Anyone with an interest in overseeing, imagining, and inhabiting the House is welcome. Meetings are largely shaped by participants' ideas and concerns. First-time attendees are always welcome.

Beginner's Print Shop Workshop: Introduction to Letterpress

Begins Tuesday, September 15, Print Shop, Rose O'Neill Literary House

Our free, non-credit Print Shop Workshops are open to students, faculty, and staff at Washington College and our Chestertown neighbors. Come learn the history of the book and the printed word, and try your hand at letterpress printing and bookbinding. Master Printer Mike Kaylor instructs. To sign up, email kbursick2@washcoll.edu.

Advanced Workshop: Book Arts

Begins Thursday, September 10, Print Shop, Rose O'Neill Literary House

Our free, non-credit Print Shop Workshops are open to students, faculty, and staff at Washington College and our Chestertown neighbors. Come learn the history of the book and the printed word, and try your hand at letterpress printing and bookbinding. Master Printer Mike Kaylor instructs. To sign up, email kbursick2@washcoll.edu.

Jeff Talarigo, a fiction reading

Jeff Talarigo is the author of the award winning novel, The Pearl Diver, which won the 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award and was named a 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. His second novel, The Ginseng Hunter, noted as one of the “Best Books of 2008” by NPR and an American Library Association’s “Notable Books for 2009,” will be released in paperback in April of 2009. Talarigo currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is working on a novel about 20th Century Gaza as seen through the eyes of a Palestinian woman.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Andrew Gibson - "His Journey Westward": Joyce's The Dead, Irish History, and Modernity

Dr. Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, a permanent advisory editor to the James Joyce Quarterly, and a member of the editorial board of Limit(e) Beckett, the new Anglo- French journal in Beckett scholarship set up at the Université de Paris VII to build bridges between French and Anglophone Beckett Studies. His publications include: Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (Macmillan, 1990), Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (Routledge, 1999), Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford University Press, 2002; paperback, 2005), James Joyce: A Critical Life (Reaktion, 2006), and Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Dan Chaon, a fiction reading

Dan Chaon, born and raised in Sidney, Nebraska, is the author of the short-story collections Fitting Ends and Other Stories (Northwestern UP, 1996; reprinted by Ballantine, 2003) and Among the Missing (Ballantine, 2002) which was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was listed as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the American Library Association, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Las Vegas Mercury, and Entertainment Weekly and was also cited by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as one of the Notable Books of the year. His stories have appeared in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 1996 and 2003, The Pushcart Prize 2000, 2002, and 2003, as well as such noteworthy literary journals as TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, MSS, Story, Helicon, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. Chaon’s first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was released in 2004 and praised by Publishers Weekly for its “elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.” His most recent novel, Await Your Reply, has recently been published by Ballantine Books. Chaon currently teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, where he holds the position of Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Song Yet Sung: A Reading by James McBride

October 29, 4:30 p.m., Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts
Book signing to follow

Best-selling author and musician James McBride has written for the Washington Post, People, the Boston Globe, Essence, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. He is the author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna. In his new book, Song Yet Sung, McBride follows a group of slaves as they escape to freedom through the swamps of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Song Yet Sung was chosen by the Maryland Humanities Council to represent the One Maryland One Book program for 2009, and was chosen by Washington College for its First-Year Book program. The First-Year Book program gives new students a common experience over the summer and introduces them to Washington College’s tradition of bringing great writers to campus.

Sponsored by: The Rose O’Neill Literary House, The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Department of English, the Dean of the College, Gunston Day School’s In Celebration of Books, Kent County Public Library, and the One Maryland One Book program of the Maryland Humanities Council.

Taije Silverman, a poetry reading

Taije Silverman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. The recipient of the 2005–2007 Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she is now Assistant Visiting Professor at Ursinus College, outside of Philadelphia. Her first collection of poems, Houses Are Fields, was published by LSU Press in 2009, and selected as the debut book in their Sea Cliff Series. Thrice nominated for the Pushchart Prize, she has received the Anais Nin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and her book has just been translated into Italian. Italian translations of her individual poems are forthcoming in the Italian Poetry Review, at Columbia University, and in ClanDESTino, at the University of Bologna. Her own translations from the Italian of poems by Paolo Valesio are forthcoming in Pleiades.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Debra Spark, a fiction reading

Debra Spark is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint (Faber & Faber, Avon) and The Ghost of Bridgetown (Graywolf) and editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America’s New Young Writers (Scribners). Her thoughts on the craft of writing have been collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing (University of Michigan Press). Short fiction, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, Epoch, Agni, Gingko Tree Review, narrativemagazine.com, The New York Times, New England Travel and Life, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Zacharis / Ploughshares award for best first book. Spark currently teaches at Colby College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her latest novel, Good for the Jews, will be published in October by University of Michigan Press.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Leslie Harrison, a poetry reading

Leslie Harrison’s Displacement was the 2008 Katherine Nason Bakeless winner in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. It was published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in July of 2009. She has poems and prose published in Poetry, Southwest Review, The New Republic, Barn Owl Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine where she completed her MFA in 2006. She has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

David Orvis - Shakespeare's Queer Marriages

David L. Orvis, a 2002 graduate of Washington College, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate in Women’s Studies at Appalachian State University. He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Performing Queer Marriage on the Early Modern St age, as well as a collection of essays on Psalms in the Early Modern World, co-edited with Linda Phyllis Austern and Kari Boyd McBride. He has articles forthcoming in The Journal of Homosexuality, In Search of the Normal: Developments in the Histories of Sexualities, 1200-1900, Selected Papers from the Sexual Identities in Shakespeare Conference, The Explicator, and Performing Pedagogy: Gender and Instruction in Early Modern England.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket)

March 26, 4:00 p.m., Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts
A Fiction Reading by our Sophie Kerr Weekend Speaker, Book signing to follow

Daniel Handler is the author of the literary novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. Under the name Lemony Snicket he has also written a sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, which have sold more than 53 million copies and were the basis of a film starring Jim Carrey. His intricate and witty writing style has won him numerous fans for his critically acclaimed literary work and his wildly successful children’s books. Handler has worked intermittently in film and music, most recently in collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony, entitled “The Composer Is Dead,” which has been performed all over the world and is now a book with CD. An adjunct accordionist for the music group The Magnetic Fields, he is also the author of Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, The Beatrice Letters, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid, and two books for Christmas: The Lump of Coal and The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: a Christmas story. He is the screenwriter of the film Rick, a revamp of the Verdi opera Rigoletto, and the film adaptation of Joel Rose’s novel Kill the Poor, and has written for The New York Times, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Chickfactor, and various anthologies, and was the chair of the Judging Panel for the National Book Awards in Young People’s Literature, 2008. His current projects include a fourth novel for adults, a picture book in collaboration with Maira Kalman and the script for the long-awaited second Snicket movie.

“Daniel Handler [is] something like an American Nabokov.”— Dave Eggers

“One of our most dazzling literary conjurers.”— Michael Chabon

“Sentence by sentence, Handler dazzles, teases the unwary with unforeseeable perceptions.”— San Francisco Chronicle

Sponsored by: The Rose O'Neill Literary House and The Sophie Kerr Committee

Eric Mallin - "In spite of my own nature": King Lear and the Perverse

Eric S. Mallin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (University of California Press, 1996) and Godless Shakespeare (Continuum, 2007), as well as numerous articles and reviews. His lecture on King Lear is part of a book in progress called Perverse: The Hidden History of the Normal.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

Michael Drout - Whole Worlds Out of Single Words: Tolkien and Language

The Prentice Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, Michael Drout is a specialist in Anglo-Saxon Literature and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is the editor of Beowulf and the Critics, a collection of Tolkien’s scholarly work, as well as the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and Tolkien Studies, the foremost scholarly journal on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is also the author of How Tradition Works, a study of the poetics of the Anglo-Saxon tenth century, and he has lately dedicated himself to producing oral performances of the entire Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus in podcast form. A celebrated teacher, he has recorded a popular series of lectures on Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon poetry with the Recorded Books company, which are available under their “Modern Scholar” series.

Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics

Nearly fifteen years ago, new Lit House Director Mark Nowak created XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, a journal that brought together writers in social documentary from a variety of fields—anthropology, poetry, performance studies, theatre, and history. XCP has since published writings from emerging young writers in these and other fields as well as established scholars and artists such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Adrienne Rich. In addition to bringing XCP to Washington College, this spring will inaugurate a series of readings by regular contributors to the journal. Please check the Rose O’Neill Literary House website for complete details on these spring events.

Rose O'Neill Literary House "Tea & Talk" Series

Join us at the Lit House for tea, cookies, and a series of talks featuring writers and scholars from Washington College and the Chestertown community.

Eric Mills, Director of Media Relations - Phantom Ships and Ghostly
Crews: A Haunted History of the U.S. Navy

Book signing to follow

In addition to his new book, The Spectral Tide: True Ghost Stories of the U.S. Navy, an exploration of unexplained paranormal phenomena throughout the history of America’s sea service, Eric Mills is the author of Chesapeake Rumrunners of the Roaring Twenties and Chesapeake Bay in the Civil War, which served as the inspiration for “The Bay at War,” a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities-funded special exhibit at Virginia’s Steamboat Era Museum. Mills wrote the script for the exhibit’s accompanying documentary film, which was narrated by Roger Mudd. He frequently contributes historically themed articles to Naval History, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, Baltimore Magazine and other periodicals. Mills has worked as a Chesapeake Publishing newspaper reporter/editor, as editor of publications for the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, as exhibits researcher for the Historical Society of Talbot County, and as an acquisitions editor for the Naval Institute Press. He is currently completing a master’s degree in history at Washington College, where he is director of media relations.