THE WRITER'S INSIDER
Vol. 1, Issue 1 October 2015
LYRICAL ALLIANCELyrical Alliance is Rowan University's premier performance poetry and hip hop and acoustic artistry club.
We are newly SGA chartered, so there are lots of opportunities to get involved in our organization, even if you aren't interested in poetry! We meet Tuesdays at 6:30 PM to 10 PM. There is a writing workshop run by our presidents from about 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm and then an open performance session. Feel free to show up to both parts of the meeting or just one; you don't have to perform anything, you can just stay and watch! Our first open mic of the semester is joint with True Colors and the Office of Social Justice, Inclusion, and Conflict Resolution (SJIRC) to celebrate Coming Out Week. It is on October 9 from 6:30 PM to 10 PM in James 3102. The feature for this open mic is Sean Aliño, a Filipino-American poet attending Montclair University who just returned from representing Loser Slam at the 2015 National Poetry Slam. Last semester, Lyrical Alliance - representing Rowan University - sent a team comprised of Alyssa Bayley, Linette Reeman, Hayley Solberg, and Jeremy Einbinder to the College National Slam (CUPSI) in Richmond, V.A. One of our group pieces won "Best Group Piece" and Alyssa and Hayley performed the piece in the Final Stage showcase. As this year's Lyrical Alliance presidents, Alyssa and Linette are striving to send Rowan's third team to CUPSI in 2016, which will be held in Austin, Texas. If you are interested in more information, you can email Linette at reemanL2@students.rowan.edu or Alyssa at bayleya6@students.rowan.edu. |
avantAvant is Rowan University’s undergraduate magazine for literature and art. Funded by the Student Government Association, it appears as one publication per semester.
Submissions for this semester's edition are open! We welcome all undergraduate work - poetry and prose up to 2500 words in length, as well as original photography and artwork. Submissions close at midnight on November 1st. Students interested in contributing to this issue of the magazine can submit their work as an attachment to Avantzine@gmail.com. Avant also holds weekly meetings, on Thursday nights at 7:30pm until 9pm in the Publication Suite of the Chamberlain Student Center. Both Lyrical Alliance and Avant can be found on ProfLink, Rowan's newest resource for students and faculty looking for information about organizations on campus. |
GLASSWORKS
Glassworks Magazine, a publication of Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing program, is pleased to announce the publication of Issue 11. The new issue includes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and artwork by emerging writers and artists from across the country. Also featured is an interview with award winning short story writer and novelist Aimee Parkison conducted by student editors Kathryn Brining, Denia R. Martinez, and Michael Nusspickel.
Read Issue 11 online now at http://www.rowanglassworks.org. Print copies are also available to order through Glassworks' website. Additionally, they can be purchased at either of our upcoming readings, featured below.
READINGS AND EVENTS
TATTOOED MOM'S |
barnes and noble |
Wednesday, October 21st at 8pm |
Thursday, October 29th at 6:30pm |
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Join us in celebrating our recent publication! Doors open at 7pm, and the event starts at 8pm. Copies of recent issues will be available, as well as books by featured authors (cash only).
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Join us for a reading celebrating the publication of the Fall 2015 issue of Glassworks Magazine! Refreshments will be served.
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SPOTLIGHT ON POETRY |
writing arts club |
This month's featured poem is Linette Reeman's poem, "the body of the author's mother as the author's depression." If you are interested in being November's featured writer, contact skipps4@students.rowan.edu. THE BODY OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER AS THE AUTHOR'S DEPRESSIONwhen i say “drowning,” i mean my mother is
the first water i knew. how her bones made early beached of me—something in her capsized & i was wrangled out alive / slick with the wet all new creatures know. how since then i have been all undertow & forgotten shoreline—my body begging me back to before my birth, the anchor of me mocking the ocean my father crossed to fall in love with a depth of a woman despite never learning how to swim. so thank god i am a lifeguard, was trained to wring others out, can spot a life losing itself in the distance & drag it back to safety. when i tread water back to my mother, she reminds me that i should know how to save myself; it is assumed i am strong enough to keep swimming / i tell her the water of her sinks the afloat of me & i did not ask to be a new self. how i don’t think i was ready. how i miss drowning. how i have been trying to be unborn ever since. Linette Reeman |
Our purpose is to build a community among the Writing Arts students and faculty. We are looking forward to fostering friendships and connections within the Writing Arts Department.
We meet on Tuesdays at 6:00pm-7:30pm in Bunce 104; our last meeting for the semester is on December 1st, 2015. On October 20th, we will be hosting a pizza party and write-in for the National Day on Writing. On October 27th, we will be hosting a Departmental Pizza Party, in Bunce 104 at 6pm. For more information, visit http://ruwaclub.org or contact Jessica Tuckerman at tucker78@students.rowan.edu. 
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ROWAN WELCOMES CELESTE DEL RUSSO TO THE WRITING CENTER TEAM
Celeste Del Russo is the Director at Rowan's Writing Center, located on the first floor of Campbell Library. We were able to interview her and to her about her past work, her current projects, and her future plans for our Writing Center. |
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Q: What’s your background in Writing Centers? How did you first become interested in Writing Centers?
A: I’ve been working in Writing Centers since I was an undergrad. I went to a small liberal arts college in Boston. For my first experience as a tutor, we didn’t have an official Writing Center space, so we went to students’ dorms, the student union, and other places to do on-the-spot tutoring. My major was creative writing and literature, and my very first step in becoming a stronger writer in that major was being tutored. Realizing I had that resource available to me made it that becoming a tutor was something I was able to give back. |
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From there, I’ve worked in a lot of different Writing Centers and in a lot of different capacities: as a graduate assistant, working in administrative work. I’ve worked in Writing Centers with grassroots origins, like ones based in coffee shops that sprung from a student need for help with writing and workshopping, but I’ve also worked in very organized spaces.
The last space I worked at before coming to Rowan was a writing center that was embedded in a tutoring service center – a thinktank – so it was part of many different tutoring services. I love working in Writing Centers, and I love working with the people who work for them, and that’s one of the things I enjoy the most. It’s great to have facetime to meet with tutors and learn some of the strategies that they use in their sessions, as well as meeting students who use our resources. |
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Q: You mentioned a lot of different settings you’ve tutored in, and the wide range of spaces you’ve had. Do you have a preference for one kind of space over another, or one style you’ve really connected with?
A: I will never limit my ideas of what a writing center can do by the space it’s allotted, but a large aspect of that does come from my experience in being a tutor for a center that had a presence outside of one set physical designation. A lot of my research and ideas about Writing Centers has to do with the conversation about Writing Center space, and making space for tutoring centers across campus. I like to reenvision this Writing Center outside of its actual physical location. For us in the library, we’re able to collaborate with a lot of different departments on campus. There are many opportunities to work with librarians and use the Digital Scholarship library upstairs; we have opportunities to work with some of the research librarians. There’s also a lot of traffic here, so we’re able to meet a lot of students who use the library. We can collaborate with a lot of different people from this location. Q: Is that something new for you? In the past did you ever have this amount of communication available? A: In the past, with the thinktank, because we were housed in an academic tutoring center we were able to make those kinds of connections. This sort of environment poses some challenges for Writing Centers, -- “What can we achieve across different disciplines? – so that’s a kind of collaboration I’m looking forward to developing here, too. Q: What have been some of your most recent projects, just before coming to Rowan? A: I just finished my degree in Rhetoric Composition and Teaching of English, from the University of Arizona – which is a very large public university. We do see lots of students from all walks of life and all different disciplines. That was the university with the Writing Center embedded in the tutoring center, the one we were able to work with a lot of people across faculty lines. I was also a teacher as a graduate student, and I taught many different sections of composition, from basic writing to advanced composition – which is good experience to have coming to Rowan. I also do a lot of work in community archiving and community literacy, which is another interest of mine. Q: Was there anything in particular that you noticed you wanted to improve upon when you came to Rowan? What areas do you want to see the Writing Center grow in? A: What I’m seeing now that I’ve been here for a month is that this Writing Center is supported by the Writing Arts department, which means that we have a very robust community of student writers and professors who are very focused and interested in working with the community to improve writing. We have some amazing tutors, and I’d love for our tutors to be recognized for their work, so we’ll be working on a rigorous process of certification for the Writing Center for the College Reading and Language Association. Through that, our Writing Center can be recognized and our tutors can receive certification on different levels for the work that they do, notably on a national level. Those are some of our ongoing projects. Also, given my past experience in Writing Centers, I value the collaborative relationships we can build between this department and other departments and disciplines on campus. I’d like to start better serving some students who are also working in the College of Communication and Creative Arts; for example, students who work with texts that aren’t necessarily written, but are rather visual or aural, or other mixed media projects. I’d like to see how we could work with those students on their projects, and how we can train our students to take that on and improve our services overall in that dimension. I want to use the Writing Center to improve our presence nationally, because I think there are a lot of approaches to teaching writing here that we can highlight in showing other Writing Centers how we work. Also, I’d like to see both undergraduate and graduate students conducting research from the Writing Center, and align ourselves with some larger university goals and see how we can become a part of that. Q: How do you feel about the atmosphere here? A: We have a really nice setup, one that really reflects the kind of work we do here. There are the seminar rooms, for small group tutoring, and tables to encourage one-on-one sessions or larger groups; there’s a lot about the layout that’s conducive to what we do already. I can never find my ideas about what the Writing Center can do based on the physical nature of the space, but I think that the space and the work we do reflect each other nicely. |
Stay tuned for next month's featured interview.
SPRING 2016 COURSE SELECTIONStudents, don't forget to meet with your advisor for Spring 2016 course selections. Your advisor is listed in Banner Services, under your GRAD report.
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QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, OR FEEDBACK?
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The Writer's Insider is a new publication that works to inform and to inspire the community of writers at Rowan University. As illustrated by its title, The Writer's Insider seeks to instill a sense of being "inside" the community, as all writers are welcome to join in the tradition of creativity here at Rowan University.