Open Mic Nights Planned

Sigma Tau Delta will be hosting an open mic event each month in Eagle's Landing. Please sign up to read your own creative work or even a poem/short story that speaks to you, even if it's by someone else. Readings for each person will be 5 minutes. Here are the dates: 

• Wednesday, October 4th, 9-10pm
• Wednesday, November 1st, 9-10pm
• Wednesday, December 6th, 9-10pm

Sign ups are on a first come, first served basis here. 

Intern Learns Day-to-Day Operations of Department Publications

By Julia Swanson-Hines, English and Creative Writing major

Julia Swanson-Hines (center), along with Emily Wirtz (left) and Amanda Wise (right)

Most people think of publishing as simply just the process of getting a manuscript from screen to a book in print, but there’s much more to it, especially when it’s a journal such as River Teeth (www.riverteethjournal.com) or a publishing establishment such as the Ashland Poetry Press (www.ashlandpoetrypress.com). There are the smaller, but just as important pieces to the puzzle, without which the whole picture is lost.

One of the more surprising things when I first started working at my internship was the process of subscriptions. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that, of course, someone would have to manually enter each subscription into a database that then forms a list of who will receive the upcoming issue of River Teeth. There’s the check requests, deposit forms, refiling cabinets, shredding paper, sending out mail, and preparing the large shipments of River Teeth once the issue is ready to be sent out, which involves taking one of the shrink-wrapped books and sticking on a label with an address. Rinse and repeat one hundred times, making sure to keep the books in numerical order by zip code.

For the Ashland Poetry Press, there’s also the printing of hundreds of pages of manuscripts, sifting through lists of submitters’ materials, and its own personal mail account, as well as a current job I’m working on of entering this year’s book contest winner, Michael Miller, in national contests in the hopes of garnering him some awards for his worthy piece, Asking the Names, published by the Ashland Poetry Press.

While that may sound unappealingly menial, I love it. I love being able to contribute to the smaller things that keep the machine whirring but that most people forget about.

As I went through my months working with Cassy Brown, Managing Editor of River Teeth and the Ashland Poetry Press, she eventually could give me more thoughtful work, such as contributing to the River Teeth website in the form of formatting a certain type of post that is popular on the website: the “Beautiful Things” column (www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/beautiful-things). People submit a work under 250 words—so it’s a piece of flash fiction geared towards something they construe as beautiful in some way. It’s a fantastic way at getting a look at what all types of people—not just authors—think, experience, and write.

Being more interested in the copy-editing/proofreading side of publishing, I luckily have been given opportunities by Cassy to proofread many different types of things—from newsletters to article posts.

Again, while my internship may not sound particularly glamorous, it’s composed of working on separate tasks that maintain the foundation of River Teeth and the Ashland Poetry Press alike. Because I’m able to contribute in seemingly small ways while also learning so much surrounding different aspects of the publishing world, I couldn’t possibly ask for a better internship.

River Teeth Essays on Best American Essays Notable List

From the River Teeth website:

Congratulations to the authors of the four River Teeth essays listed on this year's Best American Essays list of Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction for 2016. 

"If Woman Is Five" by Sonja Huber (Spring 2016, vol. 18.1)
"Thieves" by Jerald Walker (Spring 2016, vol. 18.1)
"Five Autobiographical Fragments or She May Have Been a Witch" by David Lazar (Fall 2016, vol. 18.2)
"Unpinned" by Heather Gemmen Wilson (Fall 2016, vol. 18.2)

Congratulations also goes to River Teeth Associate Editor and Beautiful Things co-editor Sarah Wells whose essay "The Body Is Not a Coffin" (Under the Gum Tree, April 2016) also appeared on this year's list.

Editors for the 2017 edition of Best American Essays were Robert Atwan and Leslie Jamison.

Dr. Sharleen Mondal Publishes Scholarly Article

Dr. Sharleen Mondal’s article, “Hindu Widows as Religious Subjects: The Politics of Christian Conversion and Revival in Colonial India,” has been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Women’s History, a publication that accepts only 8% of the manuscripts submitted and is considered to be one of the top journals in its field. 

Dr. Mondal describes the article, which takes an interdisciplinary approach: 

This project examines the social reform efforts of Hindu widows in India who converted to Christianity, and in particular, high-caste Hindu women in Maharashtra associated with widow and convert Pandita Ramabai. Drawing on a postsecularist framework which resists reading the religious as necessarily separate from the secular, the article argues that Ramabai’s reform work, articulated through Christian conversion, contributed significantly to the emergence of feminism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India.

Congratulations, Dr. Mondal!