Ashland English majors hold First Open Mic Night of Spring 2020

The Ashland English majors held the first Open Mic night of the semester on Tuesday, Jan. 29. 

Students from the English department read from their original work. 

The remaining Spring 2020 Open Mic Nights are scheduled for 2/25, 3/24 and 4/19, all at 7 pm in the Eagles Landing.

Kellie Pleshinger

Emily Beaver

Sara Ludwig

Deborah Fleming's book chosen as finalist for PEN America Foundation Art of the Essay Award

Professor of English Deborah Fleming's book Resurrection of the Wild is one of five books chosen as finalists for the PEN America  Foundation Art of the Essay Award, also called the Diamondstein/Spielvogel Award.  PEN Foundation Awards attract hundreds of submissions from publishers.   The other four finalists were published by large New York publishing houses including Random House and Little Brown.  

Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others. Our strength is our Membership—a nationwide community of more than 7,200 novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission.

• PEN America formed on April 19, 1922, in New York City and included among its founding Members writers such as Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost, Ellen Glasgow, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Benchley, and, as the first president, Booth Tarkington. PEN America’s launch followed by a year the founding of PEN International in London by Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott, a British poet, playwright, and peace activist who enlisted the novelist and playwright John Galsworthy as PEN International’s first president. The intent, in the wake of World War I, was to foster international literary fellowship among writers that would transcend national and ethnic divides. PEN America subscribes to the PEN International Charter.

• Many notable writers are past or present Members of PEN America. A small sampling includes Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edward Albee, Maya Angelou, Paul Auster, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Teju Cole, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Roxane Gay, Langston Hughes, Barbara Kingsolver, Norman Mailer, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lynn Nottage, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Richard Russo, Sam Shepard, Susan Sontag, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler, Colson Whitehead, and many more. 

Poet Paige Webb to give reading at AU on Feb. 6

Poet Paige Webb to give reading at AU on Feb. 6 4 p.m. in Ronk (SCOE)

- Paige Webb, administrative director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program and managing editor of publications at Ashland University, will give a poetry reading Thursday, Feb. 6 at 4 p.m. in Ronk Lecture Hall inside the Schar College of Education. The event is free and open to the public.

Webb’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Portland Review, Vinyl and on the Academy of American Poets website. Her chapbook, Tussle, was recently released by dancing girl press.

Webb’s work has received an Academy of American Poets Award, the Howard Nemerov Award in Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. A graduate of the Washington University in St. Louis MFA program, she also co-curates the reading series Paging Columbus at Two Dollar Radio HQ in Columbus.

Alumni Spotlight: Daniel O' Brien

By Daniel O'Brien, class of 2009, Integrated Language Arts major

O'Brien and wife Kristin

As I round the corner onto Bank Street, passing under my neighbor’s friendly old maple tree, I squint ahead to the crest of the hill as hints of frost sparkle over the pavement. The morning sun climbs the horizon at my back, painting the morning sky with fresh scarlet, rich aubergine, and searing orange.

It’s quiet during these walks to work.

Passing through neighborhoods, I mostly manage to miss kids being hauled to school and the rush of others to their workplaces. Although, the rush in a small town like Ashland is something which I am still settling back into. I wasn’t planning to return to Ohio. I’ve been fortunate enough to see the sun crest over mountains in Japan while I taught on mission with the Wakakusa English Program, over bustling cities with their blaring traffic while backpacking in Thailand, and most recently, on the heels of a move from Raleigh, North Carolina, back to my home state.

I first came to Ashland as an undergrad to pursue a degree in English education. While it took me a long time to find my footing in the realm of education, I was always at home in the English department here. My professors intentionally connected with us in memorable ways. Whether it was Dr. Brown tacking my “Transcedental-palooza!” sketch from the top of my old test outside her office door, Dr. Weaver inviting us in groups to his home to discuss papers from our Major Writers: Dostoevsky class, or Dr. Donatini working tirelessly to induct us into Sigma Tau Delta, our professors made sure we were known and valued. These experiences transcended the classroom. Dr. John Stratton somehow managed to make a Grammar and Usage class – diagramming sentences included – fun, like a puzzle, in a way that would impact me to view language as something to play around with and feel free to fail at; a skill that would serve me well in learning Japanese as a foreigner living in rural Japan.

When I reentered the United States after three years of teaching and missions work, I knew I wanted to shift into a different role. I moved to North Carolina to earn a Masters degree in Information and Library Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Librarianship is service- and people-oriented, organizational and detail-rich, technological in today’s digital landscape and, with a background in education, I could easily transition into the role of a school media specialist. It was a good fit.

In the span of a summer I married Kristin, an English teacher from Georgia, and we began work at GRACE Christian School in Raleigh, NC. As a media specialist in the middle of the Research Triangle, I worked with the school administration and IT department to update their library into a more modern community space, worked alongside the 7th - 12th grade teachers to integrate technology with their lessons, connected kids with books that would encourage them to fall in love with reading, and provided instruction on best research practices for our students. I taught lessons on fake news and how to evaluate information, helped manage a grant that the Computer Science department received during my final year there, and worked with the English teachers to help create a school-wide culture that promotes reading. While the work was frenetic, it was also fantastic, and it was a community in which I was completely invested.

Unexpectedly, during the December of our third year working at GRACE, my father had some serious health issues. Living long distance while my father recovered for a year afterward made us realize we wanted to be closer to family. And while his recovery was remarkable, we still sensed it was time for us to move. Kristin and I told our boss we would not renew our contracts after the next school year ended, and we discovered our path back to Ohio in pieces over the next several months.

I transitioned away from school media librarianship to begin work at the seminary library here in Ashland. We purchased our first house instead of finding another apartment for rent. Kristin found an English teaching position at a school in Mansfield. Our orange tabby cat, Canyon, endured an agonizingly long car ride through the mountains of West Virginia, which would take him several days to recover from. The transition back to Ohio is still ongoing, and is a year of “firsts” for us, but it feels good to be back.

I can take the interpersonal skills I’ve gained overseas, what I have learned about librarianship, and the digital skills from working in a technology-rich school, and apply all of these to my work at the seminary. I have a fantastic boss and wonderful co-workers who let me know that they value what I do, and that I am appreciated here. I can bring the sum of my experiences back full circle. It’s my turn to pour into the lives of people here, and do what I can to make others feel valued, known, and that they matter. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Miller's An Enemy of the People

Throwback to Sigma Tau Delta attending the production on campus of Arthur Miller's An Enemy of the People in October 2019. 

Students and faculty met for pizza in Bixler for some socializing prior to curtain up.

The play was staged as part of the 13th International Arthur Miller Society's conference at Ashland University (October 18-20th, 2019). The conference brought prominent international scholars of Arthur Miller's work to Ashland University to present new research on this award-winning American Playwright. 

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was born in New York City and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977), The American Clock (1980) and Playing for Time (1980). Later plays include The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998) and Resurrection Blues (2002). Among his other works are Situation Normal (1944), the novel Focus (1945), screenplay The Misfits (1960), and texts for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. Memoirs include ‘Salesman’ in Beijing (1984), and Timebends, an autobiography (1987). Short fiction includes the collection I Don’t Need You Any More (1967), the novella Homely Girl, a Life (1995) and Presence: Stories (2007). Essay collections published in his lifetime include The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1978) and Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944–2000, as well as individually published volumes ‘The Crucible’ in History (2000) and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He was awarded the Avery Hopwood Award for Playwriting at University of Michigan in 1936.  He twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, received two Emmy Awards and three Tony Awards for his plays, as well as a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.  He was named Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. Among other honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award (http://www.arthurmiller.org/)

Although Miller died in 2005, he was the most-produced playwright on Broadway in the last decade (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Scribe-Stats-Broadways-Most-Produced-Playwrights-Of-the-Decade-20191222). These stats do not include the many regional and student productions of Miller's work held every year (arthurmillersociety.net).