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Notes & Quotes

    Staff Notes…

    by Max Shenk, Periodicals Assistant

    YES, IT IS ART...

    Periodicals clerk, Darren Clossin, has an unusual hobby—one that combines his artistic talent with a passion for autograph collecting. Darren draws a sketch of a celebrity and then sends the sketch to that person with a letter, requesting an autograph. He now has a collection of over 400 signed drawings of politicians, Presidents, sports figures, war heroes, actors, musicians, and other personalities from every imaginable walk of life.

    While he’s snared some big names (Charlton Heston, Hank Aaron, Jonas Salk, Ray Charles, George Bush, Charles Schulz, Harper Lee), the most interesting names are those with unusual claims to fame: over his sketch of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby, Darren obtained the autograph of James Leavell (the detective who was handcuffed to Oswald when Oswald was shot); and recently Darren received a signed drawing from baseball player Bill Werber, who is the last surviving teammate of Babe Ruth as well as the first batter to appear on a televised baseball game.

    While these unique pieces would doubtlessly fetch high prices on the collectors’ market, Darren has a single word answer to the question “Would you ever sell them?” – “No!”

    STAFF PICKS: WHAT WE’RE READING

    Janet Perry : “The best book I have read recently was The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. The book reads like a modern classic, with characters far from those so often found these days. It features a fascinating look into student life on a small-town campus, as well as an interesting relationship between students and professor.” Jan adds that The Secret History is available from the West Campus Library.

    Marie Devine: “Elizabeth George: With No One As Witness. This is a British mystery in a long series, with continuing characters; written by an American! As good as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.”

    Max Shenk: “When The Smoke Cleared At Gettysburg by George Sheldon and This Is Holy Ground by Barbara Platt. Sheldon’s book is mainly about the immediate aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg, while Platt’s book is about the long-term effects of the battle on the town, and all of the struggles that have occurred there since.”

    Robert Erb regularly intercepts books on their way through cataloging, the most recent two being David Brooks’ On Paradise Drive and Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping. Both of these books come highly recommended and, of course, are available to check out from the library.

    Darlene Bentley started exploring the works of J.R.R. Tolkien after seeing the Lord of the Rings movie, and has read Tolkien’s original Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. She, also, has recently read Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe, a novel on which a 1953 film starring Victor Mature was based. All of three books are “read in the car at the stoplights” absorbing, according to Darlene.


    My Experience as a Full-time Graduate Student Working in the Library

    by Max Shenk
    Periodicals Assistant, Brendlinger Library
    and student, Goddard College

    If anybody would have told me a year ago that I’d be a full-time graduate student while working full-time in the library, I would have said “O.K, yeah, sure... and study piano, volunteer at the orphanage, wait tables a couple nights, AND run a successful home business, right?”

    But I’m doing it, somehow... as of this writing, I am through my second semester in the Masters of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at Goddard College.

    Although I’ve always been interested in writing and have been working on a novel for the past four years, I never really thought that a masters program in creative writing was for me. I dismissed the idea when a friend of mine asked me if I’d ever considered it. I remember my exact words: “Why would I take two years going to school for writing when I could use those two years and just WRITE?” Four months after that conversation, I was enrolled at Goddard.

    Goddard College (in Plainfield Vermont) pioneered the low-residency MFA in creative writing. At the beginning of each semester (January and July) students converge on the rural campus for a week and a half of seminars, workshops, readings, and meetings with their advising groups (and late-night gatherings in the music building). It’s definitely a non-traditional group of students: my closest friends in the program are a Montessori teacher who earns extra cash waiting tables; an owner of a Vermont bed and breakfast who also works for Federal Express; and an Alabama poet who considers himself a fundamentalist Christian but enrolled at Goddard because “if I’d gone to school down south, I would have just met more people like me, and what good would that have done me?”

    The camaraderie came quickly --I literally met my two best friends in the program as I was unpacking my car-- and I immediately felt like part of the community. “Welcome to your creative writing program,” the director of the program, Paul Selig, said at our orientation. “You are in the right place.” I felt like I was.

    The first few days of the first residency were a little tough, looking at all of the other students and thinking “These people are so talented and brilliant; what am I doing here?” This feeling dissipated at lunch one day, though, when a fellow student said “You know, sometimes I see the rest of the students here and I think ‘these people are so talented and brilliant; what am I doing here?” and everyone else at the table said “Me, too...” except for one guy at the end of the table, who sat back and said, “Well, I am talented and brilliant; what are YOU all doing here?”

    After the residency ends, the semester’s work begins. At Goddard, the coursework is submitted to our advisors through the mail in packets: five packets per semester (one every three weeks), with about 60 pages of work in each packet, a combination of creative work (in my case, fiction: an epistolary novel), text annotations and critical essays. It took me about a semester and a half to finally take the words of my advisor (Nicola Morris) to heart: “You’re worrying too much about the critical writing. This is not a critical writing degree with a creative component; it’s a creative writing degree with a critical component.” My interactions with Nicky and my friends in the program have been the great intangible that I didn’t anticipate when I made my proclamation about “why study writing when I could just write”? Their feedback and support and guidance are what make the program worthwhile for me.

    My friends at Goddard envy my day job: “It must be great to work around books,” they say, and I’m sure they picture me sitting at a desk in the stacks, reading All Of The Great Works in blissful silence, with pauses to write and --oh yeah--help students. But reality is a little different. No, make that “a lot”. The bustle of the library’s main floor is far from the idyllic image many of my fellow students hold in their minds. A typical morning at the periodicals desk offers more than enough distraction, and certainly precludes the concentration needed to perform any creative work or sustained reading. I keep my notebook and manuscript handy in case I get a flash of inspiration, and my fellow students and advisors are never more than an email away. But inspiration, if it’s going to strike, usually has to wait for my lunch hour, or after work (although I’m partial to writing before work, while it’s still dark and I’m still mentally fresh).

    Is it worth it? I feel like just two semesters have made me not only a better writer, but a better person. The “blocks” I’ve discovered in my work are less “writer’s block” than they are bad habits and ingrained tendencies. My grad work has forced me to come face to face with my own limitations and, if the end result of my process means anything to me, find solutions. At times (especially during the week before my packet is due) it can get a little overwhelming, and I get trapped in a cycle of write-work-sleep-write-work-sleep a little too easily.

    But when I realize that the most stressful part of the program for me is knowing that I only have two semesters left after this one, I know that, yes, it’s been well worth it.

    LINKS:
    * Goddard College on the Internet: http://www.goddard.edu

    * A sample of Max’s work for his Masters thesis was published in the Spring 2005 issue of Goddard’s literary magazine Pitkin In Progress, online at http://web.goddard.edu/pitkin/2005_spring/toc.htm.