Connect, Collaborate, Create
December 24, 2011 Leave a comment
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Connect, Collaborate, Create
December 24, 2011 Leave a comment
In Support of Occupy Wall Street
By Zillah Eisenstein and Chandra Talpade Mohanty
“Occupy Wall Street” is an incredible movement even if there is no easily ready-made pre-existing political language to describe it. Its newness—multiple concernsacross the wide-swath of “99 percent of us” that may seem unfocused—is really not. Instead we see decades of lead up work done by the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the 1970’s women’s movement, all forms of anti-racist feminist activism of the `90’s, gay rights activism, AIDS organizing, anti-globalization/anti-militarization mobilization, the labor, immigrant, and peace movements, and so on… OWS is its own new form/less inclusive frame coalescing around the shared—however differently—suffering and vulnerability of a growing number of us. Some say that OWS is a result of the attack on the middle class(es) that has created a huge swath of economic suffering that connects us/them with the poor, and the working classes of all sorts, and students, and Tahrir Square, and….
Millions of people are in need—of food, of medical care, of housing, of education, of…. Such persistent need is frightening and also maddening. There is massive disappointment amidst more and more hard working individuals. It seems as though everyone is asked to work harder and then harder again with not much result
or easing of their pain. If someone has been lucky enough to hold on to their job, it is not the job they used to have—there is always more to be done because a co-worker has been fired,or hired more cheaply.
This disheartening condition affects people across the age divides. People in their 50s and 60s are losing their jobs and cannot find other work. Those in their 20s
and 30s cannot find their first ones. Then there are citizens who have been disenfranchised all together for decades and now are relegated to the prison and felon system. And then there are those denied an education and health services because they are “undocumented.”
These times are disheartening and heartbreaking in newly excessive ways. The excesses of the rich and corporate/government brokers have become so unconscionable that people from the center and the right and the left—whatever these categories mean today—are coming together to say that this is enough: “Basta!”
Maybe the bankers and their cronies have finally done their own unraveling. They have exposed themselves to the rest of the U.S. public across people’s differing needs and histories. The vulnerability is palpable and cuts through and across class lines. People at Liberty Square in New York City see themselves as autonomous political beings—not necessarily belonging to traditional political organizations. They are there in solidarity with others who feel the same way about corporate greed and the vulnerable disenfranchised.
We are thinking that what is wonderful besides the obvious, is that the so-called 99 percent seem so far able to embrace a shared collectively despite differences of history–in class, sex, gender, race, ability, health, and so on. But as OWS moves forward to include more than 30 states and for almost a month now it might be important to begin to make clear what the many strategies will be for naming the issues. If ever there was a moment to move with these differences together, and not be splintered by them, this is it. This moment reminds us of the huge presence of women in Tahrir square and yet these women’s insistence to stand with a shared collective demand for human rights for all. We are thinking it is important for many, and for more of us to make public statements of support for OWS that recognizes the massive challenges ahead while also embracing the joy of creating a new inclusivity.
OWS has a first ‘official’ statement that calls attention to the mass injustice of today; of the illegal foreclosures, and perpetual inequality and discrimination of age, color, sex, and gender identity; the poisoning of the food supply; the outsourcing of labor; the destruction of the education system; the huge student loan debt; the torture and murder of innocents; colonialism at home and abroad, a system hell bent on weapons of mass destruction. Finally, millions of people are coming together to say: we need a fair and socially just society; end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; forgive the mortgage debt and student debt; extend unemployment benefits, create jobs by investing in infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and our public schools; create a single payer health care program; send the banking crooks to jail. It is a time for our polyversal embrace and support of each other across all differences. It is time to make them listen to the “99 percent.” It may also be time to begin to mobilize this discontent towards specific ends. What of demanding that Obama and Congress, together, openly commit to curtailing corporate power and its excesses and redirect the agenda to the health and economic rights of the “99 percent”?
OWS reveals that imagination is the most subversive thing a public can have. If we can imagine a more “civil” and compassionate way to live we can act on it. It is this ongoing social experiment of living together in community, sharing resources, honoring differences and interdependencies while building a common vision of justice for all that is most remarkable about the OWS movement. This is the big “we”; the big “we” of us all who are suffering and have the courage to stand up to the one percent.
This movement is a beginning and it has begun. Now OWS needs actions that show collective and shared power across the national landscape. How about this: perhaps one collective action can be a call for a general strike by all people of all sorts and types to not work or consume on a given day. Food should be contributed by all who can do so until this day if action. And on this day food could be distributed through food banks and schools and churches, and mosques and synagogues. Redistribution will begin at this moment by the “99 percent” who can do so.
It is necessary to continue to coalesce and go forward, together. These next steps will allow us to see and find new expressions of collective action against corporate greed. These are unsettled times and the OWS movement is hugely important because it assists and mobilizes our humanity to fight back, and to do this together. The colorful placards in Liberty Square say it all: “Fight Like an Egyptian”; “Don’t Trade Our Futures for Yours”; “Arise and Seize the Day”; AND also, “One Earth, One Humanity, One Love!”
So make your sign and claim the public space: “I am brown and female and part of the 99%”; “I am undocumented and part of the 99%”; “I am indigenous and part of the original 99%”; “I am queer and part of the 99%”; “I am an anti-racist feminist and part of the 99%”; “I am in middle-school and part of the 99%”; “I am in prison and part of the 99%”; “I am a medical student and part of the 99%; “I am homeless and part of the 99%”; “ I am transgender and part of the 99”; “I am a soldier and part of the 99%; “I am a college student in debt and part of the 99%”; “I have no medical insurance and part of the 99%”. Say it; and do it and make this moment happen again and again.
– Contributed by Guest Contributor to:
October 14, 2011
Connect, Collaborate, Create
December 24, 2011 Leave a comment
Dmitri Mendeleev’s Sketchbook
By Liam Curley
It’s not every day that a chemical reaction and a brushstroke are so closely met in our thoughts. Only last Spring, did two professors, art historian Gary Wells and chemist Mike Haaf, join forces to teach “Chemistry & Art” at Ithaca College and bring both subjects into perspective. The course was open to all majors on campus and the syllabus was designed to allow the fields of chemistry and art history to be in discussion with each other for at least the entire semester. It wasn’t always easy.
Wells thinks mostly about modern art, where surrealism came from, and how the night sky looks in 19th century paintings, but recently he’s gotten into technology and science as a way to approach the physicality of art: what a brush does, what paint is. He’s wanted to pass this on to his students.
“I wanted them to understand something of the history of art as a history of materials and technologies,” Wells said. “My hope is that those students who make art will be more knowledgeable about the history of the materials they work with, and the non-art students will have a better understanding of the objects they look at, both as historical artifacts and as material objects.”
Haaf thinks science is also a field that rests on technologies, from a microscope to a catalyst, and this is what science and art have most in common and can lend each other, their use of tools.
In “Chemistry & Art,” for example, the class looks at art conservation and how to attribute a painting. This gets down to the minutia that artists agonize over and chemists revel in, and is probably where the two fields come together most naturally, where one has a need for the other.
“But it’s really almost impossible to prove exactly who did what,” Haaf explains, “and even when you know for sure it’s actually easier to disprove it isn’t someone’s.”
So chemists will make leaps when and where they can in art, he says. They can tell you what makes a sky blue different from a blue jean blue, the chemical composition of a pigment. “I can tell you how linseed oil helps the color stay,” he says. “A chemist can tell you why paint,” Haaf makes little scare quotes with his fingers, “dries.” These tools in chemistry become an artist’s tools, a way into their own work they may have never used before.
But what’s in it for a chemist? Maybe it’s the challenge. Haaf says that it is art attribution and restoration that bring together a set of a chemist’s skills, and applies them outside the lab. For Haaf, it also engages different sub-disciplines of his own field, like forensic chemistry, that he’s not used to working in.
Haaf teaches organic chemistry, and has co-written papers with head-scratchers for names, like “Synthesis and reactivity of the stable silylene N, N’-di-tert-butyl-1,3-diaza-2-sila-2-ylidene.”
But that ability to not be easily understood or communicated is also something that art and science have in common: someone might look at that sentence above and see a jumble of words the same way someone else might look Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and see a jumble of lines.
But Haaf admits there can often be miscommincation not about but between the art and science. Before going into the class he thought there were some points that would just never translate. In restoration there are examples, such as in the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel’s frescos, where the restoration’s relative success may interfere with the artist’s intent and technique. In attribution it can get equally complicated. “A chemist will say ‘well, if I could take this paint chip, I could tell you everything you need to know.’ And the art historian will be up in arms over the sanctity of that paint chip.”
What finally convinced Haaf, though, was a sketchbook–Dmitri Mendeleev’s, the creator of the periodic table of elements. “You think it’s a given ‘oh, it’s just this table whatever,’” Haaf says. “But contained within each block is so much information about the world we live in on such a basic and profound level.
“And when Mendeleev sat down to figure this out, you can see how unsure he was. It was a process. He kept a list in his notes. Each chemical element had its place in the table, and as he found it, he would cross it off. But sometimes there was logically room for another element where there was none, and he would leave a space, because he knew something had to go there, that there was an element that had yet to be discovered. And of course, he was right.”
This type of beauty, when everything seems to align, is ultimately what holds science and art together, that puts the raveled rainbow back on the swift, so to speak.
“When you hold that notebook side by side with poetry, something like William Blake’s early drafts of “The Tyger,” you see that same struggle,” Haaf says. “‘This line will go here—no, there.’ It is the same trial and error. On paper they look almost exactly the same.”
December 8, 2011 Leave a comment
Linked:
U.S. History in the Digital Medium
By Caitlin Ghegan
History is not a straight line of dates and facts. Michael Smith, a professor from the departments of History and Environmental Studies, explains, “Facts out of context are pretty empty.” This idea was the motivation behind his new project, “Untangling the Web.” For three semesters, Smith and Ali Erkan, of the Computer Science Department, have been thinking of history as a series of interconnected events and ideas, spanning time and geographical location. With the help of several departments across campus, the two have implemented a way of learning that requires students to create and analyze their own Wiki sites. Smith and Erkan are looking for the connections that exist between these links to better understand the way humans learn and associate ideas…
Q) It’s evident to both students and faculty that technology plays a growing role in the learning process. How do you personally think Computer Science has impacted History and/or other subjects? How did your personal beliefs compare to the observations you made in the Untangling the Web project?
A) In the context of the “Untangling the Web” project, we are using wikis as well as a few visualization generators that we (including Drew Winston who graduated in May 2011) created. These are software systems developed by programmers (some/many holding Computer Science degrees), constructed with the tools and techniques developed by computer scientists, made available to anyone who would like to use them. So, this is probably the most direct impact. A deeper and more important impact has to do with the ways-of-thinking that Computer Science exports to other disciplines. Thinking and reasoning in multi-dimensional terms, for example, is a skill that Computer Science can bring to History (in particular) and to a liberal education (in general). What Michael and I are trying to do is to instill such rigorous forms of thinking and learning in a humanistic context, with the aid of technology (i.e. at the end, technology is not at the center of our focus).
I am not sure if I had any specific beliefs going into the project (other than knowing that multi-disciplinary collaborations are almost always worth it) but I certainly had hopes and assumptions. Each of the three semesters we tested our ideas taught us something new and allowed us to refine our research questions. At this point (which is before we start the funded part of our work), we have evidence to indicate that we are making progress in the right direction. For example, students realize that history is more of a web of knowledge rather than a linear arrangement of facts. Our plan is to explore (in unambiguous terms) the extent to which this realization is a consequence of the use of wikis (as opposed to other important factors such as what the instructor does, who the students are, etc) since wikis explicitly allow students to arrange historic information as a web.
I have a side comment regarding the statement “technology plays a growing role in the learning process”. I think technology applied for the sake of technology is a dangerous thing. I have seen instructors open minds with nothing but a piece of chalk on a blackboard. And I have seen technology add to nothing more than a distraction when used without a proper pedagogical framework. So, I think it is very important for educators and administrators to assess the actual benefits of technology before believing in it. Perhaps the most fundamental question for anyone experimenting with the use of technology in the classroom is whether the associated change is actually making students think better. And the response to this question must be based on systematically gathered evidence.
Q) Describe the process of working with Michael Smith, a professor in the Departments of History and Environmental Studies: what was the collaborative process like? Was there anything that you learned or that you took from this project?
A) First, working with Michael confirmed that philosophical and pedagogical compatibilities are deeper and more significant than disciplinary associations when engaging in collaborative work. Second, Michael (through conversations as well as his lectures) made me appreciate the complexity of the information processed in a History course. Third, he helped me contextualize various computing ideas in a humanistic framework. For example, I often use the phrase “multi-dimensional thinking”; but it was after my interactions with Michael that this phrase made more sense, even to myself.
Q) From my understanding, the goal of the Untangling the Web project was to figure out how to best facilitate new kinds of interconnected learning. Do you think that other courses at Ithaca College have responded or will respond to this project in terms of Wiki use? Do you think that you or other professors will try to create or experiment with new forms of digital learning modules in the future?
A) The very first trial of this idea was through a course taught by Michael Twomey of the English department. As a consequence of when courses get taught, subsequent trials took place in History but I am sure Michael Twomey and I could have explored the use of wikis in a different subject matter, with different group sizes, instructional priorities, etc. Whenever information is arranged as a web, wikis can be used as an authoring tool that captures relational complexity. I imagine Michael and I will be interested in trying out some of our ideas in an environmental studies/sciences context as well.
Q) I extend to you belated, yet full-hearted congratulations on your Fullbright fellowship in Istanbul. That is such an incredible achievement and your project sounds absolutely fascinating. How did you choose to work on this particular project? What first sparked your interest in creating an open source Geographic Information System? How do you feel this system will contribute to international, scholarly collaborations?
A) The project idea was born from the intersection of a curiosity and an educational need at Ithaca College. In terms of the curiosity, I always wondered why different cultures have such different takes on important chapters in world history. Of course I am not being oblivious of cultural biases and so on, but I often wondered the extent to which we diverge in our analysis because we are simply working off of different sets of information (without even knowing it). The educational need was based on the observation that dealing with spatial data is a growing need for our campus. The idea to use open source was to make sure that everyone (not just those who can afford it) could make use of what comes out. The Fulbright project become a context to work on all this, to produce a set of tools that eliminates the need to have a computer scientist around as well as a wallet to cover the bills for licensing fees. If I can do what I hope to do, these tools will allow scholars (historians, sociologists, etc) from different disciplines to converge to a single point to arrange/layer their spatial data; what comes out will be a matter of what they notice when they look at these layers.
December 6, 2011 Leave a comment
American Fingertips in Paris
By Jessie Mitchell
Professor O'Connell "sketching" the original siting of the Tour Saint Jacques
In the summer of 2010, two professors from the Art History Department co-taught a ten-day course called “Art and Politics in Paris: Reading Power in Space and Image” for the first time—in Paris. The course was the brainchild of Jennifer Germann, an art historian, and Lauren O’Connell, an architecture historian, whose different specialties converged at their connection to political power. Because the concept of space was so important to this course, Germann and O’Connell designed a short-term study abroad program that would allow students to walk through and stand in the shadows of the artwork they were studying—a different, more engaging experience than staring at slides on a projector screen.
The course’s maiden voyage went well; the itinerary was met, no one got lost, and no one disappeared on the back of a moped. However, the two professors agreed that the level of student engagement, already heightened by being in the presence of these buildings and pieces of art, could be even higher. “There’s enormous value in walking the spaces of a château,” says O’Connell, “but time was very compressed, and the students found it difficult to keep up with assigned readings for each day.” The professors had successfully transported their course beyond the classroom, but they were still in large measure the “transmitters” of information, which they provided with their required readings and on-site talks. Their goal for the next course became breaking down this barrier, urging students to actively figure things out for themselves. One way of doing this, they realized, was to make the course truly interactive. “Lauren and I thought,” says Germann, “that it would be exciting to think about new uses of technology on the ground in a course where we were surrounded by what we were studying.”
John Barr, of the Computer Science Department, had been thinking about new uses of technology (particularly Apple technology) for a long time. He had worked with the Art History Department before on virtual panoramas (called Quicktime VRs), which combine individual images of a building’s interior to create a more life-like, three-dimensional perspective of that space. Barr, a long time Apple user, had been focused on iPads and iPhones since they were first introduced. Last year, he taught a course in iPhone programming. His recent interest in these tools spurred him to ask members of the H&S Curriculum Committee if they had any ideas for iPad apps. Germann, a fellow member, suggested creating something for her summer course, and this is when, as she says simply, “iPad Paris was born.”
An example screen capture of a quiz
The group first met last spring and garnered the interest of two students, Colleen Muldowney and David Banker. Muldowney, a mathematics/computer science double major with a minor in art history, and Banker, a writing major with a computer science minor, applied for an Emerson Foundation grant and a Dana Internship (respectively) to fund their participation in the project. Once the group received the necessary clearance and funding, they began the long process of moving the course out of the classroom and into an iPad app, from the lecture hall to the students’ fingertips.
Since then, Germann and O’Connell have been working closely with Barr, Muldowney, and Banker to create something amazing—an application that holds within it all the resources and materials students need, including highly interactive tests and quizzes, that uses its built-in camera and GPS locator technology to stress the importance of space and location. It isn’t an easy task. “There’s a lot of give and take,” Barr says, “because both parties need to know how to speak the other’s language and know what’s possible.” O’Connell describes it as “challenging, but in a stimulating kind of way.” Without the constant give and take, the project wouldn’t get very far. O’Connell explains: “The computer science people need to get inside the art history people’s heads before they can figure out how best to execute things—we began the collaboration with a crash course in the history of Parisian space and the French monarchy to orient our CS partners to the subject matter. And at the same time, it would do no good for the art history side to think up clever challenges in a vacuum, without knowing whether or not they’re technically conceivable.”
Barr emphasizes the need, in collaborative work like this, to speak the other party’s language. Reflecting on this language barrier, Germann says, “It hasn’t been hard to communicate because the computer scientists have been so curious and enthusiastic about the course and the material.” When there was confusion, they had to stop and think about what they were really saying, how those words might seem like something else entirely to another person. O’Connell laughs about an incident at the very beginning of this project, when she and Germann were describing their course goals to Barr, Muldowney, and Banker using the term, “theoretical frameworks.” To Germann and O’Connell, this seemed like a perfectly transparent phrase, referring to the various conceptual lenses that might be brought to bear on the analysis of a work of art. But Barr had immediately questioned it, because in the realm of computer science, “frameworks” refers to something completely different. Collaborative work like this, as Germann notes, “forces you to think about what you are assuming your audience already knows or understands. It also makes you articulate why your ideas are important.”
Professor Germann explaining frescoes at the entry to the 16th century Palace of Fontainebleau
Muldowney, whose major/minor combination makes her the perfect “bridge” between the worlds of computer science and art history, says the project has allowed her to “refine [her] own knowledge base.” Her ability to see things from both perspectives is crucial in this kind of collaborative work. “I help both parties come to agreements in the middle,” she says, “when something isn’t exactly how they wanted it to be.”
Germann and O’Connell are hoping that the app will heighten student engagement overall, making the learning experience more active. “The app will require them to integrate what they’ve been reading with what they’re seeing, in a very hands-on way,” says O’Connell. “It helps them take advantage of being there physically, figuring out the spaces actively.” Germann adds that students “won’t have to carry a heavy, paper-bound reader” and says that the app “puts more of the learning directly in the students’ hands.” Barr explains that having the course material contained within an app will make it much more accessible, because “you can work wherever you are, whether or not you have an Internet connection.” Of course, Barr, Germann, and O’Connell don’t have to imagine all of these benefits for the students. They are, after all, collaborating with two students, whose opinions of the app are invaluable. Germann says that working with students is helpful, because “it allows faculty to hear a student’s point of view. Students can articulate what students need to succeed.” And at the same time, Muldowney and Banker are learning how to appreciate their instructors. Muldowney says the project has been eye opening, because it’s given her the chance “to experience the ‘other side’ of learning—what professors go through to create courses for us.”
While the app is their first concern, their excitement for creating it may be matched by what O’Connell calls (without wanting to sound too sappy) the joy of learning. For people that immerse themselves in one discipline for years and become professors, the process of learning is intrinsically interesting. “But when you connect with a completely different discipline,” says O’Connell, you “learn new things, like the inner workings of an iPad,; there’s the excitement of dipping into another territory—for us it’s ambrosia.” For O’Connell, this project has already provided the opportunity for new scholarly pursuits, including original research. Instead of requiring the students to relearn all of the information from an article she published five years ago, on a Paris monument the group visits, she pulled together some untapped primary sources (most of which had to be translated from French to English, which was exciting in its own right) and incorporated those sources into the app. With those sources, “laid out on the metaphorical table, the iPad,” students will be able to “construct their own understanding” of the site as it evolved over time instead of merely regurgitating what she has already figured out.
Mock ruin of an ancient colonnade in the Parisian Parc Monceau
And for Muldowney and Banker cross-disciplinary work is a much-needed change in their routines. “I feel that if I hadn’t taken this project to work on,” says Muldowney, “I would really dislike computer science at this point because it is a lot of the same thing (coding, coding, and more coding on projects that really aren’t relevant to me or my other interests).” And later on down the road, their experience with this project will be a huge advantage. Those who create technology have to understand the ambitions and desires of the people who will use it. This project has been an exercise in just that. As Barr notes, “software developers (like Apple) are only successful when they consider how ‘normal’ people might use the programs, how they can be practical and useful in every day life.” Muldowney and Banker’s experience in the iPad Paris project will give them a leg-up on understanding the relationship between the user and the technology interface. What this project shows us, really, is that we need to be a little less narrow in our disciplines to make room for this kind of thinking.
December 6, 2011 Leave a comment
Cross Cultural Collaboration:
Mara Alper on the Making of Visions of the Huichol
By Jacob Brower
Professor Mara Alper first encountered the stunning art of the Huichol (pronounced: WE-chol) tribe as a tourist in Mexico. She became more drawn to t
heir culture and began documenting their lives and rituals over the course of twelve years, she says, a process that became a collaborative effort and resulted in the documentary film Visions of the Huichol.
“My goal,” she said in an email interview, “became helping others understand and appreciate the Huichol way of life and art, especially tourists who bought the art and wanted to understand the symbols used in the exquisite yarn paintings and bead work.”
The collaborative process started with her friend Isabel Jordan, who knew many of the Huichol families and became Alper’s travel partner. Since both speak Spanish as a second language, they were able to interview the tribe’s people and see families and children grow up over the years. Eventually, Alper had “hours of footage,” which required in-person collaboration with both Jordan and the Huichol people to tell the story, as well as Ithaca College alumna Shauna Leff ’99, who helped shooting photos and video. After this process, a number of Ithaca students worked on footage logging and early edits, including alumni Alexis Sexauer ’06 and Emiliano Acevedo ’08, who helped transcribe and translate all the interviews.
“Once this was done, I returned to Mexico to get feedback from Isabel and the Huichol families,” Alper said. “They enjoyed seeing themselves in the video very much!”
To make a bilingual (Spanish-English) version of the DVD, Alper contacted Annette Levine, an associate professor in Modern Languages and Literature to 
assist with subtitling. The process was time consuming, Alper said, and required double-checking with a native Spanish speaker to fix any errors. Creating subtitles was a more complex process than merely translating, according to Alper.
“[Subtitling] is an art unto itself,” she said, “because the actual words need to be translated in a somewhat condensed form so they fit the timing of what is said.”
Once complete, 100 copies of the DVD were made and it screened internationally in Mexico, Japan, and the United States. Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications provided additional funds for 100 copies to be made and provided as gifts to the families in the documentary. In turn, the Huichol people sold the DVDs to interested tourists to help explain the detailed symbols and artistic process used in their colorful art, as seen in the included images.
Alper called the project immensely gratifying. “It was an honor,” she said, “to be accepted and trusted by the Huichol families and welcomed into their everyday lives. To tell the stories of an older culture believed to be the most intact in Mexico gave me insights and deep appreciation for all these older traditions have to teach us.”
The project, she said, would not have been the same without the many degrees of collaboration.
“Collaborating first with the Huichol, then with the students here at IC and Professor Levine, created a synergy not possible when working alone. Collaboration combines individual strengths to create a richer, more complex, outcome.”
Visions of the Huichol from Mara Alper on Vimeo.
December 4, 2011 Leave a comment
Ithaca Is a New Beginning
By Haley Davis
Jennifer Cunningham and a Karen student navigate a book together as a part of her graduate studies in literacy development.
Three years ago a professor at Ithaca College, Dr. Cathrene Connery, began helping a collection of families in Ithaca that had escaped from Burma, a country facing one of the longest running civil wars in history. These families, many of which include young children, are religious and linguistic refugees. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Dr. Connery stepped up to help these families adjust to their new country. “I’m really interested in helping to develop and document the development of language and literacy within the first language and second language,” Connery explains.
With the help of local elementary school teachers, Connery began a program that would not only help the displaced families learn language skills and cultural norms, but also help teach her own graduate students. “On one hand, our students have the opportunity to develop professional proficiencies with their teaching, their planning, even learning how to interact with a parent who doesn’t speak English is a really important skill for developing teachers,” Connery says. “Probably the best part that really impacts my grad students is that the kids are so warm and so appreciative and it allows for students who have not grown up in diverse cultural families to get to know another, instead of the other.”
By this current semester, the project has grown to include 200-300 people, including a local pastor who donates space in her church for tutoring, dentists whoclean the families’ teeth for free, as well as countless community members who donate time, space, and knowledge in any way they can. With new families arriving to Ithaca every summer, community support is essential and also benefits the community members as well. “You really see that [the program] pushes past a lot of cultural boundaries that really don’t need to be there,” Connery explains.
Katie Merry, a Childhood Education graduate student, reads a picture book to K-5th grade children during an after school session.
Currently, Connery and the program’s supporters are working on a variety of projects with the Burmese families, including grant writing to fund an after-school project, tutoring in the schools, and creating a technology program that helps the children develop their reading and writing skills. The community is also celebrating a milestone this year: their oldest student, whose family was one of the first to take refuge in Ithaca, is applying to colleges.
The project has been a success, but there’s no time to slow down now. As long as there are still displaced families in Ithaca, the project will never cease to grow. Meanwhile, the project continues to inspire everyone that participates in it. “It really helps to push past the limitations that people have placed on us in terms of race, class, gender, and to see the joy of a child and to be able to touch that and inspire that,” she explains. “In doing so, we realize how human we all are.”
December 4, 2011 Leave a comment
From Conception to Co-Editing
By Amelia Blevins
Novelists Eleanor Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) and Anna Solomon (The Little Bride) have begun collaborating on an, as of yet untitled, anthology of birth stories. They agreed to sit down with Tandem Magazine‘s Amelia Blevins to discuss the process…
Tandem Magazine: Can you give me a bit of background on how you started writing, and how you came to start a project like this?
Eleanor Henderson: I began writing fiction. We’re both fiction writers. I got my MFA in fiction, never considered myself to be an essay writer, certainly not an editor of an essay anthology. So I never felt I was working toward a project like this. It sort of approached us as a surprise. As we were working on our novels we had babies, and I was actually toward the end of my pregnancy with my first son, so this was three and a half years ago. And I was talking to Anna and to another friend of ours, Christina Enriquez. And we all met at Bread Loaf [Writers’ Conference] 2005 and we all became parents and writers kind of together.
Henderson with her son Nico
Anna and Christina had recently had babies so I asked them for their birth stories, essentially, and was asking a lot of friends for birth stories, and naturally the best stories came from writers who had been through the process. I wanted to know all of the really gory details, like what happens when you go into labor, what does it feel like, emotionally and physically, what can I expect? I was the sort of pregnant person and mother who was just very engrossed in the process of being a pregnant person and mother, which I don’t think everybody is. But I was very into it and very amazed by the process of being a carrier of life. And Anna, who had just had a daughter a few months before, produced this beautiful four page essay, which was more than I could have asked for, really detailing her birth story. It was a beautiful essay that not only answered my question of “how far apart are your contractions…” but really strung together a wonderful narrative about giving birth in the way that only a fiction writer could – although we’ve invited essays not just from fiction writers.
But as soon as she produced that essay, and Christina read it and I read it, I think we kind of had the thought at the same time. I was a little shy to share with you [to Anna] that I thought it would make a great anthology of essays. But when you first said, “We need to collect these stories” as soon as we made that connection…we said, let’s see if we can get some friends – we had a lot of women writer friends to send us some of their essays, so we started thinking about what our project would look like in terms of an anthology of essays about birth.
Anna Solomon: So, on a collaboration front it’s definitely been less about writing and more about figuring out how to make it work. What would this book be? Where do you start? Do you start with a title? Do you start with seeing if other people are interested? When do you start thinking about actually trying to sell it? When you start to try to sell it, what other problems does that present? People have readily signed on to do this. How many big-name people would we need to get it published? What caliber, on a reputation level, do we need in order for someone to pick it up? We’ve each talked to people we know who’ve edited anthologies before and those stories; they’re all clear that it’s a tremendous amount of work. My agent, who is totally interested and willing to do this, is also like, “It’s a tremendous amount of work and you know it doesn’t pay for it.” But that’s not really the goal in this.
EH: [laughing] It’s not? I thought we were going to get rich.
AS: It’s been this really prolonged process because we’ve been busy as moms and as writers, and each of our first book came out this year so we’re on a lot of parallel paths and then we keep coming back to it because we both feel like they’re important stories to tell and they could be important for other people to read. So on the collaboration front, it’s stretching skills beyond writing. It’s more been scheming and thinking and brainstorming and playing around with these ideas.
TM: I know a lot of writers aren’t necessarily cut out for editorial, so to come into that kind of job as a writer who’s really dedicated to the personal side of this anthology, was that a challenge? Also, what is your role in taking submissions, working with the writers on their work?
AS: We’ve kind of just started this process and it will be challenging. I think we’re both very comfortable as readers and as editors to a large degree because we’re readers for other writers. Eleanor teaches a lot and I teach some, too. The commenting part and figuring out how to make something work feels pretty comfortable. We haven’t gotten down to what it means in terms of professional writers coming to us with work, and having to say “This isn’t going to work,” or “This is going to work but we need it significantly changed.” I think that is going to be challenging, not so much on the skill level but a personal and interpersonal level. We’ve just started skimming the surface. And getting essays in and talking briefly with each other and going “Okay, this is going to work, but we need to do this too…” And then to think about doing that times twenty.
TM: I was wondering, what is your final project envisioned as?
EH: 20 to 25 [essays] – they’re short essays. 1500 to 3000 words is what we drafted together using Google Docs. We began drafting a letter we would send around to possible contributors that spoke about what our vision for the book is and what our practical plan is for selling the book. So that helped us to craft a vision. And so what we’re asking for – 1500-3000-word essays about childbirth – that can allow writers some freedom to write about other aspects of parenthood or marriage, but really focus on the event of childbirth. Part of our work has been co-researching other books out there that might be similar to what we’re doing.
AS: Figure out the market.
EH: I think we still remain emphatic that this is a book that does not exist out there and that it’s a book that mothers-to-be and recent mothers would want to read.
Henderson pregnant with her second son, Henry, as she prepares for last summer's book tour for Ten Thousand Saints
AS: One of the things we both felt the gap of is sort of…well obviously there are a lot of how-to or medical [texts]. Or more new age-y texts that, though there’s an openness to them, there is also a sort of narrowness to them. They’re usually very pro-natural birth, that don’t seem to get into the nitty-gritty. They get into it more as a spiritual experience and it doesn’t necessarily feel that helpful for those of us who have these questions, not just timing of things, but how does this feel, and how might you be feeling toward your partner at that time, and what are all the other pieces of this. It’s that feeling that there’s this gap.
TM: How do you approach this project differently than your fiction?
EH: We’ve certainly not developed a tried and true system. We’re entirely doing this by the seat of our pants. I think what we’ve discovered is lucky about that position is that the women we’re working with are also working writers and mothers. No one understands the deadline more than a working mom and so luckily we’ve had a lot of understanding from writers who’ve given us an essay months ago that we’ve yet to turn back edits on. Part of the answer is, we have no process. Hopefully in our writing lives we have more process because we have more control. It’s really not a writing project for us. It’s a sense of organizing a community and reaching out to individuals…sort of balancing those duties so we each feel that after a phone call we have a homework assignment that we will go out and conduct and end up reconvening [to discuss]. We have many Gmail conversations archived in my anthology tab.
AS: That’s good you even have an anthology tab! I don’t know how to do that.
EH: Well I’ll have to show you if you give me my Twitter education. [Laughing]
TM: Since you’re still getting started, have you hit any snags or surprises along the way, good or bad?
AS: Lots of snags, but they’ve mostly been a matter of our time and attention. We’re making progress. We made a lot of progress this spring.
EH: [To Anna] You know what I’d like to do? You and I go to a writers’ retreat for a weekend. And we’d pound it out and we’d be done. But it’s a matter of fitting it in and then waiting. One of the snags is that we’re working with writing mothers and so our deadline would pass and we wouldn’t get an essay in, and at some point either the writer or we would realize “Oh, we’d better reach out.”
AS: No one even noticed. Or they’d say “Is it too late?” And we were like, “It’s not too late.” [Laughter] “We didn’t even notice you’d missed your deadline.” This makes us sound like we’re flakes, but neither of us is a flake at all. It’s one of those things – no one’s out there saying “You must do this. We’re waiting for the birth anthology.” So, in some ways it’s the thing that can go. But we’ll commit tomorrow. We’ll decide on dates in the next couple months to reconvene ourselves. We’ll do it over pancakes tomorrow. Or we’ll just stay up all night tonight. [Laughs]
EH: Let’s just not have you sleep at all. That’s my goal.
AB: So what advice could you give to writers or editors who want to start a project like this?
EH: What advice would we give to ourselves two years ago? Three years ago? [Laughter]
AS: Well, know that it might take a lot longer than you think. I think still there are things we’ve done successfully. Like to really hone your vision into something that specific and to think about – which is something we’ve started to do, but haven’t finished – what the shape of the collection itself will be. Thinking structurally.
EH: Thinking about readership is a skill we’ve gained through publishing our novels, which is serving us well. We have a strong sense of who will read this. I mean, we haven’t shared this with a lot of people – it’s entirely theoretical at this point, but we have received some feedback. From my agent in particular and my editor, who weren’t quite sure there was a market for this. Just remaining true to that vision and feeling like we have faith in this idea. What’s been really gratifying for me is that, as we’ve received essays from these women, they believe in the idea too. It reminds me every time we get an essay that this is a really fucking good idea. Oh, excuse me.
AS: There’s something very unique and colorful about something that’s collected. It’s not just one of us; it’s lots and lots of voices coming together. And I can’t help but think that there is an audience for that because there are so many voices represented in there, so many women who have babies.
TM: It sounds very fascinating to me. When Eleanor told me about it, I thought, why hadn’t I seen a book like that before? Now what I want to know is, do you have any other collaborations in the future that you’re thinking of? Or is this enough on your plate for now?
AS: Well it’s funny, it might be relevant to mention that I’ve been working on a collaboration for the last many months with a musician who wrote a suite of songs inspired by my book [The Little Bride] and we created together a performance where I read. She wrote songs inspired by particular sections, and I read those sections and she plays a musical score under them, and between the sections she plays a song that she wrote. And then we have projected images in the background. So it’s kind of a whole performance experience. I really enjoyed branching out into another art form all together and really just allowing them to speak to each other, and to me that made my work much more powerful. There was emotion in it that I hadn’t felt myself, that the music presented. I could see getting visual artists involved. It’s just [a] very exciting way to expand on the work itself and make it come alive in a different way.
November 30, 2011 1 Comment
Baby’s First Classic
By Mary Kate Murphy
The novel Pride and Prejudice contains over 120,000 words. The classic Moby Dick has over 200,000. Cozy Classics, a new children’s series being released by the Vancouver-based children’s publisher Simply Read books in fall 2012, takes these two novels and condenses them each into twelve.
Dr. Jack Wang of the Ithaca College Writing Department with his brother and Cozy Classics collaborator, Holman Wang."
Dr. Jack Wang, chair of the Writing Department at Ithaca College, came up with the idea for this new series after he became a father. Dr. Wang says, “After I had my first daughter, my wife and I were joking around how we should have a series of books called ‘Theory for Babies.’ The concept was to take something very high brow and present it in a childlike form. Wouldn’t it be hilarious to have Freud for babies or Foucault for babies?” However, after some consideration was given to the potential audience for that type of series, the focus went from theory to literature. “One day I said, you know what would work is if we did literary classics for babies. And I sort of seized upon that idea as having a certain amount of commercial viability and I ran this idea by my brother and he was quick to see the possibilities and he was the one who came up with the artistic concept. So it really was collaborative in that I generated the concept and he came up with the artistic direction.”
The artistic concept that Dr. Wang refers to is that of needle felting. Needle felting is the process of binding wool fibers together by jabbing them with a needle until the fibers become entangled enough to make a figure. Dr. Wang’s brother, Holman Wang, learned needle felting from a relative and was quick to see how it could apply to the new concept of Cozy Classics.
“He emailed me some images of needle felting,” Dr. Wang says, “and part of what was attractive about this concept for us is that it’s like a totally new medium in children’s literature because you are used to two-dimensional images like paintings and drawings. But this was three-dimensional and appealed to children and adults alike.” Holman made wool figures of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Bingley for Pride and Prejudice as well as figures of Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, and the Pequod for Moby Dick. Then, he oriented the figures in natural settings and photographed them. The figure of Elizabeth Bennet is pictured reading a letter from Mr. Darcy in front of the softly-focused backdrop of a forest on a sunny day. The Peqoud is photographed sitting in a puddle with the sun setting in the background, yet Holman’s skill at arranging the figure makes it look as though the Pequod is actually sailing across the ocean into a beautiful setting sun. Each figure and image is arranged with what Dr. Wang calls, “a cinematographer’s touch.”
Each image is accompanied by one of the twelve words, previously selected by Dr. Wang, that make up each book of the Cozy Classics collection. The images portray a scene from each novel and each word describes the corresponding scene. For example, an image of Elizabeth comforting Jane is paired with the word “sisters.” The images give the narrative arch of the story and the words help build vocabulary for children reading the book.
Why only twelve words?
Captain Ahab from Moby Dick propped up next to foam and felting needles.
“I think originally we thought twenty images [and words]. Then we realized [that would be very] labor intensive and we thought that if you have too many images, it becomes difficult to tell the story. After twenty words you are going to have to start to account for subplots. So we settled on twelve as the right number of words to tell the story and where people thought they were still getting substance and it was still a reasonable amount of labor.”
Currently, the labor is divided between Dr. Wang and his brother, who currently lives in Vancouver. They correspond via email to discuss the separate images that Holman creates. Several of the images have gone through multiple edits for lighting, placement and location adjustments.
“He works on these images and sometimes he’ll send one and I’ll say, ‘Fantastic!’ Then other times we’ll talk and he’ll go back and do a color correction [or a simple change]. Then there are other cases where we will deliberate a lot more,” Dr. Wang says.
The distance between Ithaca and Vancouver also makes the process a bit more difficult. “We are used to working together but right now because we are long distance, it makes things more complicated,” Dr. Wang explains. “It [would be] nice if we could work more face-to-face. Sometimes I feel like I can’t participate in the hands-on of taking pictures and so on.”
However, thanks to their fluid communication through email, the Wang brothers are almost finished with the images for both Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick and are already starting to look ahead to other literary classics. Dr. Wang says, “We can do an endless series. It’s still unsettled and still up in the air but we suggested Great Expectations and Jane Eyre.”
Though the collaboration between Dr. Wang and his brother has just begun, it does not appear to have a set end thanks to the seemingly endless supply of classical literature. Come next fall, children beginning to develop their language skills will find a new literary option with stimulating visuals when the Cozy Classics series hits the shelves.
