"Touched Breifly": The English Department Reading

If there was a Wordle of Wednesday night’s English Department Reading, the program would have put the words “light,” “fear,” and “memory” bold, front, and center. Such juxtaposing concepts featured prominently in the original works of Kalamazoo’s ten English professors, weaving together distinct voices and formats.

Perhaps the commonalities speak to the plight of academics desperately seeking warmth in the dead of winter, or perhaps to the candid self-searching that is rampant in the Humphrey House. No matter the interpretation, Wednesday evening provided a looking-glass into the current occupations of our campus’ best writers.

Under the glow of a candelabra, it was easy to feel on the inside of this privileged window. Gail Griffin addressed the comfortably full Olmsted Room, hoping the event would make light of Winter quarter, she said, “before we all want to commit suicide.” The dark humor was unsettlingly appropriate, given Griffin’s power to humanize in the subsequent selection from her book on the murder suicide of K students Maggie Wardle and Neenef Odah ten years ago. A certain phrase seemed to encapsulate the evening, as Griffin “touched the comforter briefly” on Maggie’s old bed. The audience was indeed “touched briefly” by pieces of the past brought exquisitely to light.

Griffin also introduced this year’s two visiting professors, Amy Rodgers and Beth Marzoni, with fortes in theatre and poetry respectively. Rodgers achieves the dramatic, the analytic, and the personal in a unique process piece that explores her inspirations for a new play. The narrative is intensely earnest, and relatable, as Rodgers is determined to write an essay but is instead distracted by a file of pictures of Robert Frost’s late son. Marzoni drops two realist characters, “you” and “me,” into a broad range of surreal landscapes in her poem “Rothko’s Room.” She summons the painter Mark Rothko’s misty stacks of color by repeating t and d sounds atop one another, and by wistfully negating the possibility of an “ending” in the opening line with “if we could arrive” in the closing lines.

Di Suess joined with two characteristically merciless poems, drawing laughs especially with the self-aware and achingly pre-teen “Birthday Confessions.” Babli Sinha’s nuanced analytical paper on the “New Woman’s” role in a Southeast Asian novel also prompted snickers when the main character described a scholar’s life as “barren and cold.” Andy Mozina and Glenn Deutsch read excerpts from witty short fictions, one with suburban sexual undertones, titled “My Non-Sexual Affair,” and the other craving “density” on a road trip in New York.

Amelia Katanski, Marin Heinritz, and Bruce Mills shared creative non-fiction steeped in family matters. Katanski’s main character, struggling to pull a turkey from a dark coop and “yelp(ing) as his fingers are pecked,” seems a metaphor for extracting literature from our own inner darkness, a process in which each author was inherently engaged. Mills stepped up to the podium last to unveil the uneasy balance between order and chaos with sections from his book, “The Archeology of Yearning,” on raising a child with Autism. “Make room for all that is lost” he enjoined, and broke the spell of the evening with a final round of applause.