July 17, 2006

GREENSHEET HEADLINES

• Kenton Adler’s song posted on Neil Young’s website

• Scots-Irish lecture series continues

• Alumna Thomas joins Searcy Medical Center

• Lyon College bookstore manager publishes ‘tail’ about a wayward dog

• Shannon Vinson Fallis returns home to renew vows

• Two new faces join Lyon

• Orientation II held Friday

 
 

   Budy's latest poetry collection to be featured by Garrison Keillor
By Wil Shane
Lyon College News Bureau

Everyone at Lyon College knows the school’s writer-in-residence is a gifted and prolific poet, but now her fame has even spread as far as Lake Wobegon.

On Wednesday, July 19, humorist, author and broadcast personality Garrison Keillor, who created the fictional Minnesota town, will read a poem from Andrea Hollander Budy’s latest collection of poetry, Woman in the Painting, on his National Public Radio show, The Writer’s Almanac.
The program is aired on more than 300 public radio stations nationwide. It’s a five-minute radio show that Keillor does each day of the week, year round, and features a single poem read aloud, preceded by the literary news and events from that date in history.
The book is Budy’s third full-length collection of poetry. Her first, House Without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize in 1993 and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Writer’s Digest.

Her second, The Other Life, was featured in The Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize winner Rite Dove and singled out by Fred Chappell, winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, who wrote a review of the collection: “Direct but delicate in style, strong but never strident, The Other Life advances Andrea Hollander Budy into our foremost poetic ranks.”
 
Budy has also published three award-winning chapbooks, which are small books produced from the 17th century until today, originally sold by “chapmen,” and peddlers. They are usually chapter-length books that deal with a single theme. “Once I’ve written individual poems for several years, I look at what I’ve done and see how the poems relate to one another. Only then do I recognize themes emerging and a book beginning to coalesce.” – Andrea Hollander Budy, Lyon College writer-in-residence

An acclaimed poet and essayist, Budy’s awards and honors include the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the Runes Poetry Award and fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s also won over a dozen other national awards for her writing.

Budy has published more than 200 individual poems and essays in anthologies, textbooks and literary journals. She has also given more than 100 readings, lectures, and workshops to audiences of all ages all over the United States and abroad at public and private schools, cultural centers, and libraries.

In 1998, she won Lyon College’s Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. As Writer-in-Residence, she teaches classes in poetry, creative writing, creative non-fiction, and oral presentation. She also directs the Visiting Writers Series and coordinates the Creative Writing Program.

Budy served on the 2003 faculty of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, a two-week intensive for gifted high school students sponsored by the state of Oklahoma, and the 2004 Oklahoma Fall Arts Institute for teachers. She has also taught at the 2005 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference in New Mexico and will teach at the Foothill Writers’ Conference in California in the summer of 2007.

In 2004, Budy was Visiting Professor for one month at the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France, where she taught the institution’s first-ever creative writing workshop.

In 2003 and 2006 she was on the summer faculty of the Poetry OtherWise Conference at Emerson College, England.

Also in England, last fall Budy served as the first ever Writer-in-Residence at St. Bede’s School in East Sussex, as well as visiting writer at the University of Sussex.

Budy will spend the spring semester 2007 as the Visiting Writer at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she will teach two creative writing courses and give a public reading of her work.

Budy was born in Berlin, Germany, when her father was stationed there in the military. After earning her undergraduate degree from Boston University and a master’s degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she ran a school for high school dropouts in East Boston and an alternative high school in Bath, Maine, before returning to the University of Colorado to pursue a doctorate. While there, she taught some classes at the university’s Denver campus, where one of her adult students was the man who would become her husband, Todd Budy.

“The class was oral interpretation of literature,” Todd said. “Although I was an art major at the university, I had heard that Andrea was an inspiring teacher and that the course was very good – and it was.”

In 1977, the couple moved to Arkansas in search of a warmer climate. A friend recommended Mountain View, and they fell in love with the scenery, the small community, and its friendly people.

“We came here in a ‘52 Chevy pickup with a camper on it that I built,” Todd recalled. “Andrea was six months pregnant.”

Their son, Brooke, was born in Calico Rock. Todd and Andrea taught him at home until sixth grade, when he entered the public school system in Mountain View. After earning his B.A. degree at Vassar College, he won a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship to France, where he lived for four years. Brooke is a current graduate student at the University of Iowa pursuing an M.F.A. in translation. He’s also an artist, and his painting of his parents sitting at a table in one of their former homes serves as the cover art for Woman in the Painting.

Todd is also an artist, though of a different kind. He designed and built the couple’s current two-story cottage home, as well as their two previous homes, in the hills near Mountain View. The cottage features two studies, a library on a stairway landing and a pair of balconies that overlook the forest canopy and a jagged line of mottled gray limestone rock formations that rise from the valley floor like great whales in a green sea.

While giving a poetry reading for the Arkansas Philological Society in the mid-1980s, Budy, who by that time had published one chapbook and many poems and essays in a wide range of journals and magazines, met Lyon College professors Dr. Terrell Tebbetts and Dr. Virginia Wray. Ensuing friendships eventually led to Budy’s joining the faculty at Lyon in 1991.

Woman in the Painting is structured in four sections. The first focuses on romantic relationships. Sections two and three focus on key moments in the lives of her mother, who died at 51, and her father, who lived past 90 but suffered from Alzheimer’s. The volume’s final section centers on renewal.

“Never do I set out writing with a theme in mind,” she said. “But once I’ve written individual poems for several years, I look at what I’ve done and see how the poems relate to one another. Only then do I recognize themes emerging and a book beginning to coalesce.”

Commenting on Budy’s new poetry collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stephen Dunn praises Budy’s “beautifully restrained meditations on love and living with those close to us who are dying.”

“She knows what to hold back as she lets us in,” Dunn says. “And so we willingly bring ourselves into her subtly registered emotional world. There’s a lovely blend of qualities at work here – an unsparing eye, and a heart that humanizes what that eye sees.”

According to Maxine Kumin, who also won the Pulitzer Prize, Budy makes a reader feel the poem being read.

“In ‘Still Life with Jonquils,’ Budy says, ‘The painter knows. . .we bring our own heat to the canvas’,” Kumin writes. “Her readers enter poem after poem in this poignant and mature collection bearing the heat of their own lives. The Depression, World War II, the poet’s family history of loss are ranged against remarkable poems about Auden, Larkin, Dickinson and allusions to Dylan Thomas and Rilke, as well as painters Munch and Vermeer. Budy’s impeccable conversational diction does just what a poem should do; it raises the hairs on the nape of your neck.”

Budy will give a celebratory reading of the new book at Lyon on Tuesday, Nov. 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the Bevens Music Room. Students from her creative writing workshop will join her to read poems created during the semester.

At 11a.m. that same day, Budy will present a reading of her Pushcart Prize-winning prose memoir, “The Hickeys on Sally Palermo’s Neck: Some Thoughts on Beauty and the Creative Life,” also in the Bevens Music Room, adjacent to Brown Chapel.

Woman in the Painting is available from the publisher, Autumn House Press at 412-381-4261 or www.autumnhouse.org, Amazon.com, and bookstores nationwide, including the Lyon College Bookstore.
 

Kenton Adler’s protest song posted on Neil Young’s website

By Wil Shane
Lyon College News Bureau

Long before Kenton Adler played bagpipes for Lyon College, he was a rock and roll singer/songwriter back when people still used terms like LP and record player, and said things like “Groovy.”

And one of his old-time rock and roll brethren has just honored Adler’s new protest song by adding it to the play list on his website.

Rock legend Neil Young’s website features a page called “Living With War Today,” and Adler’s original composition, “I’ve Had Enough,” is now posted on the site along with songs by other songwriters concerned with the war in Iraq.

In the photo above, Adler (right) is seen here playing a Fender Telecaster during a club gig with his brother Barry in 1980. In this photo, Adler is 24 and his brother is 18.
Adler wrote his first song when he was only 9 years old.

“It was called 'Roberta Lee' and was about a little girl in my third grade class at Cleveland Avenue Elementary in Camden,” Adler said. “Some friends and I got a local radio station, KJWH, to record it on a little reel-to-reel recorder, and they played it. The Arkansas Gazette got wind of it, and because it was the height of Beatlemania they did two stories about me.”

Adler moved to Colorado in 1965, and in 1967 started teaching himself guitar out of a book called, “Learn To Play Like The Monkees.”

“I still have a copy of that book,” Adler said. “I learned every Monkees tune and then started figuring out Beatles songs and stuff by The Byrds and Creedence Clearwater. I played in different bands throughout junior high and high school.”

He also became a popular fixture on the coffeehouse circuit in Greeley, Colo., when he attended the University of Northern Colorado for a year.

“That was about the time I first started really becoming a fan of Neil Young,” Adler recalled. “His latest albums at the time, 'On the Beach' and 'Tonight’s the Night,' were getting a considerable amount of time on my turntable.”

Adler also made his forays into recording during that time.

“I cut my first real studio demo that year with four original songs, and performed at talent shows and open mic nights around the Denver area,” Adler said.

In 1976, he joined the Navy and ended up stationed in Memphis for a couple of years. That allowed him the opportunity to go down to Clarksdale, Miss., on a regular basis and play in a duo with a friend named Freddy Bolm.

“We played little clubs like The Matador, The Delta Warehouse, The Peppermint Stick, and two of my favorites, The River Road in Clarksdale, and the pool hall in Moorehead, on a pretty regular basis,” Adler said. “We had a pretty good following, but the Navy precluded my really pursuing a musical career.”

Upon returning to Denver in 1980, Adler played in several bands. One, The Mechanics, made a high quality six-song EP demo record with producers Kellis Ethridge and Don Prorak. Adler’s subsequent band recorded a 17-song album with the same engineer that worked on the Mechanics sessions.

“He was a Grammy-nominated engineer named Steve Avedis, and we made a really good record that was lodged firmly in the twilight zone between country and rock,” Adler recalled. “Because of the diversity of the sounds we were making, every record company we pitched either The Mechanics recordings, or The Korvettes recordings to, told us that we had a great sound, but that it just wasn’t what they were looking for at the time, or wasn’t uniform enough to be able to categorize sufficiently to make us marketable.”

Adler now finds it interesting that country music has come around to a style very similar to what he and his band mates were doing back in the late ‘80s with tunes like “Still I Miss You,” “Home ‘Til Late,” and “Pinto Pony.”

“I moved back to Arkansas in 1992 and I began playing again around the Fayetteville area, and again was doing pretty well in the coffee shops, doing shows at the University of Arkansas from time to time and doing a little bit of recording with a great engineer named Dwight Chalmers at the Listen Labs,” he said. “I never got around to submitting any of those recordings for consideration because by that time I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was just recording for my own amazement.”

Since taking up the bagpipe, Adler “sort of let my guitar playing, songwriting, and recording step to one side a bit.”

“A considerable bit really,” admitted. “I mostly record at home in Batesville on portable gear and very rarely go to the trouble to make any elaborate recordings any more. This tune I submitted to the Neil Young site was just my acoustic guitar and my voice straight into a little mini-disc recorder. It’s stark. In a way though, it’s got that sort of raw, folksy edge that a war protest song from the ‘60s might have had.”

Music is just one way individuals can help shape the world around them, and each one of us can play a part, Adler said.

“It’s important for people to arm their minds and engage themselves in what’s going on,” he said. “We wake up every morning with the power to make the world what we want it to be, and this is what we’ve come up with. I think we can do better.”

To hear Adler’s song, go to: www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/index.html.

Free lecture series chronicling Scots-Irish connection
to the Ozarks opens second week at Lyon College

The second week of Scots-Irish Connection to the Ozarks Lecture Series in Nucor Auditorium on the Lyon campus at 7 p.m. is now underway. The lectures are open to the public and will feature nationally and internationally recognized scholars in the field of Celtic music and heritage.

The schedule for the second week of lectures began July 17 and will conclude July 20.

On July 17, Dr. Terrell Tebbetts, the Martha Heasley Cox Chair in American Literature at Lyon College, presented a public reading and lecture on selected works of Robert Burns.

On July 18, Dr. H. Tyler Blethen, professor of history at Western Carolina University, will give a lecture on the transmission and transformation of Scottish Culture, examining their settlement preferences, agricultural practices, religion, music and storytelling.

And on July 19, Dr. Brooks Blevins, assistant professor of history at Lyon, will present “The Scots-Irish Influence in Ozark Traditional Music.”

Lyon’s Director of Scottish Heritage and Pipe Major Jimmy Bell, along with Dr. Blevins, coordinated planning for the Scots-Irish Connection to the Ozarks Lecture Series.

The lecture series is supported in part by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information on the Scots-Irish Connection to the Ozarks Lecture Series, contact Jimmy Bell at (870) 698-4298.


 Dr. Marty Thomas joins Searcy Medical Center

Marty Thomas, M.D., a pediatrician from Little Rock and Lyon alumna, has joined the staff of Searcy Medical Center. She will be practicing with four Searcy Medical Center doctors at the Searcy Medical Center West location: family practice doctors Mike Justus, Terry Yates and Jennifer Faith and pediatrician Edward McAdams.

“Pediatrics is one of our busiest departments, and the addition of a high-quality physician such as Dr. Thomas will greatly benefit our patients,” said Dr. Clark Fincher, chairman of Searcy Medical Center. “We are very pleased she has decided to join our clinic.”

Dr. Thomas is a 1995 graduate of Lyon College, and she received her medical doctorate and completed her pediatric residency at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Thomas has actively participated in research with the Southern Society for Pediatric Research and with the National Conference for Undergraduate Research. She also assisted with research at the McClellan VA Hospital in Little Rock and at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Ark.

“I am very excited about starting my practice in Searcy,” said Dr. Thomas. “The friendliness of the community is a big draw to me. I look forward to beginning and growing with the families of the community.”

Searcy Medical Center is a full service clinic with more than 30 physicians providing quality healthcare to the community. Dr. Thomas is the first female pediatrician to practice at Searcy Medical Center.

 Lyon College bookstore manager publishes ‘tail’ about a wayward dog

The manager of the Lyon College Bookstore is now working both ends of the printing press.

Sandy Michel sells books and magazines at work, and she’s just stepped into the world of writers with the publication of her first short story in a nationally circulated magazine.

The Bark magazine, the “modern dog culture magazine,” published Michel’s story “Simon at the Drive-In” in its July/August 2006 issue, and even gave it the high profile end piece location in the magazine.

The story is about a fictional character named Samantha, her boyfriend Harry and Samantha’s yellow mixed-breed dog, Simon. While watching a drive-in movie at the Star-Lite Theater from the comfort of a brown El Camino, Harry and Samantha watch as Simon runs away to unleash some mayhem in the drive-in.

He jumps into another car where he “nearly scored with a good lookin’ schnauzer” before running off again. On her mad dash to catch Simon, Samantha rips her pants leaving her “lace undies exposed to the world.”

Simon is described as having golden hair, sweet eyes that clearly show there’s something going on in his noble head, and a glorious tail…”

Boyfriend Harry is painted as having “similar characteristics, minus the expressive tail.”

Michel said the story is part of a larger work, and she gives part of the credit for its publication to the writing courses she’s taken at Lyon College.
 		 “I hope it speaks well of those writing courses here at Lyon College that I got this story published.” – Sandy Michel
 

“It started out as a short story, but grew into a novel,” she said. “I started it in a workshop by Jill McCorkle and she suggested I send it to The Bark magazine.”

McCorkle, an acclaimed novelist and fictionist, came to Lyon as the winner of the Lenore Heasley Prize in 2002.

Earlier this year, Michel also attended a workshop by novelist Ron Tanner, Lyon College’s 2006 Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing winner.

Tanner, who has published stories in such magazines as The Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, and Story Quarterly, hosted a writing workshop as part of the fellowship that Lyon’s Writer-in-Residence Andrea Hollander Budy helped to establish.

“I hope it speaks well of those writing courses here at Lyon College that I got this story published,” Michel said.

The Bark is distributed quarterly to bookstores, newsstands, airports, pet stores and other pet-friendly establishments. Sometimes referred to as the New Yorker of dog magazines, it’s been featured publications such as InStyle, The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.

In 1999, Dr. Samir Husni, a leading magazine industry expert, selected The Bark as one of the top launches of the year, setting a “new standard for pet publications.”

Lyon alumna Shannon Vinson Fallis renews vows in Batesville

(The following article was originally published July 6 in the Batesville Daily Guard.)

By Rachael Walden, Guard Staff Writer

Shannon Vinson Fallis joined the U.S. Air Force in 2001 when working as a news reporter for ABC in Washington, D.C. was not enough.

“After the Sept. 11th attacks, I wanted to do more than report news, I wanted to help,” she said.

That decision led her to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather, Vernon Vinson, who committed 23 years of his life to the service.

“She’s always liked to travel,” her father, John Vinson, network services coordinator at Lyon, said of her decision. “She wanted to serve her country.”

After graduating from Lyon College in May 2002 with a bachelor of arts in political science and a minor in international relations, she worked as a local bank teller and gymnastics teacher for a time before beginning a six-week-long officer’s training school in Montgomery, Ala.

“Most new officers attend a technical training course immediately after coming on active duty. Technical training equips new officers with the specific skills required by their job specialty,” according to Careers in the Military.

When finished, Shannon went directly to navigator training flight school in San Antonio, where she graduated second in her class and was named navigator. She also had to complete survival school in Washington state where, according to her father, “they dump you out in the woods for a week and leave you.”

She then went to the Little Rock Air Force Base to train further on the C-130 airplane, where she met C-130 pilot Maj. Jason Fallis, whom she later married.

On Feb. 14, 2005, she was deployed to Japan, where she made supply drops and pickups in various countries in Southeast Asia.

“They did humanitarian missions such as flying anthropologists there to survey remains of servicemen,” John Vinson said. “She’s gotten to do some neat things.”

One of those neat things included flying veterans to the 60th reunion of Iwo Jima in February 2005. According to the Marine Corps League, the event brought together veterans of the Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Army Air Corps, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine and nurses and medical corps who served on nearby ships and island hospitals.

Last fall, Shannon experienced one of her scarier moments.

While in Afghanistan, she navigated 20 combat missions, where her plane dropped food, water and supplies to fighting troops.

“We were flying low level and it was mountainous terrain,” she said. “It was very challenging, but rewarding.”

Shannon married Fallis on July 4, 2005 in Jamaica and was deployed for four months to Kyrgyzstan. She is currently on leave to renew her wedding vows at her parents’ home. From there, she will be deployed to either Iraq or Kuwait in August.

Copyright © Batesville Daily Guard-Record Inc.

Two new faces join the Lyon faculty, staff

One shapes metal into works of art and the other shapes young athletes into championship contenders, and they have both joined the Lyon College faculty.

Merritt Johnson will help design and create a sculpture program for the art department, and Julie Church will coach golf and basketball.

Born in Baltimore City, Md., Johnson lived there until she went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art. She went on to earn an M.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

“This is the terminal degree for studio artists,” she said.

She’s married to Marlowe Knipes, a middle school social studies teacher, and they have a one-year-old son named Owen.

“And a four-year-old dog named Mabel,” Johnson added.

The Lyon College art program is expanding its educational offerings to encompass sculpture and that’s what brought her to Batesville. Some of her past teaching experience includes teaching drawing and painting, color theory, bronze and aluminum casting, welding and metal fabrication.

“I decided to accept the position at Lyon because it’s a rare opportunity to build a sculpture program from the ground up,” she said. “Chris Valle has done a lot in terms of drawing and painting, and I’m looking forward to opening up the opportunity for students to seriously pursue sculptural materials and processes,” she said.

Her own work is very much rooted in contemporary sculptural practices of mixed media, non-traditional materials, installation, and performance.

“So I’m excited to bring that experience to the students at Lyon,” Johnson said. “Contemporary sculpture is so much more interesting than just ceramics or wood carving, and it’s always exciting to see what students will do when they are equipped with new skills and materials for making art.”

Blytheville native Julie Church once played for the teams she’ll now be coaching. She graduated from Lyon College in 2004 with a math degree, and in August, she’ll graduate with a master’s in kinesiology from UCA. She'll  be men's and women's head golf coach and assistant women's basketball coach at Lyon.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to come back to Lyon, my alma mater,” Church said. “And I’m excited to work with both the golf and basketball teams since I was also a member of both teams while I was at Lyon.”

One of her goals is to get both the men’s and women’s golf teams into the position where they can compete each year in the national tournament.

“The golf teams have been successful in the past and I look forward to building on to that success,” she said. “I’m looking forward to the opportunity to recruit student-athletes who can handle the academic and athletic demands at Lyon.”

For the last two years, Church has served as the assistant golf coach at the University of Central Arkansas. Both the men’s and women’s teams at UCA were ranked in the top 25 with the women being ranked consistently in the top five in the country both years.

“I had a great experience as a student-athlete at Lyon, and I’m really happy to be back in Batesville,” she said.

Summer Orientation II held Friday

Lisa, Patrick, Jessica and Mark Cameron

Janette, LeAnna and Mike Peerson

Resident Faculty Mentor Gary Harris talks to the group gathered for Summer Orientation, with some of the student mentors standing in the background.

Dr. David Thomas, associate professor of biology, puts useful information on a whiteboard for a group of new students attending Friday's Summer Orientation II. A total of 58 students and many parents attended the orientation. More photos from orientation will be posted soon on the What's Hot webpage.

 

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