An interview with Barbara Fenig ’11

Katherine Bascom ’10, the Russell House 2010–2011 Arts Fellow, interviews Barbara Fenig ’11.

Barbara graduated this past Sunday, May 22, but will be staying at Wesleyan for a post-graduate year as the Shapiro Center/Russell House 2011-2012 Arts Fellow. Congratulations Barbara!

You’ve got some serious writing skills. Tell us a little bit about your creative thesis.

This year, I wrote a collection of linked short stories that revolve around breaks in normalcy. In the stories, the corporeal has magical powers: lips take on supernatural abilities, the brain houses the reality of the afterlife, and heartlessness becomes a medical condition.

Who inspires you to write?

Aimee Bender and Amy Bloom, Andre Aciman, Paula Sharp, Douglas A. Martin, and Deb Olin Unferth (my Wesleyan writing professors).

What plans or ideas do you have for your post-grad year at Wesleyan as the Shapiro Center/Russell House Fellow?

As next year’s Shapiro Center/Russell House Arts Fellow, I look forward to planning the reading series and to hosting events for Wesleyan’s writing community. I am hoping to establish a series of informal workshops where students can get to know one another. Students will write for a bit and then share their work. I’m hoping that different faculty can offer a few prompts, either in person or before the event. As a writing student at Wesleyan, I really appreciated the writing community and am eager to cultivate new outlets for students to share their work.

What anticipations do you have about spending another year at ol’ Wes?

I’m really looking forward to being at Wesleyan next year and am thrilled that my day to day will be spent in the Russell House, the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and Downey House– my favorite spots on campus.

If you could have any author or poet come to Wesleyan next year, who would it be & why?

I can’t choose! I’m just so excited to see what the calendar will offer!

Tell us about your summer plans.

I’m traveling to London, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Venice for a few weeks after graduation. Then, I’m a member of the student staff at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. I’m taking a course at Columbia in July and will be back at Wesleyan in August. It’ll be a lovely summer (fingers crossed!).

Don’t Hide the Madness: An Antithology

An interview with Morgan Hill ’14 by Shira Engel ‘14.

On May 3, the day after Mike Rosen’s senior project was performed in Memorial Chapel, I just knew that I had to interview a member of this group he put together. Morgan Hill, a willing member of the Om Collective, sat down to talk to me about the process of putting together this synchronous, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary project.

The Om Collective, Morgan says, is “an excuse to hang out and do pretty things. It’s an integration of artists from [creative campus icons like] Mad Wow, Wordsmith, weSLAM, which means dancers, poets, emcees, drummers, singers, horn players, guitarists, DJs, and sound engineers. I am honored to be included as a freshman in this group of people who decided to do performance art in a way we hadn’t seen done.”

Don’t Hide the Madness followed the framework of a spoken word performance, but strayed suitably. It was appropriately done in Memorial Chapel, where the Night Kite Revival performed earlier this year.

It all started with a vague idea. Mike contacted a group of artists on campus that he felt were right for the mission of the project. They met at his house one late night at the beginning of the semester to discuss how their diverse talents and styles might come together. Of the collaborative process, Morgan says, “There are a lot of different interests among the members and with those different interests, we can say something new about pop culture, poetry, and art. We can perform spoken word for what it is, showing it is just as legitimate an expression as anything else. The point was to experience the Self on entirely its own terms. We got to make art in the way we really wanted to make it.”

The intention of the performance, which combined spoken word, dance, singing, bass, and audience participation, had to do with Wesleyan as a creative campus, how it fosters art in a variety of forms and is part of a collective of universities pioneering a new one: poetry as performance art. Morgan explains that “slam is hyper-condensed into the past ten years.” It is fairly magical that Wesleyan can play such a huge role in cultivating an art, a means of self-expression and communal appreciation, that is still legitimizing itself.

I asked Morgan what it was like to integrate all these art forms. She responded, “We wanted to provide an explanation for what has been happening on this campus. We’re saying that this is something new that can be seen differently. This is where poetry can be right now; performance art as a denial of a formal structure is dangerous, but so cool, so cathartic.”

She continues with what I believe to be the perfect note to end this post on: “[At Wesleyan] you have so many people that are so talented in many different ways. Why wouldn’t you want to bring them together, all the time?”

WesWinds: Rides, Dances and Chaos!

An interview with Ariel Lesnick ’14 by Shira Engel ’14.

Ariel Lesnick is an enthusiastic student in the class of 2014 in the Wesleyan Wind Ensemble, WesWinds. She has been playing the clarinet since third grade and did not want to stop once she came to college. Lucky for her and for WesWinds, she got to continue playing and performing music as a part of this fun group. I interviewed her about her experience with WesWinds and how the ensemble prepared for their spring concert which took place on May 3, Rides, Dances and Chaos!

WesWinds is not simply a group for Wesleyan students; it is an integrative force that bridges the gap between the Wesleyan campus and the surrounding Middletown community. Ariel says of this coming together, “I sit next to a middle-aged man, a boy in high school, and another Wesleyan student. It reminds me that the real world exists and that music can bring people together.”

Peter Hadley, the conductor, has been at Wesleyan for seventeen years. His familiarity with the group is apparent in how he gently leads them and the audience through the music with his wonderful British accent. WesWinds is a full music credit for Wesleyan students. Rehearsal is once a week on Tuesdays from 7pm to 10pm. Ariel says that in the rehearsals, it is apparent what WesWinds is all about. “What’s unique to the group is that there are professional musicians and they really know what they’re talking about. Then there are kids who are fourteen and their moms sit and read while we practice.”

Of the concert, Ariel revealed, “We have an electric guitar soloist and he just shreds it. It’s the kind of music that is fun. I hope the audience had as much fun listening as we had playing. It’s hard in a concert because we know everything that went into it. We know all these components so I just hope the audience got what they wanted out of the concert. There are so many crucial factors that it is hard to take them all in. They are fun funk pieces.”

And I, as an audience member, noticed that they all “shredded it.” Ariel, front and center, played the clarinet with passion and talent, as did everyone else with their wide variety of instruments. It flowed seamlessly because they were having fun with the music and had an apparent desire for the audience to have fun as well. It was eclectic in a very Wesleyan way – with instruments from Home Depot (pails as drums) played next to more professional-looking electric guitars. The experimentalism entrenched in the performance was contagious and evidence of what Wesleyan students and the Middletown community are capable of as collaborators and music-makers.

An interview with Yu Vongkiatkajorn ’13

Katherine Bascom ’10, Russell House 2010–2011 Arts Fellow (part of the Wesleyan University Writing Program), interviewed Yu Vongkiatkajorn ’13, a College of Letters (COL) major who is currently studying abroad in Paris.  Yu is a Freeman Scholar from Thailand, and recently won the Herbert Lee Connelly Prize for outstanding talent in nonfiction writing.

 

What type of writing do you do?

I mostly write in my journal — reflections, ramblings, details that I notice, conversations that I have or overhear. It’s the only kind of sustained writing that I can do outside of classes. I’d like to think that it helps me furnish material for more formal nonfiction or fiction pieces, but it’s also something that I really enjoy doing for myself. I’m beginning to write more fiction since I’ve taken Paula Sharp’s fiction class, but I can’t do any poetry. It’s completely foreign to me.

What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?

Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep) by Georges Perec, which is about a young man who decides to become completely indifferent to the world. He wanders the streets of Paris, sleeps, dreams, watches other people, and describes the actions of himself and others around him in meticulous and beautifully-written detail. I was completely enamored by the lyrical, alliterative style, as well as the subject, perhaps because I identified with it a little. It’s hard not to feel similar things when you seem to spend such a large part of your day sitting in the metro.

What writers have influenced you?

I picked up Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides in eighth grade and completely fell in love with it. It was the first time I had encountered something so powerfully written, so tied to its characters and their interactions. I spent every spare moment I could reading it and I even stopped eating and socializing with people for a while. After that, my tastes changed completely and I started looking for books outside of the fantastical and the Dan Brown’s. My brother later gave me a copy of one of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, and she’s since become one of my favorite authors.

When I really think about it though, there are so many writers that have influenced me. It’s kind of hard for me to read something and not be influenced by it in, even in the tiniest way. In retrospect, E.B. White probably had a profound influence on my life before I even knew it. I don’t know how many stories I wrote about farms after reading Charlotte’s Web in first gradeI probably started writing because of that book.

Please tell us about your piece that won the Connelly Prize.

I submitted two pieces for the prize, both of which I wrote for my nonfiction courses with Lisa Cohen. The first is centered around a watch I bought one summer and how it was tied to a relationship I had with someone at the time. It’s kind of an experiment in style, and I think that it was an indirect way for me to talk about an experience that had a profound effect on me. I wrote it in freshman year, then abandoned it for a while, but now really like how complete it feels.

The second piece was my final project for my Advanced Nonfiction seminar: a profile of my father. It was extremely difficult to write, partly because I had to do most of my research during a Habitat for Humanity trip over spring break, thus spent a lot of time making international phone calls in the car at odd hours. What was most difficult though was that it touched on a lot of sensitive issues in my family — issues that that we’ve kind of buried in the past and still don’t talk about today. I interviewed members of my family, and of course, my father, and unearthed a lot of things I hadn’t known about him.There were a lot of revelations for me while writing the piece, and I still don’t know how I feel about it. When I first wrote it, I didn’t feel like I had done the subject enough justice, so asked Professor Cohen if I could change my topic. She gave me a firm ‘no’ and encouraged me to keep going. I’ve revised the piece a few times since then, but am still ambivalent. I actually just looked at the piece right now, and I can’t get myself to read past the first few pages. I guess it’s still too hard for me to detach myself from it.

Where is your favorite place to write?

I don’t think I have a favorite place to write as much as a way to write. I need to be able to write on a surface — there’s something about pressing my pen to the paper and seeing my own handwriting that helps my ideas flow better. I’ve been keeping a notebook of my travels, and although I don’t usually reread previous entries, it comforts me to see my previous writing. It feels like I’m continuing my thoughts, in a way.

 

Where are you studying abroad, and what has been most surprising about the experience?

I’m studying abroad in Paris. What’s probably been most surprising is experiencing the culture shock that I should have felt when I went to the U.S. for the first time. During orientation in Paris, I had never felt so maladjusted in my life. Though language played a part in how I felt, it was far from the main factor. Identity became a big issue, because I always had to say that I was a student studying in the U.S., but that I was Thai, not American. Yet at the same time, when I work as a language partner or a tutor, people expect me to represent the U.S., or either rebuff me for not actually being from the U.S. I’ve had someone reject me for a position just on the basis of not being American. Other people have just referred to me as an American student. I suppose it’s typical of study abroad experiences, but I continually find myself rethinking my identity here.

Apart from that, what’s also been interesting is discovering how filthy and strange Paris can be. The Champs-Élysées at three a.m. is a sad, depraved place.

Cardinal Sinners, May 8

Watch this short video of the Cardinal Sinners rehearsing “It Don’t Have To Change” by John Legend in the Music Studios on May 3:

Rehearsal: Cardinal Sinners “It Don’t Have To Change” 5/3/11

The Cardinal Sinners Spring Concert will take place on Sunday, May 8, 2011 at 8pm in World Music Hall.

As Wesleyan’s oldest all-female a cappella group, the Cardinal Sinners have developed an eclectic repertoire of songs for performance on the Wesleyan University campus, as well as benefit events in the greater Middletown community.

West African Drumming and Dance, May 6

Watch this short video of a rehearsal for the West African Drumming and Dance
 performance:

Rehearsal: West African Drumming and Dance 5/3/11

Don’t miss this invigorating performance, filled with the rhythms of West Africa! Drumming and dance students (and guest artists) will perform under the direction of Abraham Adzenyah and choreographer Iddi Saaka on Friday, May 6, 2011 at 3pm in the 
CFA Courtyard 
(rain location: Crowell Concert Hall). 
Free admission.