The Greyrock Institute: 2000 Program

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Institute Overview

The Greyrock Institute of Colorado State University offers graduate courses, conferences, and workshops for graduate students, teachers in secondary schools and community colleges, and members of the Fort Collins community. Weekly readings, colloquia, and social occasions afford students ongoing informal exchange in a supportive learning environment, while outstanding faculty facilitate opportunities for growth and professional development.

A four week package and a two week package are available, both designed to complement the Greyrock course offerings. Within each package students can choose to participate in all of the Institute offerings or can opt for a more tailored selection. A detailed explanation of the available options can be found under the heading "Institute Packages."

Keynote Address

William W. Bevis will open the month-long session with an exploration of the Institute's theme, "Seeing the Landscape." In addition to his newest book, Borneo Log: The Struggle for Sarawak's Forests, he is the author of Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West and was a member of the editorial board for The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. He is Professor of English at the University of Montana, where he has taught for over twenty years.

Course Offerings

Two three-credit graduate courses offer students stimulating contact with peers and faculty. Courses are open to Institute participants and other professionals within the community, as well as students currently enrolled in CSU's graduate program.

E630A: "Seeing the Landscape"

Taught by David Mogen

June 13-22

"Tell me the landscape in which you live," wrote Ortega y Gassett, "and I will tell you who you are." Through an examination of a variety of voices, this course will explore the personal, cultural, scientific, and mythological dimensions of a process that seems as simple as opening your eyes: "seeing" the "landscape." In readings from classic American writers such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Cather, students will examine how landscape descriptions evoke complex, often contradictory American values associated with "wilderness" and "nature." Then students will explore how landscape descriptions by contemporary writers such as Edward Abbey, Ann Zwinger, William Kittredge, Leslie Silko, SueEllen Campbell, John Calderazzo, and Gerald Callahan continue to expand and reconceive these themes. To creatively apply the insights gained from discussing the assigned readings, students will write two essays of landscape description themselves: one on a landscape reconstructed through memory, the other on a landscape observed on a class hike in the Colorado Rockies. Though the primary focus will be on interpreting and writing literary landscapes, this will be an inherently interdisciplinary course, in which students will discuss and research relevant material from history, other arts, and sciences that help to interpret "landscape" observations. Readings will be assigned from texts such as the following:

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown"

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture, eds. Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O'Grady

William Kittredge, Owning It All

SueEllen Campbell, Bringing the Mountain Home

Kim Stafford, Having Everything Right

David Mogen is Professor of English at Colorado State University and has published on frontier mythology, Native American literature, and science fiction in numerous journals and anthologies. He has also authored two books, Wilderness Visions and Ray Bradbury, and he co-edited The Frontier Experience and the American Dream and Frontier Gothic.

E632: "Making Literature: Teachers As Writers, Writers As Teachers"

Taught by Deanna Ludwin

June 26-July 7

"Writing is a hard way to make a living, but a good way to make a life," said fiction writer Doris Betts. The same might be said of teaching. This course will focus on the writing life and the teaching life and how these two "good ways" can inform each other. Through critical reading and craft-focused writing, participants will expand their knowledge of both the principles and practice of literature--with attention to poetry and fiction--from a writer's point of view. Participants will read poetry and fiction by such writers as Mary Crow, Bill Tremblay, Laura Mullen, Billy Collins, Wendy Rose, Charles Baxter, Ellen Gilchrist, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Sandra Cisneros, Pablo Neruda, Jamaica Kincaid, Amy Tan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Sherman Alexie, Linda Pastan, Lucille Clifton, Steven Schwartz, Leslee Becker, Emily Hammond, Brendan Galvin, Ed Ochester, Charles Simic, Pattiann Rogers, Pam Houston, Yehuda Amichai, Wislawa Szymborska, Eavan Boland, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich. Participants will respond to each other's writing during in-class workshops, and they will create a portfolio of writing exercises to use in their own classrooms. Guest speakers will include local writers and writing teachers. Possible texts include:

What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers

The Practice of Poetry

Writing Poems

Writing Fiction

Deanna Ludwin teaches literature and creative writing classes and coordinates the internship program for Colorado State University's English Department. She also instructs Teaching College Creative Writing and supervises MFA candidates who teach CSU's introductory creative writing course. Her poetry, short fiction, and critical works have appeared in ACM, Cimarron Review, Writers' Forum, Sundog: The Southeast Review, Dry Creek Review, Western American Literature, The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, and other publications. She taught in secondary schools for thirteen years.

Conferences and Workshops

"The McBride English Education Conference"

June 23 & 24

Affirmation of the Institute's belief in teachers as the key to educational change can be found in the example of Bill McBride, a nationally recognized Colorado educator. Bill McBride has contributed to the field of English Education on local, state, and national levels for forty-five years, and he is the co-author of the Pacesetter English Program. At this first McBride Conference, CSU English Education Alumni will gather with Institute participants for presentations and workshops on the topic "Teaching Film As Text."

"Teaching with Technology"

Taught by Mike Palmquist

June 30 & July 1

This weekend workshop is designed for teachers of language arts, composition, and humanities who wish to explore how technology can support their teaching. Workshop participants will get hands-on experience with a variety of communication tools, including e-mail, chat, and discussion forums. Web-based resources and commenting programs that support collaboration among writers will also be explored. In addition, participants will be introduced to the basics of creating and maintaining a web page for their own courses.

Mike Palmquist is Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University, where he co-directs the Center for Research on Writing and Communication Technologies. His scholarly interests include writing across the curriculum, the effects of computer and network technologies on writing instruction, and the use of hypertext/hypermedia in instructional settings. His work

has appeared in journals including Computers and Composition, Written Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of Engineering Education, Kairos, Council of College Teachers of English Studies, and Social Forces, as well as in edited collections. He is co-author, with Kate Kiefer, Jake Hartvigsen, and Barbara Godlew, of Transitions: Teaching Writing in Computer-Supported and Traditional Classrooms, and co-author, with Don Zimmerman, of Writing with a Computer. Recent work includes establishing a new journal, academic.writing, which offers interdisciplinary perspectives on communication across the curriculum.

Reading Series Writers

Mary Crow is Professor of English at Colorado State University. She is the current Poet Laureate of Colorado and has published seven collections of poetry, four of her own and three of her translations of Latin American poetry. Her most recent book of poems is I Have Tasted the Apple. She has won a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Creative Writing Award from the Fulbright Commission. Some of her projects as Poet Laureate include putting poetry placards in Fort Collins buses, giving prizes for innovative teaching of poetry in the public schools (Zach Memorial Awards), and traveling around Colorado for two-day residencies under the sponsorship of the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities.

SueEllen Campbell, Professor of English at Colorado State University, is the author of Bringing the Mountain Home, a collection of interlinked personal essays exploring how it feels and what it means to spend time in wild or natural places. She has taught a wide variety of courses in reading and writing literature about the natural world and the human place in it (for groups ranging from freshmen through graduate students to elderhostelers) and has published numerous ecocritical essays. She is also co-director of CSU's new Environmental Affairs Interdisciplinary Program and in 2000 will be president of ASLE, the (1000+ member) Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Her current project is another book of literary nonfiction about the complex relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.

John Calderazzo teaches creative nonfiction workshops at Colorado State University and writes widely about the natural world. Through personal essays and environmental reporting in Audobon, Orion, the Sierra Club's American Nature Writing anthology, and the Reader's Digest's coffee table book American Nature, he has written about the man who makes the Swiss Army knife, birds in China, a forest-wandering monk in Thailand, canoing a swampy Florida river, "eco-grief" and insomnia, and many animals. His books include a how-to guide, Writing from Scratch: Freelancing; a children's book, 101 Questions About Volcanoes; and a book-in-progress about the ways volcanoes affect the inner lives of people who live on or near them. He also writes a natural history column, "Science and the Shore," for Coastal Living Magazine. In 1998, he won a "Best CSU Teacher" award.

Gerald Callahan is Associate Professor of Immunology in the Department of Pathology at Colorado State University. His scientific publications have appeared in, among others, Nature, Journal of Immunology, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, and Immunogenetics. Callahan's poetry and prose have appeared in, among others, Puerto Del Sol, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Creative Nonfiction, Terra Nova, Cream City Review, The Macguffin, Midwest Quarterly, Pacific Review, Creative Nonfiction, Rhino, and Midland Review. In 1999, Callahan was awarded a fellowship for literary nonfiction from the Colorado Council on the Arts for work currently underway. Callahan's first book, River Odyssey, was published by University Press of Colorado in 1998. His second book, The I of the Storm, is soon to be published.

Receptions and Weekly Events

An evening reception will follow the Institute's opening Keynote Address, allowing participants to meet and share ideas. Weekly colloquia, barbecues, and a mid-session reception will provide further opportunities for informal discussions in a relaxed environment.