Miscellany

Beverly Taylor, Dawn Wilson, Erica Plouffe-Lazure, Stuart Parks, Dean Tuck, and Maggie Saia participated in the National Novel Writing Month project with the encouragement of Luke Whisnant.  Participants in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) begin writing November 1 and stop at midnight on November 30 in an attempt to reach completion of a first draft 50,000 word novel (175 pages -- double-spaced).  The very first NaNoWriMo took place in July, 1999, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Congratulations to Beverly Taylor and Luke Whisnant who made it to 50,000 words!  For more information about National Novel Writing Month, see: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

The 4th Annual TALGS Conference will be held February 10, 2007, at East Carolina University.  Sponsored by the English Department, the TESOL/Applied Linguistics Graduate Students (TALGS) conference will present Donna Christian as keynote speaker. Christian is current president of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC, a private, nonprofit organization that works to promote and improve the teaching and learning of languages, serve as a resource on issues related to language and culture, and conduct research on critical topics in those areas.

Rachel Mills organized two poetry readings by students from her Introduction to Poetry Writing courses on December 5 in Bate 2024 and 2016.

Anthology, a collection of story excerpts by Luke Whisnant's Fall 2006 Advanced Fiction Writing students, is now available online (click on the title).

The premiere newsletter of Joyner Library's Special Collections Department, Pirate's Treasure, is now available online.  Please see: http://www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/spclcoll/upload/Special_Collections_Newsletter_Fall_2006-2.pdf

On Wednesday, Nov 29, at 8 pm in the Willis Building, Mark Kemp, ECU English alumnus and former associate editor at Rolling Stone, read from his creative nonfiction book Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race & Redemption in the New South, first published in 2004 by Simon and Schuster and re-issued in paperback by the University of Georgia Press in 2006.  From the publisher: "In the tradition of music historians such as Nick Tosches and Peter Guralnick, Kemp masterfully blends into his narrative the stories of southern rock bands -- from heavy hitters such as the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and R.E.M. to influential but less-known groups such as Drive-By Truckers -- as well as the personal experiences of their fans. In dozens of interviews, he charts the course of southern rock & roll.  Before civil rights, the popular music of the South was a small, often racially integrated world, but after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, black musicians struck out on their own.  Their white counterparts were left to their own devices, and thus southern rock was born: a mix of popular southern styles that arose when predominantly white rockers combined rural folk, country, and rockabilly with the blues and jazz of African-American culture.  This down-home, flannel-wearing, ass-kicking brand of rock took the nation by storm in the 1970s.  The music gave southern kids who emulated these musicians a newfound voice. Kemp and his peers now had something they could be proud of: southern rock united them and gave them a new identity that went beyond outside perceptions of the South as one big racist backwater.  Kemp offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, searingly intimate, and utterly original journey through the South of the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, viewed through the prism of rock & roll. With brilliant insight, he reveals the curative and unifying impact of rock on southerners who came of age under its influence in the chaotic years following desegregation. Dixie Lullaby fairly resonates with redemption."

While at ECU, Kemp was an English major with a concentration in writing, and he played lead guitar and was lead singer in the local alt-rock band the Trend.  After graduation, he worked his way up writing for Option magazine in the 1980s and becoming editor of Discovery magazine.  He also became a vice-president of programming for MTV, and then an associate editor at Rolling Stone, a position he left after securing a contract for Dixie Lullaby.  Kemp, who has also been named an outstanding alumnus, lives in Charlotte, where he is a freelance writer.