Kathryn Trueblood’s newest novel, Take Daily As Needed, presents the challenges of parenting while ill with the desperado humor the subject deserves; it was published by the University of New Mexico Press in September 2019. Trueblood offered workshops in therapeutic writing at “The Examined Life” Conference at the University of Iowa, the Hugo House in Seattle, and the Lighthouse Writers Conference in Denver. Her essay, “Writing from a Pile of Shoes: Chronic Illness, Kids, and Creation,” was published by Literary Mama in November 2019, and “Honey, Don’t Break Yourself” is forthcoming in Minerva Rising #18. You can find her interviews at Invisible Not Broken Podcast, Montana Public Radio, and Writing It Real.
Geri Forsberg
Geri Forsberg is fast at work teaching, researching, and writing. This year Geri developed a new approach to teaching technical writing. Students research historical documents that have transformed culture—such documents as the Magna Carta, the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Human Rights, the Equal Pay Act, and many others. Students study what life was like before the document was written, how the document came about, and how life changed after the document was written. They also consider how the document is relevant to their lives today. Students then write magazine articles, an academic research poster, and visual presentations based on their research. Their research posters are presented at the Humanities Research Day at Western. Students have said that their appreciation of history has grown, and their critical thinking skills have developed. Geri is also presenting her research on “Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul in Dialog” at the Media Ecology Association annual conference in Toronto this June.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s Your Body a Bullet, a collaborative book with alumna Elizabeth Vignali, was published by Unsolicited Press in November 2018. She presented “Immensities” at the PMLA conference, a poetry project that seeks to honor women who’ve been murdered in Whatcom County. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction appeared in various journals including SWIMM, Ghost City, Stirring, Hippocampus, Threadcount, Permafrost, A-Minor, and Contrary, received six Best of the Net nominations and two Pushcart Prize nominations, and will be included in three anthologies: Mansion, by Ghost City Press, and Ways of Looking, by Carve, and the Running Wild Novella Anthology, by Running Wild Press.
Kelly Magee
Kelly Magee’s story “Nobody Understands You Like You” was selected by Antonya Nelson to be included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, her story (with Carol Guess), “With Killer Bees” was included in an anthology of collaborative writing, They Said, and her story (with Kami Westhoff) “The Unbearable Here” was published in Contrary. She developed a new course in “Queer Memoir” and taught a Graduate Fiction Workshop around the idea of “influence”—what things contemporary writers are influenced by, and how they can best exert their own influence. She also spoke on a panel on “The Speculative and Fantastic in LGBTQ+ Writing” and organized “Taste of Western,” a reading of WWU faculty at this year’s AWP conference in Portland.
Christopher Loar
Chris Loar’s unhealthy obsession with Daniel Defoe continues. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year will appear in Eighteenth-Century Fiction this fall, and he is currently working on a book chapter about Defoe’s responses to scientific developments in the early eighteenth century. He’s also still co-editing the online journal Digital Defoe (digitaldefoe.org). And this summer he’ll travel to York in the UK to present some of his research on Defoe and deism. His students this year have mostly been spared from this obsession, though; instead, his teaching has focused on the sibling novelists Henry and Sarah Fielding; on ecological writing in the past, present, and future tenses; and on literary animals.