J: Lancaster, PA.
Q: What major (and minor, if applicable) did you graduate with for your undergrad degree?
J: I graduated with a BA English and a Minor in Philosophy.
Q: Where did you go for grad school?
J: I earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2011. Then, I continued on to earn my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Texas Christian University (TCU).
Q: What did you focus on there?
J: During my MFA at Mills College I took a series of craft classes, fiction workshops, and literature classes with the MA students. My creative thesis was a fiction novel titled The Wait Means Never that told the story of a young woman returning to her old friends and family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for a funeral after having lived in California for several years.
Q: Have you written for any kinds of publications or received any writing awards? If so, what?
I’ve published two pieces so far. During my senior year at Bloomsburg University, Dr. Riley helped me publish a piece about Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot in a small, online scholarly journal called the The Absurdist Monthly Review.
Then, in 2016, CCTE Studies (a scholarly journal for teachers of English in Texas) published “Creativity in the Margins,” which argues that interest to the point of obsession is an essential component of writing well and offers exercises adapted from creative writing pedagogy to nurture and trigger students’ interests.
Q: What English-related organizations are/were you part of?
J: American Culture Association
Association of Writers and Writing Programs
Conference of College Teachers of English
Modern Language Association
National Council for Teachers of English
Rhetoric Society of America
Q: What career are you in now?
J: I’m currently a lecturer at Texas Christian University (TCU). I teach introductory and intermediate composition and creative writing classes.
Q: Favorite books or shows?
J: Favorite Books:
Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Favorite Shows:
Anything by Marti Noxon (Sharp Objects, Dietland, Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce, etc.)
Q: Why did you become an English student?
J: I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing. As a child, my parents would let me and my three siblings stay up as long as we wanted telling each other stories as long as one of us wrote them down. As I continued through middle and high school, I had excellent teachers who emphasized the intersections between creative writing, research, argument, and literature. So, choosing an English major was the obvious choice.
Q: What is the best advice someone has ever given you about writing?
J: “You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
– Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Q: What is your favorite class you have ever taken? (At Bloomsburg, or otherwise?)
J: Tough question! I think my favorite class was Craft of Fiction, which I took during my MFA at Mills College. We read weird, philosophical literary fiction like The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz, analyzed them to understand how specific stylistic choices created particular effects, and imitated them strategically. It was a crazy, weird, challenging class that really taught me how to read for the sake of writing something similar.
Q: What subjects do you like to write about, formally and informally?
Scholarship:
Creative writing, rhetoric-composition pedagogy, and classical rhetoric
Fiction:
Philosophical questions like the nature of truth, everything fantasy or sci-fi, and coming of age stories
Q: Quick, create a title of a book you’d like to write:
J: Into the Air.
Q: Now create the title of a book about you:
J: Oh, the Places You’ll Grow!
Q: Any advice for students looking to take more English classes or for those thinking about majoring in English?
J: Most people think that the only jobs English majors can hope for upon graduation are teaching jobs. That’s simply not true. More and more jobs are looking for graduates with Liberal Arts majors because these majors teach the soft skills (critical thinking, strong communication skills, close reading ability, etc.) that other majors tend to lack. You can approach your education looking for a major that will prepare you for a specific job like Nursing or Accounting, or you can choose a major that trains your mind for the millions of jobs that require critical thinkers and strong communicators. An English major prepares you for those jobs. Plus, an English major sets you apart from the roughly 40% of students graduating with business majors.
Thanks for the interview, Dr. Menkin Kontelis!
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