Q: Where are you from?
T: Originally, I grew up in North Dakota. [I’ve spent] not quite ten years in Pennsylvania.
Q:Where did you graduate from?
T: I have four degrees. I have an Associate’s in Liberal Arts from Minnesota. I have a Bachelor’s from Portland State University in Oregon. A Master’s from the University of North Dakota. And a PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi.
Q: What kinds of publications have you written for?
T: [Most recently I've been involved in editing for]
WLN. The full title is
WLN: A Journal of Writing Centers. Historically, it was known as the
Writing Lab Newsletter. But, a few years ago they decided, looking at the nature of the work and the fact that it is peer reviewed, “newsletter” wasn’t really the way to describe it. So, instead, we renamed it. People in the field still refer to it as the Newsletter.
So, I’m a co-editor for that, which is a lot of work - good work. I’m co-editing the digital edited collection [
What We Teach Writing Tutors: A WLN Digital Edited Collection], which is the first of its kind in our field, which is very exciting. Somebody published a book recently pointing to the problem that writing centers are - people are interested in writing centers around the world. We had visitors from a college in China [last semester]; they got really interested in our center. I recently saw a presentation about writing centers in China. They’re emerging, and they’re emerging everywhere. The problem is getting access to our scholarship. People can’t - they don’t have a subscription to
JSTOR or can’t get to our scholarship. So,
WLN is nice in that our back issues are archived online after a year. We’ve also created this digital edited collection, which is really pitched for a new director or, say, someone in a graduate program… everything you need to know about how to train and educate your writing tutors.
I’ve mainly written for writing centers… it’s been years since I published somewhere that wasn’t [for a writing center journal.] The last that wasn’t for one was in a journal called
Teaching Writing.
Q: How long have you taught at Bloomsburg?
T: I’m in my tenth year.
Q: What classes do you usually teach?
T: Basically, there are four classes I teach here. I teach the introductory tutor class, English 297. That stays fairly consistent each year. Of course, I teach sections of returning tutors, and we rotate that topic. The two classes I get to teach for the English Department - I’m currently teaching the Theory in Practice in Writing class, and that’s a neat class… for one, the group of students in that class are future teachers of English. We have one semester to correct a whole lot of misconceptions about what it means to teach writing. The other class I get to teach is English Grammar and Usage. That’s English 212.
Q: Involved in any other organizations, other than WALES?
T: On BU campus, I am involved in several projects. One is the Military Credit By Review committee, designed to help people with military experience get an accurate assessment of what credits [they should receive]. I’m on the university curricular committee. So, we think about changes and grading curriculum across campus. I’m involved in academic enrichment. Just a lot of writing curriculum. Oh, I’m involved in writing placement, so students can come here either starting in English 101 or in English Enrichment.
Q: What are your personal favorite kinds of books/shows?
T: I like comedy if I’m watching television. Anything with a laugh track, I probably won’t watch… But anything that is a little strange [I like]. I have the great fortune of being married to someone who reads voraciously, so I never even look for books. I have the ones that are left for me to read. Good literature. Contemporary. I’m reading
An American Marriage right now. [It’s a good way to pick up unfamiliar genres.] Absolutely, but I never - I was telling someone I was reading this great book this morning, and they asked me the title - I don’t even remember! I don’t pay attention, because, you know, it’s just the book that was the next thing for me to read, and I didn’t seek it out. It’s a great problem to have.
Q: If you could create your own class to teach, without restriction and about anything you want, what would it be?
T: That’s a tough question… Well, there’s a way in which that I’m really troubled by where we are right now. I read an article yesterday about a group - it’s something like Invicta Europa. It’s an alt-right group. They’re a white nationalist group, and they’re kind of going undercover at places like CPAC, and their goal is to hide their ideology so they can infiltrate and get elected to GOP spots. Then, when they have enough pull in the Republican Party due to their elected positions, they can start to try to… their fear is that by 2045 white people will not be the majority anymore. They want to shut down non-European immigration as a way to combat, and they’re very much in lieu of President Trump’s policies. So, any class that can help students actually process information carefully, and allow us - and I do think if we can be willing to think and hold disparate views at the same time, humans are decent enough that we can overcome groups like that. So, if someone said “develop an important class” that would be it. It would be a class designed to - not infuse my politics into students’ heads, but to force them to think. I think those classes already exist, but that’s the work I'd think of.
Q: What is the best advice someone has ever given you about English?
T: I’d go back to my high school English teacher. He wouldn’t probably have known what theoretical position he was coming from, but he was an Expressivist. Every week - I had the same teacher from seventh grade through twelfth grade. It was a small town. Every week, we wrote what we called a 400-word composition. Two double-spaced pages was essentially what we had to do. I decided one time I wasn’t - I was just writing whatever... I had a very real rhetorical situation. I wanted to entertain these people. So, every week, that’s what I was trying to do.
One week, I decided, well, I should do something more academic. I went to the encyclopedias in the library and being somewhat of a lazy student, I only got to the “A” and stopped at Australian Flying Bats. And I wrote an essay about Australian Flying Bats. Mr. B always returned our reports regularly, but he didn’t turn it back that week. He waited, and the next week I wrote something more like what I was usually writing. Something about how cold it was in the house in the winter before you started the fire. Just this descriptive nonfiction essay. I made up stories about this cheese addict that managed a Pizza Hut. You know, just whatever a high school kid is going to do.
So he took - in front of the whole class, and we’ve all known each other since we were young - he takes my Australian Bat essay, and as he’s handing back the essays, he crumbles [up my essay] and he throws it in the garbage can. “Ted, this is awful!” Then he hands me my cheese addict essay and says, “There’s the Ted we know.” And I think that had a profound impact, just having a real person engaging through that. So, I’ve never really been confused about writing what I’m interested in.
Q: Quick, create a title of a book you’d like to write or a book about you:
T: Weirdly, these titles come right into my head.
Unintended Consequences could work for both. Why? [laughs] So, if I’m writing about myself, I had no idea how I landed a job I love in a place I love. It’s a little tough right now because, as America has kind of shown its racist face a lot more, I’m not as in love with living out in the country as I have been. But, I still love the countryside. But I had no idea - there were years I was trying to do other things. My idea of - when I was eighteen, was join the military, learn how to operate nuclear power plants, move to France, where nuclear power is a big source of energy, live in France, operate a nuclear power plant. That was the plan. And then it just sort of kept changing, and changing, and changing along the way, to the point that even in my PhD program, I went as a creative writer. I still hadn’t figured out yet what I wanted to be. But, things kind of keep happening, in a way I really hadn’t known or guessed. Eventually, you start to aim a little bit. You decide to go on the market and apply for a job like this. I almost had to be hit on the head before I realized that this is where I should be.
Q: What would you like to see for the English department?
T: We know how valuable the work we have students do is, but we keep shrinking. We’re down several professors, and I think it’s because it’s very hard to convince people’s parents that it’s okay to be an English major because it doesn't seem immediately practical. Now, all of those ‘soft skills’ English majors develop - and what research shows us about liberal arts - they bring all these skills and abilities. So...again, if people were ready to think in more complicated ways, to understand the value of a liberal arts education, it wouldn’t be such a hard sell. This is a wonderful English department. I’ve been in many English departments before I got here, and two of them were not very functional. In fact, one had to do something called “receivership” where an outside person came in and was the chair. They fought so much. Our department doesn’t really have that problem.
It would be nice to get more people in here and help us continue to move into the 21st century. I don’t know - there are some of our classes that can be taught well online, and some that I struggle to imagine having the same impact in an online environment. I could teach English 212 [English Grammar and Usage] online, and that could work. But, I would struggle to teach English 306 online. Being in the room for the conversation matters, especially for future teachers. I think that’s probably similar for some literature classes. Conversations within the classroom have a lot of power. I’m not against an online environment… but I know what a special experience it can be [in the classroom].
One thing I also think - rather than sort of revering, I think we should respect and present our students literature throughout the history of the world, western European and world literature, and underrepresented cultures' literature. But - the thing that happened to me, and thank goodness the person I’m married to escaped it, but when I was an undergraduate, I don’t know that I was assigned to read anything that had been written within the last 30 years. It was all older stuff that I was reading. Again, that was a long time ago, so maybe it’s changed… well, that’s not true. In my creative writing courses, I read more recent stuff. In my literature classes, I didn’t. It was all anthologized stuff. There wasn’t really a contemporary literature niche. And so, I think one thing - I’d love our literature folks to leave here knowing how to find good contemporary literature. I don’t know if we have as much of that as we should. I would love for all BU undergrads to leave here knowing how to find literature that mattered to them, because there’s lots of great things being written and published, and I’m not sure if we’re equipping our students to have lives as readers of stuff that’s current.
Thanks to Dr. Roggenbuck for the interview!
