Written by guest blogger W.D. Blackmon, head of English

First, I’d like to thank Professor Gloria Galanes for being such a wonderful dean, and, second, I’d like to thank her for allowing me the opportunity to communicate with you directly through her blog. I want to focus on four areas in which the English Department actively seeks to work with you, our colleagues, in the College of Arts and Letters or elsewhere on campus, and you, our fellow community members locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. I have chosen four representative areas to discuss, but I could have focused on dozens of areas in which we in English want to work more closely with you.

The Children’s Literature Festival of the Ozarks

One of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen at Missouri State (or anywhere) occurs each Friday (in recent years) of MSU’s Fall Break. On Wednesday of Fall Break week, the campus sidewalks are flooded by thousands of eighteen- and twenty-year-olds; on Friday, however, these students seem magically transformed into shockingly younger versions of themselves (nine- and eleven-year-olds)!

For the last five years, the Children’s Literature Festival of the Ozarks has been hosted on the MSU campus the Friday of Fall Break (the twenty-seven years before that it was hosted at Drury). Those thousands of fourth-sixth-grade kids taking over the campus the Friday of Fall Break are here to listen to noted children’s authors from around the country. Up to fourteen sessions are held hourly and concurrently throughout the school day, with some of the sessions hosting over four hundred children! The authors include our local literacy champion David Harrison, who has sold tens of millions of children’s books (eighty million, and counting, I believe).

It’s an inspiring sight to witness the river of enthusiastic young readers (and their teachers and librarians) flowing past the front of Carrington Hall at the change-over time between sessions. This flood of juvenile enthusiasm would be one terrific way to illustrate the productive collaboration between Missouri State University and the Springfield Public Schools, as would the multiple sessions with authors (one of the most striking sessions I’ve witnessed was author Roland Smith’s session with Coger Theatre full of young students: he had their absolute and delighted attention). The Children’s Literature Festival of the Ozarks Committee takes note of the favorite authors of their targeted fourth-eighth-grade audience, and has had remarkable success bringing those very authors to campus. Meyer Library at MSU and the Children’s Literature faculty in the English Department (and others on campus) help the organizing committee (public school teachers and librarians, local librarians, and others) coordinate this huge, colorful, and important event for young students.

The Ozarks Writing Project

The Ozarks Writing Project (the on-campus site of the National Writing Project) in the English Department at Missouri State has helped train, revitalize, and reinvigorate hundreds of teachers in the region in all the disciplines that use writing and at all levels of schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. Dozens of specific initiatives undertaken by the Ozarks Writing Project focus on such things as preserving local heritage and involving a younger generation of students in learning about, celebrating, and writing about that heritage. The Ozarks Writing Project also empowers and inspires thousands of young writers from the region at youth writing camps held at Missouri State University. For the eight years of its existence, Dr. Keri Franklin, Director of English Education, has shaped, expanded, and directed the OWP.

For each of those past eight years I have sat in a session of one of  the Ozarks Writing Project  summer workshops and found the work done there to be especially effective and inspiring. Each time I have visited an Ozarks Writing Project session, the teachers/students/participants were so highly motivated and enthusiastic it was a very inspiring experience for me. Our future (and current!) public school teachers (in virtually every academic field, not just English) are obviously in excellent hands with Dr. Franklin at the OWP.

National Writing Project sites such as the Ozarks Writing Project have a profound “ripple effect” in regard to teachers and students in this region. For example, thirty-five teachers who have learned to improve their teaching of writing radically during the summer session, then, in turn, teach 150 or so writing students the next year, and this very positive cycle continues, year after year, to benefit the region in fundamental ways, since effective writing is perhaps the single most important skill (combined with reading) learned in our educational system.

Dr. Franklin’s grant writing success through the OWP is extremely impressive. Among the highlights of the over $300,000 in externally funded grants she has raised in connection with the OWP was a Local Sites Research Initiative ($20,000 for each of three years to study the effectiveness of DESE Literacy Academies for a total of $60,000). Dr. Franklin remains, year-after-year, the most successful grant writer in the College of Arts and Letters.

The Moon City Press

In 2006, Professor James Baumlin, as Managing Editor of the Moon City Press, began a series of books, researched and written by students, about the cultural heritage of this region, publishing The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful”: Remembering Springfield’s Theatre History, 1926-2006. This beautiful book has been praised by countless community members and played an important role in the gala-reopening of the Gillioz Theatre in downtown Springfield in October 2006. That series has continued with such publications as Recipes of Hope: Holiday Stories for and from The Kitchen in 2009 (this was a fund-raiser for the Missouri Hotel and Kitchen), and  Confederate Girlhoods: A Women’s History of Springfield, Missouri in 2010 (a book for which Dr. Baumlin mentored graduate student research concerning the letters of the women of the Campbell family, Springfield’s founding family). This book is partly remarkable in that it is a feminist history of early Springfield, Missouri, which is a pioneering breakthrough achievement, clearly.

Publishing 6-8 books annually, the MCP uses the following mission statement in all the books it publishes: This book is a joint venture of the Missouri State University Departments of English and Art and Design. With publication series in “Arts and Letters” and “Ozarks History and Culture,” Moon City books feature collaborations between students and faculty over the various aspects of publication: research, writing, editing, layout, and design.

At its heart, the MCP is (and will always be) a “teaching laboratory,” providing real-world experience to student researchers, writers, artists, editors, and graphic designers. Its “book annual” (upgraded from annual journal), the Moon City Review, allows Missouri State’s best students to experience national publication alongside writers of international stature: these include recipients of Pulitzer, MacArthur, Fulbright, and Faulkner Awards, the Prix de Rome, the Poet’s Prize (poetry’s equivalent of a National Book Award), and a Pushcart Prize. Missouri State students have also been published side-by-side with a Missouri Poet Laureate, an American Poet Laureate, a Presidential Inaugural Poet, and a living past President of the United States.

The Ozarks Studies Institute

Professor Kris Sutliff in the English Department has served as the Director of the Ozarks Studies Institute since 2007. The OSI seeks to preserve the heritage of the Ozarks, its culture, environment, and history by fostering a comprehensive knowledge of the Ozarks’ peoples, places, characteristics, and dynamics. It sponsors an Ozarks Studies Minor, numerous research archives, a wide-ranging annual festival, and a revitalized OzarksWatch magazine, which has been published in various forms since the 1970s.

Each year, in September, the Ozarks Studies Institute sponsors The Ozarks Celebration Festival, which is an entertaining and educational look at the region’s culture and heritage. The University launched the festival in 1998 with the hope that it would foster an understanding of place for both natives of the Ozarks and visitors. This year’s festival featured over 60 traditional craftspeople and commercial artists, three stages of music (which included traditional, bluegrass, and gospel music), Ozarks storytelling, traditional dance, films, historical characters, exhibits, and more.

The Ozarks Lecture Series, which occurs in conjunction with the Ozarks Celebration Festival, featured such notable speakers and topics this year as Rachel Reynolds Luster’s “Bringing It All Back Home: Holistic Approaches to Community Renewal and Cultural Sustainability in the Ozarks”; David L. Burton’s “Saving One-Room Schools in the Ozarks”; Dr. Brian Campbell’s film The Natural State of America and talk “Cutworm, Crow, Share and Grow:  The Conservation of Ozark Agrobiodiversity”; and Professor William Garrett Piston’s “Forgotten Local History: The Confederate Attack on Springfield, January 8, 1863.” In addition, a day of digital stories was presented by the Ozarks Writing Project.

The focus of the Ozarks Studies Institute is to encourage scholarly research focusing on the Ozarks while also being an educational resource, particularly for the region’s elementary and secondary schools. Some of the more notable collections that Missouri State University has available for research are the following (the first two feature work by former and current English faculty):

• The Katherine G. Lederer Ozarks African American History Collection showcases work done by Dr. Lederer for over 20 years, as she worked to preserve this region’s African American heritage. Through archival research and by building close bonds with the area’s ethnic community, Dr. Lederer compiled a collection of approximately 7,500 documents, many from the 19^th century.  The Lederer Collection includes over 2,500 photographs, numerous documents (such as marriage records and copies of church records), and Dr. Lederer’s own notes and writings.
• The Telling Traditions project is an oral history working to uncover, chronicle, and transmit the legacy of Jewish women in the Ozarks in collaboration with Temple Israel in Springfield, Missouri. This project’s goal is to preserve the culture of local Jewish women and to spread awareness of Jewish traditions.
• The Max Hunter Collection is an archive of almost 1,600 Ozark Mountain folk songs, recorded between 1956 and 1976. A traveling salesman from Springfield, Missouri, Hunter took his reel-to-reel tape recorder into the hills and backwoods of the Ozarks, preserving the heritage of the region by recording the songs and stories of many generations of Ozark history. As important as the songs themselves are the voices of the Missouri and Arkansas folks who shared their talents and recollections with Hunter.

I hope you are able to enjoy, in one form or another, such outreach projects connected with the English Department as those described above.