The Words: February 2021
One Brave English Major Embarks on an Honors Project
Alice Asch ’22
Betsy Barthelemy, a senior from Evanston, IL, has earned the impressive title of being the sole English major undertaking an honors project this school year! In what will ultimately be a research paper of roughly eighty to a hundred pages, Betsy plans to examine representations of girlhood in Victorian children’s fiction and fantasy literature. Read more about Betsy’s work here…
Revolutionary Writing: An Interview With Miriam Moore-Keish ‘19, Author of Cherokee Rose
Dalton Greene ’22
Macalester’s English majors tend to get up to a lot after graduating and moving into the always-looming real world. One such busybody is Miriam Moore-Keish ‘19, who, having earned an MPhil at Cambridge just last year, is now preparing for the release of her new book, Cherokee Rose. Excited to hear more from the author herself, The Words caught up with Miriam to discuss the writing process, publishing during a pandemic, and, of course, the role the Macalester English department had in bringing her to this point. Read the full interview here…
Cows, Poetry, and Facing the Climate Crisis
Malcolm Cooke ’21
Molly Sowash ’16 has recently started a newsletter. Some of the topics? Cows and the climate crisis. Her writing weaves the poetry and literary influences she developed getting her Creative Writing degree (and as a Senior Newsletter Editor for the Words!) at Macalester into promoting education on sustainable agriculture.
“It’s a lot more of sharing my story, writing my thoughts about the environmental crisis we’re in and what it means to work with the land,” Molly said. “A lot of inspiration I find from authors like Wendell Berry and Robin Wall Kimmerer. I definitely weave writing into that through that newsletter.” Read more about Molly and her cows here...
Sabbatical and Scholarship in a Pandemic
Kira Schukar ’22
In the summer of 2019, Professor Amy Elkins embarked on a year-long sabbatical to work on her first book, Crafting Modernity: Remaking Feminist Time from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present. Before her trip, she talked about her plans for the year in an interview with Miriam Moore-Keish ‘19. Her study took her to Cardiff University in Wales, the British Library in London, and Yale University in Connecticut. Although her research was interrupted by the pandemic, Professor Elkins found “radical joy and mindfulness” in her work, whether she was writing on site or at home. She returned to teaching English at Macalester in the fall of 2020. Read more about Professor Elkins and her research here…
Wordplay
Alice Asch ’22
This month at The Words, we’re celebrating the work of Krys Limin ‘22! Krys (she/they) is a Religious Studies Major and Classics Minor from Wrightstown, New Jersey, who has dabbled in the genres of fantasy, romance, horror, young adult, and freestyle poetry. When asked about her areas of interest in writing, she said she is fascinated by “reunions and returns, the horrors of being the horror, the disconnect and intergenerational trauma between immigrants and their American-raised children, and the experience of being a woman in a sexually repressed Christian household.” As for Krys’s inspirations, they are drawn to “the smallest aspects of people’s existence: what they use to hold their keys, the ways they are picky, their pet peeves, the food they eat and why.” Read two poems from Krys here…