Lebanon Valley College interview!

Dear England, I'm pleased to report I've been invited for a campus interview at Lebanon Valley College. LVC is located in Annville, a small town in Pennsylvania about 35 miles east of the state capital, Harrisburg. It's a picturesque part of the country, and I am excited to visit next Wednesday and meet the faculty at the English department.

University of Michigan interview!

Dear England, I am pleased to have an initial phone interview at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The job is for Lecturer in English literature, and would involve teaching upper-level courses in poetry, literary studies, romanticism, drama, digital rhetoric and undergraduate advising. Ann Arbor itself is a pretty college town in the American midwest:

For those of you uncertain where Michigan is, the whole state is surrounded on three sides by the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. The college town of Ann Arbor, home of the main campus of the University of Michigan, is also very close to Lake Erie and Canada itself - see the map! Ann Arbor is in the south-east corner of Michigan, close to Detroit:

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So far I've visited Ann Arbor three times, twice in the last two years, and I'll be visiting again in September - for the football! The University of Michigan is famous for its American football games, which are played at literally the biggest stadium in America: it holds 100,000. It's nickname is The Big House - also a term for prison in American slang!

Click the pic to learn more about Michigan American football and stadium!

Queen's University, Belfast interview

Next week, I'm pleased to receive my second interview in Ireland - this time Northern Ireland. I'll give a presentation at Queen's University, Belfast. I'm excited about the trip to the city, and to visit the famous Seamus Heaney Centre in the English department, to interview for the post of Lecturer in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction). After teaching Creative Writing on the M.A. at Royal Holloway, University of London, I'm excited about the chance to convert my work and publications into a full-time position. Wish me luck!

One of Seamus Heaney's accomplishments is his translation of the earliest Old English epic poem Beowulf. Here we see him holding up an ornate retainer's mask with suitable admiration!

Below is the The Grounds at the university, a suitable place for dreaming and writing great poetry!

A potted history of the university: "Founded by Queen Victoria, the Queen's University in Ireland, was designed to be a non-denominational alternative to Trinity College Dublin which was controlled by the Anglican Church.The University was made up of three Queen's Colleges - in Cork, Galway and Belfast. Although it was the first University in the north of Ireland, Queen's drew on a tradition of learning which goes back to 1810 and the foundation of the Belfast Academical Institution.Its collegiate department, which provided University-style education, closed with the establishment of Queen's and four of its professors and many of its students transferred to the new college.Founded in 1845, Queen's opened in1849 when the first students entered the magnificent new college building designed and built by Charles Lanyon. Since then, the University estate has grown to more than 300 buildings - many of them listed for their architectural importance. The first batch of students numbered 90. Today there are some 24,000."

For more information, see this link.

University of Puerto Rico shortlist!

My latest job possibility (for Assistant Professor of English) is at the University of Puerto Rico. Click the pic above the learn the history of the oldest university of Puerto Rico, an American territory (but not a state). The university is run in a similar way to a US state university, offering courses to both Puerto Rican and mainland US students, and I am very excited to have made the shortlist there. Beautiful buildings and palm trees can't be bad!

John McGahern Interview

This is John McGahern, a much respected Irish novelist who passed away in 2006. However, his archives are held at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and include the manuscripts of his published and unpublished novels, short stories, letters and so on. Tomorrow I'm pleased to be travelling to Galway for a job interview for the position of Lecturer in Creative Writing and as a kind of archival ambassador for the literary treasures of the late writer. It's a great opportunity to work closely with the archives of an active Creative Writing program, as well as within the archive and how its carefully listed material can be best represented to the university, scholars and the general public.

John McGahern is probably best remembered for his novel Amongst Women (1990), written relatively late in his career - the story of a widowed IRA man Michael Moran who brings up a large family but through his mix of confused love and fear, eventually loses their love and much needed attention, as they grow up and become wise to his muddled and controlling ways (several of them moving to London). A sad story, but someone beautifully sweet despite the pain of the family shifting under Moran's feet - until the only thing left is his stubbornness and the sinking meadow where he goes for walks as an old man...My favourite John McGahern novel, though, is The Leavetaking (1975), a story set in Ireland and England about a schoolteacher who is forced to resign because he gets married outside the Catholic Church. Amongst other things, the novel is a quiet meditation on love, loss, growing up and struggles to find a place in the world for someone caught between Ireland and England. It also dares to be uplifting, or rather the autobiographical character dares to look forward to a better life less controlled by the Irish State at that time (the 50s), but of course, the sense persists that London is merely a temporary excursion away from the power of rural Ireland and its landscape that will draw him back...

Of course, John McGahern is equally remembered as a skilled writer of the short story, a creative form that bears a rich Irish history from James Joyce to William Trevor. McGahern's own Collected Stories appeared in 1992, and its revised edition Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories (with some stories excised) in 2006.

Finally, there is the Memoir (2006) that John McGahern published close to the end of his life - a kind of spiritual re-examination of his beginnings, his family and in particular, his relationship with his mother and father, the two presences that could not control his inner identity more strongly, and more differently. The father is revealed as the forerunner of many fictional fathers he created, a heroic man from the war with the black-and-tans, but a domestic bully who cannot manipulate his family to make them love him, who somehow escapes both sympathy and tragedy, and yet is an obsessive presence for McGahern and the reader alike - for his towering self-pity.

So what remains is the mother, the memory of the half-relationship cut off so abruptly in childhood but that lasted vividly for McGahern...If she has lived, she would have seen him become a writer of great statue, not the priest of their shared dream (a dream of priesthood that McGahern explodes in both his life and work); and yet, given his ability to grace lives far outside of Leitrim in England, France, Spain and the United States - those other countries that McGahern made his temporary homes - how much prouder she would have been.

The Best Job in the World!

Would you like to look after a private Austalian island for £70,000 a year, working part-time (12 hours a month) and all you have to do is write a promotional blog about how beautiful everything is? Er, so would I!

Is it true? Yes, but hence the competition. Click the pic above!

University of London - teaching postgrad class!

I'm pleased to say I'll be teaching a postgraduate workshop (for the M.A. in Creative Writing) at Royal Holloway, the University of London alongside UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, in Bloomsbury, Central London. I'll be teaching the workshop from January - April 2009 (the spring term in the UK).

The above pic shows the main campus, approximately 20 miles outside London in Surrey. The MA in Creative Writing will be taught in Bloomsbury, though, close to Bedford Square:

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I'm definitely looking forward to working alongside Professor Andrew Motion, the UK Poet Laureate, and poet Jo Shapcott. It's a great opportunity and I'm pleased to have it.

Below is the college coat of arms! The Latin motto "Esse quam videri" means "To be, rather than to seem." I hope to do the same!

Blighty here I come!

Singapore Creative Writing interview!

The above pic shows the green roof of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I'm pleased to receive an interview there for Assistant Professor of Creative Writing! I'll be mowing the roof garden part-time.

I'm excited about the interview, happening on a Sunday night for me and early Monday morning for the Nanyangs, given Singapore is 13 hours ahead of the US!

Here's the Division of English department. Terima kasih, NTU!

University of Cape Town interview!

I just experienced my first academic job interview. It was exciting to talk to to three professors who work on the slopes of Devil's Peak, with a view of Table Mountain.

It was amusing too to be on the line with the Southern hemisphere - where it is summer and the end of the academic year! - as well as the end of the day! (8:30 AM east coast is 4:30 PM South African time).

With a little luck, I'll be visiting Cape Town in early December for a campus visit - now that would be something!

Kerouac House - I am Alternate!

I am pleased to say I am the alternate choice to live in Jack Kerouac's old house for 3 months! The Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida, is the house Kerouac lived in with his mother when On The Road was published, made him famous, and where he subsequently wrote The Dharma Bums!

If Brian Turner, the soldier-poet known for his 2005 poetry volume Here, Bullet decides not to live in the house (from June-August 2009), I am first alternate choice!

Voila the house!

The Kerouac House is now run by the Kerouac Project of Orlando at http://www.kerouacproject.org/ Plus you can tour the Kerouac House here.

I recommend the Jack Kerouac biography called Memory Babe (his childhood nickname)- the most readable and detailed biography in my view. More about Jack can be found here.