written by J. Michael Call

The annual National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State University features a highly acclaimed poet who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize and a former Ogden author whose first novel took an unflinching look at a seemingly perfect Mormon family.

The conference, originally founded by WSU English professor Mikel Vause and former faculty member Michael Meyer, was a way to help WSU students prepare to attend graduate school, explained Carl Porter, executive director of academic support and also a WSU English instructor.

The conference first started off as a state conference, where students could share their work with other students as well as listen to and get input from notable writers. It soon expanded nationally and was attracting students from across the country.

Porter and Vause now head the conference, which is in its 27th year. This year, it attracted about 350 student submissions from colleges and universities across the country. Porter said about 180 of those students were invited to present at the conference.

The student breakout sessions happen between presentations by the featured writers and are usually presented around a theme such British literature, American literature, Shakespeare, etc. The student work includes poetry, prose, fiction, short stories, essays and more. A complete schedule of the student presentations is available at nulc2012.com.

"I really would like the community to come up and participate and be a part of this and to see not only the professional writers, but also the young writers who are honing their skills here at the university," Porter said. "I think that they would find it enjoyable."

W.S. Merwin

In a career spanning half a century, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read -- and imitated -- poets in America.

The author of more than 50 books of poetry, prose and translations, Merwin was named in 2010 by the Library of Congress as the 17th United States Poet Laureate Consultant. Included in his awards are the National Book Award, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and two Pulitzers, first in 1971 for his book of poems, "The Carrier of Ladders," and again in 2009 for "The Shadow of Sirius."

The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of 5, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice. His recent poetry is his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs as an anti-imperialist, pacifist and environmentalist.

Merwin lives, writes, and gardens on a former pineapple plantation on the northeast corner of the island of Maui in Hawaii. He has spent the last 30 years planting 19 acres with over 800 species of palm, creating a sustainable forest. The property has recently been turned into a conservancy, the Merwin Conservancy.

Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner

Utah native Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner's first novel, "Dancing Naked" (Signature Books, 1999), was awarded the Utah Book Award and the Utah Arts Council's Publication Prize.

"Dancing Naked" tells the story of an even-tempered, successful mathematics professor who is comfortable with the predictability of his life in a quiet Salt Lake City subdivision. However, that control is just an illusion and something his 15-year-old son never lets him forget. A sensitive boy, his son is also harboring a secret.

The father's inability to accept what he knows -- and does not know -- about his son takes a devastating toll. American novelist and screenwriter Tim Sandlin wrote that the book "stares deep into the heart of intolerance, grief, and redemption, and does not blink."

Van Wagoner's short stories have appeared in literary periodicals, magazines and anthologies. His two forthcoming novels, scheduled to debut this summer, are both literary thrillers, and influenced by the traditions and landscapes unique to their settings. The books are titled "Cautionary Tales in Ogden, Utah," and "Come the Stygian Night."

A graduate of Weber State University, Van Wagoner and his family live in Washington.

the original story can be found here.

written by J. Michael Call

You could put a lot of labels on Alexandra Fuller, but she would prefer you didn't.

"When we put labels on, we can't hear one another, and I think that the quality of our listening gets impaired if we go at our stories from sort of a team-based, lockstep political point of view."

That philosophy to not label, but instead to tell a person's story in a forthright, entertaining and honest fashion, may be part of the reason Fuller's writing has earned her accolades around the world.

She is the author of four acclaimed nonfiction books and one of three featured speakers next week during the National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State University.

Prior to leaving on a publicity tour to Paris and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, last week, Fuller was walking along the banks of the Snake River near her home in Jackson, Wyo., during a telephone interview.

The snow was crunching under her feet on the brisk morning, and she spotted some moose along the riverbank, a far different setting from her childhood growing up in war-torn South Africa. As Fuller walked, she chatted in her distinctive South African accent of her formative years, her colorful mother and her books -- one of which tells the story of a Mormon roughneck killed on a Wyoming oil rig.

Born in 1969 in Glossop, England (near Manchester), Fuller has no memories of her early days in England. Her family moved back to Africa when she was a toddler.

Her father, Tim Fuller, was British and her mother, Nicola, was Kenyan. Alexandra was the only one of her siblings born in the U.K.; her parents moved there from Africa after the death of her older brother from meningitis.

"Tragedy sort of impelled them to go back and try to live in England, but my mother couldn't bear it. It's too gray and dreary," she said.

The couple's decision to return to Africa grew out of what Fuller categorized as a "bizarre love triangle" between her parents and her mother's native land.

"My mother loved land and she is so incredibly attached to it and would die for it, and my father loved my mother and was so incredibly attached to her and would die for her," Fuller said. "So the three of them stayed together."

So the family moved back to Africa and settled in what was then Rhodesia, a place where a bloody battle for independence was about to engulf the family. Change was coming to South Africa, the apartheid system of racial segregation was faltering and the young Alexandra -- known as "BoBo" to her family --was coming of age. The groundwork had been laid to stir the fires of this budding writer.

"There was this massive internal shift as well as this phenomenal external shift that made me question everything," Fuller said.

A love of books

Fuller's family farmed close enough to Mozambique that they could hear the border land mines going off when people or animals stepped on them. Because of the land mines, Fuller said, she did not go to school during those times. Instead, her mother taught her to read and write and instilled in her a passion for books.

"She finds math and science very boring and she loves words," Fuller said of her mother. "So she never bothered to teach me to count, but she spent an inordinate amount of time teaching me how to tell stories."

As the war intensified, her parents joined up to fight against the liberation army, her father as a soldier and her mother as a police reservist.

Fuller writes in compelling detail of her childhood in her first book, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood" (Random House, 2001). The book was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the Booksense Best Nonfiction Book, a finalist for the Guardian's First Book Award and the winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

Fuller has described her madcap mother as a "fiercely glamorous, hard-drinking woman capable of terrifying and sometimes racist madness and equally terrifying compassion, and a woman whose madness was fueled by the death of three of her children."

Fuller's other two siblings also died during infancy as the family struggled to survive in Rhodesia's harsh environment.

Her newest book, "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness" (Penguin Press, 2011), is a prequel/sequel to her first book and a love letter of sorts to her mother. Fuller paints a vivid, funny, but unflinching portrayal of her mother's idyllic childhood as a white girl whose best friend growing up was a chimp in imperialist Kenya.

The book details her mother's struggles as a white woman during the Rhodesian civil war and how her baby brother's gravesite -- along with many others -- was left unmarked as a result of that war.

"Humans have an unerring capacity to ignore one another's sacred traditions and to defile one another's hallowed ground," she writes of the incident in the book. "Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity, no peace."

Cowboy with dreams

Her childhood in Africa certainly affected her writing, but Fuller said her books are not political. Instead, she tries to paint an honest portrait of the people she examines in her books and the injustices she sees in the world.

"I think coming from South Africa is where I'm really intolerant of injustices and I'm intolerant of the way that people get around that sort of injustice," Fuller said. "I had it literally in black and white, growing up under apartheid."

Fuller paints one of those injustices in her book "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" (Penguin Press, 2008), in which she tells the true story of a modern-day Wyoming cowboy working on that state's oil rigs. Fuller moved to Wyoming in 1994 with her husband Charlie Ross, an American river guide she met in Zambia where her family had moved.

Raised in a Mormon family from Wyoming, Bryant idolized his father, dreamed of owning an F350 pickup, loved to hunt, shoot and fish, and had trained mustangs straight off of the desert.

Like anyone else, he had dreams for how his life would go. Instead, the 25-year-old fell to his death from an oil rig due to lax safety measures on the part of the company, Fuller said.

When she wrote the book, Wyoming had one of the highest oil-rig death rates in the nation. Colton's death was the third in six months on a rig contracted by Ultra Petroleum, which had revenues of more than $592 million in 2006. Fuller said she was appalled by the carelessness with a human life -- all in the name of energy extraction.

"You get fined more for shooting a moose out of season in Wyoming than you do for killing a roughneck," Fuller said. "They are literally getting away with murder."

Fuller said she wanted to expose the injustice of what happened to Colton, but found it interesting how some people immediately went into a defensive posture because the book was critical of the oil company. She was just trying to tell Colton's tragic story, but was labeled by some as an environmental activist.

At the WSU literature conference, Fuller hopes to address the ineffectiveness of labeling and its relationship to the freedom of speech enjoyed in this country.

"I can say, 'Well, I'm in this club and I'm on this team and I'm in this group. Yay! We agree and isn't everybody else foolish?' But's that very middle-school thinking," Fuller said. "Instead of a really sort of robust, muscular and responsible use of voice, we sort of get these ranting tirades. I think we lose the dignity of our intelligence when that happens."

Instead of ranting tirades and political diatribes to throw to the inflamed masses, this storyteller strives in her writing to engage readers by getting them to think and listen.

She perhaps sums up her philosophy about writing best in her book "Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier" (Penguin Press, 2004.)

"What is important is the story," Fuller writes. "Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin -- when we're dancing with our own skeletons -- our words might be all that's left of us."

the original article can be found here.

The National Undergraduate Literature Conference (NULC) is coming to Weber State University April 5-7. The event gives undergraduates an opportunity to present their works of literature to an audience of peers from campuses across the country and to hear some of the most influential writers in contemporary literature.

The 2012 conference will feature three authors: W.S. Merwin, the 2010-11 poet laureate for the United States, Alexandra Fuller and Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner. NULC is held annually in the spring at WSU.

The three-day conference is the only literature conference in the country that focuses exclusively on undergraduates. Students across the country submit pieces in one of seven categories. Those who have a submission accepted present at one of the conference sessions. Events on Friday and Saturday are free and open to the public. For more information, visit weber.edu/nulc.

By Amy K. Stewart,
Standard Examiner Correspondent

Taking a break from her book tour, author Pam Houston will be popping into Ogden this week to coach writing students at Weber State University and also to visit with the public regarding her new book, "Contents May Have Shifted."

Houston, who lives on a ranch in Colorado, is the author of two collections of linked short stories, "Cowboys Are My Weakness" and "Waltzing the Cat." She also wrote the novel "Sight Hound" and a collection of essays called "A Little More About Me." All were published by W.W. Norton.

Houston is an author who gathers her inspiration from her surroundings.

"She's a writer of narratives that feature very strong female protagonists. Besides being a writer, she is an outdoors specialist. She has run river rafts and hunted," said Victoria Ramirez, WSU English professor and director of creative writing for the university's English department. "We're delighted to have her come here."

Houston will be a Hurst artist-in-residence. The residency program, funded by WSU alumni Dean W. and Carol W. Hurst, brings a renowned artist to the College of Arts and Humanities to work with the students in small groups for an extended period of time.

Houston also will be doing a public reading from her new book, "Contents May Have Shifted," at 7 p.m. Monday at the Pleasant Valley Library in Washington Terrace, and a signing from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Queen Bee Bookstore in Ogden.

Both events are free to the public.

Houston's life

Houston lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande River.

The author says her inspiration comes from mountains, rivers and oceans, but also the urban landscape.

"I get my inspiration directly from the hard, physical facts of the world -- things that are out there, that I am seeing," she said. "A lot of writers get their inspiration from history, stories they hear or from ideas they have. But that's not how it is for me. I am really about bearing witness to the physical world that I get to be in touch with."

In dishing out writing advice, Houston quotes Henry James, "A writer ought to strive to be a person on whom nothing is lost."

Her first line of advice is to pay close attention to the world around you. "Writable things are happening all the time -- everywhere we look, everywhere we go," she said.

"I don't really think of myself as having a really good imagination," she said. "I think of myself as being a keen observer, and if I have a talent, it's translating those observations into language."

Houston's stories have been selected for volumes of "Best American Short Stories" and "Best American Short Stories of the Century." She is the winner of such honors as the 1993 Western States Book Award (for "Cowboys Are My Weakness") and the Willa award for contemporary fiction (for "Waltzing the Cat").

Houston earned her master's degree at the University of Utah. She is the director of creative writing at the University of California, Davis, and teaches at writing conferences around the country and the world.

Strong women

"Cowboys Are My Weakness" was published in 1992.

"At the time the book came out, it was pretty unusual for a woman to be a hunting guide and a river guide," she said. "It was women in traditionally male landscapes. Now, of course, there are more women wilderness guides."

" 'Cowboys' addresses being a really smart woman but having terrible taste in men," Houston said. "I think there are a lot of women in that boat. I think there are a lot of smart women who are really successful at many things but, for whatever reason, get into problematic waters with their relationships."

Houston says she gets letters from women who confess that accountants are their weakness, or firefighters are their weakness. "It struck a chord with a lot of women," she said.

Houston says her favorite book is "Waltzing the Cat," even though it was difficult to get it published and it didn't sell as well as her other works. "It was my problem child," she said. "But the new book is my new favorite."

"Contents May Have Shifted" is a novel, structured in very short chapters, about a woman named Pam, about traveling and relationships.

Ramirez said she likes the way Houston writes from a woman's point of view, and in first person.

"Often, the woman telling the story has outdoor experience and that is unusual. The women are free and independent. They take themselves and their romances wherever it leads them," she said. "The writing is breathtakingly beautiful and brings the reader into these issues we all face in our lives, dealing romantically with the other gender."

Teacher and coach

A WSU committee selected Houston from the group of applicants.

"The faculty was very enthused about having this particular author come," said Diane Stern, director of the Cultural Affairs program at WSU.

"I am excited to meet her. It's always interesting to meet the visiting artists," Stern said. "They are very creative and usually very involved and passionate in what they are doing -- and they have lots of ideas."

Houston will be working with a core group of students every day from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday of this week. She will also be attending several classes, from general education to the master's level, where she will talk about the writing process and her strategies. She will also be meeting with the staff of the university's literary journal, Aelurus, as well as doing a reading for the English faculty.

Ashley Allen, 26, of Roy, a junior majoring in art, is taking an introductory class to short fiction at WSU and is reading "Cowboys" in preparation for Houston's visit.

"We're learning about what makes good short-story writing. We've been discussing the strengths and weaknesses we find within the book," Allen said. "I'm excited to meet the author. You get inspiration from them, and it's interesting to see what works for them with their writing. It's good to get pointers from people who have been successful."

For more information on Houston's visit, call 801-626-6570.

The original article can be found here.

OGDEN, Utah – Weber State University English professor Mikel Vause may be part of history this spring. He is one of 20 men embarking on an expedition to Mount Everest this April, with the goal of solving a decades-long historical mystery:

Who was the first man to scale the world’s tallest peak?

Sir Edmund Hillary is credited with being the first man to successfully reach the summit of Everest in 1953. But 29 years earlier, the British tandem of George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine may have summited, only to perish on their descent.

A Kodak pocket camera, believed to be on Irvine’s person, might hold the answer. Eastman Kodak Company officials believe the pictures could be developed if the film is undisturbed.

“If the photographs survived then that would solve this great conundrum,” said Vause. “I mean it doesn’t cure cancer and it doesn’t end world hunger or bring world peace, but it has been a big question in the mountaineering community for a long time.”

The current expedition’s leader, Graham Hoyland, will focus on locating Irvine’s remains. Mallory’s body was found in 1999. The party will have an approximate location from which to start. In 1979, a Chinese climber uncovered a body that could be Irvine’s, but he died before he could lead others back to that location.

Along with the chance to finally settle a historical debate, Vause also hopes to find inspiration for a new collection of poems he’s writing, called Terrible and Deadly Seasons.

While Vause lacks the necessary certification to reach the highest points on Everest, the advanced base camp at 22,000 feet will far exceed his previous personal record of 18,000 feet above sea level while attempting Naya Kanga in the Langtang Himal range of the Himalayas.

“To even be there on the periphery will be a thrill. I won’t be able to go high enough for where they are doing the actual search, but if they find something and bring down the artifacts, I’ll be among the first people to see them,” said Vause, sitting in his campus office, surrounded by photos and souvenirs from his previous mountain climbing treks.

Vause’s love of climbing dates back to his childhood days exploring the Ogden foothills and an old stone “W” on the side of the mountain. “It was a big deal as a little kid to hike to the W. It was a pretty good distance, and every step of the way was uphill.”  As a teenager he went to work at a little shop in Ogden called The Mountaineer, got his first pair of climbing shoes, and discovered his passion for mountain climbing.

Vause went on to write his dissertation on mountaineering literature. By the 1980s, he was leading groups of Weber State students to England, Scotland and Wales, retracing the steps of famous British poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge among the peaks of the United Kingdom. These expeditions were often led by premier British climbers who Vause has befriended through the years. The groups would stop and read the works of these famous poets, in the very locations that inspired the artists centuries ago.

The trip offers Vause his second brush with the world’s highest peak. In 2000, Vause took a detour from a humanitarian trip to Nepal, chartering a plane so he could glimpse the mountain. At the time, he never dreamed he’d have a chance to one day climb it.

Vause leaves on April 10 and returns to Ogden May 8.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.

Contact:

Mikel Vause, English professor
801-626-6659 • mvause@weber.edu

Author:

John Kowalewski, director of Media Relations
801-626-7212 • jkowalewski@weber.edu