By Mark Bauer/se news editor
Eight members of the TCC faculty will flex their creative muscles Sept. 7 at the annual Langdon Literary Festival.
Beginning Friday afternoon at the Dora Lee Langdon Center in Granbury, TCC participants will read from original poems, fiction, drama and creative nonfiction.
“ TCC is probably unaware of the great number of faculty who actively write and publish creative works,” Dr. Tony Zurlo, SE Campus professor of English, said. “This is a long over due opportunity for TCC to discover this fact.”
Zurlo has been publishing for more than 25 years and has had the privilege of working on four different continents,
“ I was in the Peace Corps for two years in Nigeria, one year as a literature teacher at a Chinese university, one year as an armor officer in the U.S. Army in Germany, and many years here in North America,” he said.
Dr. Violet O’Valle, adjunct instructor of English on SE Campus, said she likes to attend the festival because it gives her the opportunity to meet and talk to interesting writers from all over the state. Her own literary piece is a series of poems written in response to a relatively new cultural phenomenon—the determination to remake Mary Magdalene into a kind of First Century Republican Club woman, she said.
“ It’s as if the Divine is to be found only within respectability,” she said. “My Mary Magdalene poems, which feature some modern Magdalenes, too, celebrate the Divine in the disrespectable.”
Bill Holt, associate professor of English on South Campus, said he is often awed and delighted by his colleagues’ abilities. Like O’Valle, Holt said he has not reserved any particular expectations for the literary festival—other than meeting some interesting and productive members of the academic community.
“ These are some of the best people I know, and my respect for them deepens every time I have an opportunity like this one,” he said.
For their parts in the literary festival, Rebecca Balcarcel, associate professor of English on NE, will read about a 1300-mile bike trip she took while pregnant, and Dr. Vicki Sapp, assistant professor of English on SE, will share her travel experiences.
Jerry Coats, assistant professor of English on SE, will delve into his personal discoveries after his excursions through England, France and Spain while Toni Manning, English instructor on SE, said she will take abreak from her normative snow poems and share poems on artists’ work in the form of an artists’ book.
Dr. George Edwards, professor of English on NW, will present “Eclectic Elegies and Ecstasies.”
The cost is $60 to attend the entire four-day conference, $35 to attend one day and $10 to accompany someone as a guest to the brunch on Saturday.
For more information or a registration form, visit www.tarleton.edu/~langdonreview/.
