The TODAY’s Spotlight on Reading/Writing features CSU-Pueblo faculty, staff and students sharing their reading and writing experiences. The column is co-sponsored by the English and Foreign Languages Department and the English Club. This week’s feature highlights English grad student Cheryl Purnell.
Name/department/educational background: Cheryl Purnell, English Club president; English/Foreign Languages GTA; BA English CSU-Pueblo; currently a grad student in the program
What has been your greatest success in writing? (Personal writing, collaborative writing, completing a project or book, etc.): Having a short story published by CSU-Pueblo’s TODAY and a multi-genre collaborative project I did in one of Dr. Frank’s classes. Also, I’m presenting a paper with another grad student on collaborative teaching at the Southwest Texas Pop Culture/American Cultural Association conference in late February. I also presented a paper at last year’s SISSI conference in Colorado Springs on “Chaucer: The Metafictional Outsider.”
What do you struggle with in writing and how do you tackle that challenge? The hardest part for me is actually starting to write. Putting that pen on the paper. With every paper I have to overcome the fear that what I have to say is unimportant and that I am a competent writer, no matter how horrible I think I am.
What’s your favorite book of all time? Author?: Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey”
What are you currently reading? Author?: I just finished Robert Asprin’s “Dragon Rules.” I’m also reading “Theocritus Idylls: A New Translation” and Kenneth Burke’s “A Rhetoric of Grammar.”
What’s your favorite guilty reading pleasure? “Harry Potter,” and anything by J.D. Robb or Janet Evonovich
Do you have a favorite word or quotation and who is the author? I have several, but I think this week it has to be “It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word,” Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the USA
For more information on this feature, contact English Club sponsor and English lecturer Constance Little ([email protected]), 549-2197.
