The OWU English Department Blog
Dear Mystery Novels,
I have missed you so much since our last meeting. My longing to be reunited with you only grows stronger each day, and I often find myself looking to our past for solace. It feels like only yesterday that I first laid eyes on you.
You appeared to me in the form of Encyclopedia Brown, and it was love at first clue.…
As a writing exercise, I was once told to pick someone in the room and describe them — what they wore, what they looked like, how they spoke, how they moved — and then to invent a “why” for each observation. Why is he wearing that shirt? Because he keeps forgetting to do laundry and this was the last shirt that didn’t smell rancid.…
There’s no shortage of seriousness in the modern landscape of creative nonfiction. Week after week, The New York Times’ Bestsellers List exalts narratives exploring the horrors of our world: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me at 84 weeks on the list, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle at 436 weeks on the list, and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy at 119 weeks on the list, to name a few.…
On a warm evening in early September, approximately eighty Ohio Wesleyan Students and eighty faculty members gathered in the Benes Rrooms for the school’s first Diversity Summit. The two dozen round tables were littered with small yellow pads and pens, boxed dinners, and signs with labels proclaiming such topics as “coalitions across student groups,” “Faculty and Staff collaboration,” and “Intersectionality.”…
Bright lights, spinning wheels, ice cream at every corner, and more toys then your heart could desire. Children covered head to toe in unknown sticky substances, while drinking sugar water and shuffling through the dirt roads in awe of everything around them. What more could a kid ask for. The Delaware Fair was heaven on earth.…
I talk about the fact that I’m from Portland often, with much chagrin from my Midwest-native friends. In my mind, Portland has always been the heartbeat of the Pacific Northwest, a concrete blossom among some of the most creative and bold people in the world. The city has always felt electrically alive.…
The first time I saw a play, I was seven years old. My nana took me to see my older cousin, Zoe, in her middle school production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” a play about two elderly women who poison single, lonely, elderly men in mercy killings. Admittedly, this was a bit of a morbid start to my love of theater, but then again, I doubt it’s possible for anyone to find a play with no morbidity at all.…
As we cross the midway point of the semester, we at The Sturges Script just want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s made the launch of this blog possible. Whether you’ve answered one of Anna’s thousand emails, provided Kirsten with a “What We’re Reading” or “Scholars of Sturges” quote, assisted Carrie in the OWU archives, edited your post per Dr.…
During Mid-Semester Break in October, I traveled to the Bahamas on a cruise with my parents. It was my first time out of the country, and I was taking “Caribbean Women Writers” with Dr. Comorau at the time. I was ready to get some exposure to the region—even though, geographically, the Bahamas are in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Caribbean Sea.…
I consider myself a connoisseur of gummies. They have always been my favorite, and I have always been opinionated. One could say that gummy candies have been a consistent presence in my life.
Two summers ago, I was at a bus stop eating candy from a bag. The bus was late by two hours and I found that nervously chugging gummies while reading Dostoyevsky or Hemingway helped me pretend to be calm.…