Steve Brahlek, vice president and 2004 conference chair, teaches at Palm Beach Community College where he has served on the Honors Committee. His recent paper "Composition Instruction: Web-based Editing Exercises" was presented at the 2003 FCEA Conference.

Jeffrey Karon, secretary, teaches English  at the University of Tampa.  He has published articles  in literary criticism, linguistics and philosophy, focusing on the relation between deception, ethics, and writing and is active in the Tampa poetry and art scene.

Fred Standley, CEA liaison, continues as an active member of College English Association and Florida College English Association. The inaugural Distinguished Colleague Award was presented to Professor Standley in October 2002.

Susan Nugent, past president, teaches English at Santa Fe Community College. Her recent presentations and publications, including FCEA’s ‘Silence as Response,’ focus on varying approaches to teaching literature and writing to community college students.

Patrick McMahon, board member, is also Past President of FCEA.  He has taught at Pensacola Junior College, the University of Florida, and Tallahassee Community College. He recently performed "Poetry Ruined My Life: And Now It’s Payback Time" at the 2003 FCEA Conference.

Deborah Coxwell-Teague, board member is now in her fifth year as Director of the First-Year Writing Program at Florida State University which has 200 or more sections. Her recent paper "Choosing Not to Embrace Technology: An Exploration of Our Resistance" was presented at the 2003 FCEA Conference.

Jane Anderson Jones, webweaver, is also Past President of FCEA. She has taught English and Humanities at Manatee Community College since 1982. Her publications include co-editing The Poetry of Florida and a young adult biography of Frida Kahlo.

Courtney Ruffner, Florida English liaison, teaches English at Manatee Community College and Ringling School of Art and Design. She has co-authored a book in Harold Bloom’s Biocritiques series on Edgar Allan Poe.

Helen Connell, newsletter editor, teaches English, Humanities, and film at Barry University where she is chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages and co-facilitator of the film studies minor.

Fred L. Standley,  Daisy Parker Flory Emeritus Professor of English, Distinguished Service Professor, Florida State University

As one who has been concerned with the Students’ Right to Read, Teachers’ Right to Teach issue throughout my forty-five year career, I have relied heavily on two sources of censorship data: those annual lists of banned school texts promulgated by People for the American Way (PFAW), Attacks on the Freedom to Learn and the Banned Books lists of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Committee on Intellectual Freedom. Both groups publish a Top Ten list of banned books every year. The PFAW first produced its list in 1982 as a summary of a state-by-state compilation of censorship challenges that year. Unfortunately, the organization, as a cost-cutting measure, ended its publication of the Attacks document in 1997, leaving the ALA’s annual list as the only game in town.

In its 1982 listing, PFAW noted some texts which could well have been found on literary canon choices: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Jonathan Swift’s "A Modest Proposal", and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. (Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, George Orwell’s 1984, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies were in the top twenty.) The ’82 ALA list included several of the above.

The 2002 list published by the ALA in September, 2003, presents a vastly different picture. Only Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (#4) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (#7) appear in the Top Ten. On that same list can be found six Young Adult novels--seven, if you include the Harry Potter series. Of even greater interest is the presence of only twelve texts which could be considered "canonical" in the list of 100 most banned, 1990-2000, also compiled by the ALA. Among them, the Angelou text ranked third, Huckleberry Finn ranked fifth, Of Mice and Men, sixth, and Catcher in the Rye, tenth. Three Toni Morrison novels appeared as did Lee’s text, Brave New World, Native Son, and Slaughterhouse Five. That same list contained 52 Young Adult works, including the Harry Potter novels.

Thus, college teachers concerned with book banning at lower grade levels need to be aware of constraints currently being placed on middle school/junior high English teachers. The works of Robert Cormier, Judy Blume, Katherine Paterson, Mildred Taylor, Lois Lowry, et al are drawing much more fire from today’s would-be censors than are the Great Books of yore.

For those interested in using 19^th century recipes for holiday festivities or for complementing an English or Humanities course, Miss Leslie of Philadelphia’s 1832 recipes may be downloaded from http://www.cookbook-crew.com/free-cookbook.html.  Gooseberry pudding, for example, includes a pint of stewed gooseberries, a quarter pound of powdered sugar, two ounces of fresh butter, and three eggs. Pumpkin pudding is an interesting mixture of half a pound of stewed pumpkin, three eggs, a quarter pound of fresh butter or a pint of cream, a quarter pound of powdered white sugar, half a glass of wine and brandy mixed, half a glass of rose water, and a teaspoon of mixed spice, nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon.

The Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink is located at the University of Adelaide in Australia. A Symposium was hosted by the Research Centre in 2000 which included presentations on meals in the Icelandic Sagas, food and the body in James Joyce’s Ulysses, an examination of food in the carnivalesque, and other representations of food in literature and culture. The site, including articles, can be accessed at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/centrefooddrink.

Professor Elaine Martin’s course "Representations of Food/Eating in Text and Image" includes an extensive bibliography which may be accessed at http://bama.ua.edu/~emartin/food/bibliography.htm.

Jumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpretation of Maladies (1999) is a collection of short stories dealing mostly with the emotional struggles of first and second generation Indian immigrants. Food plays a significant role in some of the stories, particularly in "A Temporary Matter" and "Mrs. Sen’s." Dr. Asha Choubey explains Lahiri’s use of food as metaphor in an article found at http://www.postcolonialweb.org/india/literature/Choubey/.html.

Straight Man left me laughing at the lunacy of college English teaching.  Set at West Central Pennsylvania University, English faculty in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Maine all claim author Richard Russo used their campus as inspiration for this novel.  Never again can I attend a department meeting without thinking of Hank Devereaux, Jr., Chair, crawling above the ceiling in that dead space between floors, trying to catch his colleagues’ comments concerning him.  And then, he makes an unplanned grand entrance, landing amongst them as his support gives way.  Later, he threatens the administration to kill a duck a day from the campus pond unless it takes a sane approach to campus problems.  His strategy motivates me to mutter, “A duck a day,” when noting my own administration’s more inane decisions.  Hank and Richard Russo have helped me maintain levity and perspective as an English teacher.

Richard Russo, author of five novels and, most recently, a book of short stories, presently lives in Maine and teaches at Bates. His novels capture the humor, the compassion, and the pain of small town life. Empire Falls, for which Russo won the Pulitzer, like Nobody’s Fool and Straight Man, focuses on one man daily facing his responsibilities. Although varying chapters provide us the perspectives of other townspeople, their stories serve to illuminate our understanding of Miles Roby, his relationships, and the town. Miles is a product of the town Empire Falls where the paper mill closed in 1963. People stayed, though, because no one would or could buy their mortgaged homes. Despite his mother’s pleas for him to leave Empire Falls, Miles returns to her dying side, leaving college prematurely during his senior year. Now, in his 40’s, he is trapped, not only caught by the security of a diner manager’s position but also by the suggestion from the owner that someday the diner will be his.

Just below the surface is the constant murmuring of violence, a force that permeates all aspects of life. This world is one where varying levels of violence infuse all actions: football players rely on late hits; Miles’ brother suggests he just shoot his soon-to-be ex-wife’s lover who wants to arm wrestle with him; a hit and run accident is revealed as something more; the reader learns that the former mill owner committed suicide; childhood memories emerge of a neighbor often beating his wife; a dog is seen tortured. How people live with this daily rumbling is central to this story. Like Bowling for Columbine, this novel forces the reader to recognize fear and to consider how close violence is.

While living on the verge of violence, most times people can cope – through caring for others, through humor, through conversation and connection, through a grounded perspective. The blue-collar response presented here is interspersed with the story of the mill owners’ encounters on that same edge. This underlying aggression appears to be inherited from parents and passed to the next generation. While adults may be able to balance on the brink, the question in the novel becomes how will children manage? It is the youth, with self-image and identity issues exacerbating the problem, whose equilibrium is tested.

Russo’s novel ends with one family living through violence, one catastrophe faced, one response offered. It presents an opportunity for all of us to ponder when our own lives verge momentarily on that precipice. What have we inherited and what will we teach our children? Truth comes through the combination of facts and fiction, as Russo reveals in Empire Falls.

Susan M. Nugent, Santa Fe Community College

Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) details the problems that arise when history is created and documented without the input of marginalized people. Cliff presents her version of the truth by calling upon the emerging tradition of many postcolonial literary texts.

The year is 1858, but the characters survive within a postmodern existence that transcends time and space. Mary Ellen Pleasant and Annie, a Jamaican woman, conspire and assist John Brown in the infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry. After the "raid," Annie spends time near La Terre Lepraux, a leper colony that binds the pre- and post-colonial stories of Hawaii, Tahiti, and Jamaica, as well as the Maroon camps and the experiences of the Jewish immigrants to the New World. On the other side of the nation, Mary Ellen Pleasant builds her life and wealth in San Francisco where she later becomes a footnote in American history as "a friend to John Brown."

In Free Enterprise a remarkable message lies under the rich lives, experiences, and realities of the "gens inconnu," or unknown people who understand (and maybe even accept) that there will always be more than one version of history. The version that is privileged will be displayed through hegemonic discourse, while the version that is "unknown" will be the closest to the truth. Cliff writes, "The official version has been printed, bound, and gagged, resides in schools, libraries, the majority unconscious…[T]he official version is for public consumption—in both senses of that word." Through her characters, Michelle Cliff challenges us, as readers, to learn, research, and discover alternative histories, and then dares us to compare these with the official version.

Kalenda Eaton-Donald, Barry University

GEMCS (Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies) is an interdisciplinary organization whose members study culture from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. The annual GEMCS conference is held in October and includes presentations from literature, history, including art history, music, and film. The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies is published semiannually.

The IAFA (International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts) is a worldwide scholarly organization whose members study gothic, horror, mythic fantastic, science fiction, utopian/dystopian fiction in narrati