COMM 209: Interview/availability in class Monday

In class Monday Joanna Beth Tweedy, novelist, poet and associate dean of academic affairs at Benedictine University, will speak about her new novel "The Yonder Side of Sass and Texas," just published by Southeast Missouri University Press. She'll be available to take questions on her novel, and about writing in general.

Your assignment: Take notes on Tweedy's presentation, ask questions, take some more notes on her answers ... and (I'll bet you saw this coming), write a 750- to 1,000-word story on the publication of her new book. Due at the beginning of class Wednesday.

Some background I took from Tweedy's website: She is from southern Illinois, and her novel is about two sisters from that part of the state. She calls it "a place both blessed and cursed by the hybrid footprints of the Appalachia and Ozark regions surrounding it," and you may want to ask her how being from southern Illinois helped shape her fiction. This summer she'll go on a book tour that begins in Murphysboro, her home town (just west of Carbondale), and goes on to New York, Boston, Richmond, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Madison and Chicago. Tweedy is founding editor of Quiddity, a national-caliber literary magazine based here, and has degrees in education and English from the Universities of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Springfield. You'll find more background on the website.

Some observations of mine, from hearing her read from the book and talk about it a couple of weeks ago at Brinkerhoff. Tweedy clearly loves writing. And I was struck by what she said about the business of getting a book published (and, yes, it is a business). She believes the small presses, like Southeast Missouri, are better positioned to survive the ongoing shakeout in our industry than the big publishing houses in New York. Even though her style is perhaps more "literary" than what we strive for in newswriting, there's a lot we can learn from her about the craft of writing, too.