Baton Rouge Gallery, a BREC facility, is giving students and patrons the opportunity to look into LSU English professors’ notebooks this weekend.
Sundays@4 allows local creators to present their original works on a prestigious stage, assistant professor of creative writing Joshua Wheeler said. There are many places where musicians can perform around the city, but not as many for writers.
The event is held at least one Sunday each month at the Baton Rouge Gallery and features acts ranging from dancing to poetry to jokes. This weekend, LSU English and creative writing professors will present what they have been working on.
For this week’s event, four LSU professors in the creative writing department will present what creative writing’s new definition, now including screenwriting, video game writing and other forms of multimedia writing, means to them.
University English professor Laura Mullen said LSU’s creative writing department has produced many fans and participants of Sundays@4 for as long as she has been with the department. Each fall, LSU has a faculty reading at the event, and in the spring, students present their work. The department holds the reading in an effort to keep up with what members are doing.
“Students would ask their professors why they could see their work all the time, but the students never saw what the professors were working on,” Mullen said.
Each year, the department moves its way through the staff to display different presenters. This year, assistant English, screenwriting and new media professor Jason Buch and assistant screenwriting professor Zack Godshall will present their works on creative writing’s multimedia side.
Mullen will present a passage from her upcoming book “Complicated Grief,” a collection of essays and memoirs.
Buch said he will showcase a piece of his video web-series “Arceneaux,” a detective mystery series that takes place in New Orleans and is widely told through interviews. Godshall will preview from his new documentary about a family living on the Gulf Coast and possibly read from a screenplay.
Among the professors presenting their work, one new face in the department is going to read from his book of essays.
Joshua Wheeler has only been at LSU for a little more than three weeks, and he now runs the essay school. He said his reading will come from a book of essays he wrote about the many strange events that happened to his farm and
surrounding town in Southern New Mexico titled “Acid West.”
“The collection loosely revolves around my family’s ranch that was acquired by the government to create White Sands Missile Range where they eventually tested the first atomic bomb,” Wheeler said.
The book he is currently writing is slated to come out either late 2016 or early 2017, and Sunday, Wheeler will read an abridged selection about the Red Bull Stratos jump.
Wheeler said for students who are interested in writing their own creative nonfiction like the kind found in his book, he is teaching an English 4001 class. He said the class is for students in various majors who want to learn how to write good essays in an engaging way.
“The class is made to teach students to write nonfiction essays in a way that is not completely boring,” Wheeler said.
The four all agree events like Sundays@4 are important for writers to get their names out to the public.
Mullen said writers do not create content for themselves, but to share their work with others.
“When we write something we think is good, we want to see if others think it is good too,” Mullen said. “We do not write jokes because we think they are funny, but because we think others will find it funny as well.”