Tony

“In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d wager that only 10 percent of the English instruction list will answer your call for nominations. Why? First, because more than a third of our faculty now consists of temporary (adjunct) instructors who creep into the building under cover of darkness to teach their graveyard shifts of freshman comp; they are not eligible to vote or to serve. Second, because the remaining two-thirds of the faculty, bearing the scars of disenfranchisement and long-term abuse, are busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices.”
― Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members

“The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.”
― Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members

“and we both know how beautiful the book will be, how clearly it will speak to something within us—some previously unarticulated thought or reflection that, once recognized, we will never want to be without again.”
― Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members

“(Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.)”
― Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members