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‘No worries’ attitude, hard work helped senior graduate on time

Creative writing major recounts 18-credit semesters, party stories.

Morgan Hostettler.
Hostettler

After graduating from a high school that no longer exists, creative writing major Morgan Hostettler looks forward to having a diploma that will last.

“Transience” seems to be a theme in Hostettler’s life. He’s changed places and majors enough times to make a grocery list of each. Born in the Caribbean, he then moved to Germany; then northern Virginia, and then Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to Tucson, Arizona. Afterward, he moved to a small ski town in Colorado and finally Denver.

“I definitely think Denver has shaped me as a person, and Colorado,” he said. “Just the very laidback mentality that it has … ‘no worries’ is kind of an official state motto.”

When he started at WSU, he wanted to major in history. Then, after taking a year off to work as a general contractor, he switched to journalism — but that wasn’t going to work for him either. He said getting points knocked off for things like misplacing commas made him decide to take the creative writing route.

“Then I came back and worked a whole bunch [and] did, like, 18 credits for three semesters and did summer classes,” he said, “and made it so I can graduate on time.”

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Daily Evergreen

 

May Science Pub talk to feature the language of water

Washington State University’s Entrepreneurial Faculty Ambassadors and the Palouse Discovery Science Center’s May Science Pub talk will address water as the essential element to human life and how to better understand how to use water. The talk entitled, “The Language of Water: How it Supports Us and What It’s Telling Us,” will take place from 6-7 p.m., on Tuesday, May 7, at Paradise Creek Brewery in downtown Pullman.

Julie Padowski, assistant director for the Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach (CEREO) at WSU and a clinical assistant professor with the State of Washington Water Research

Debbie Lee.
Lee

Center, and Debbie Lee, WSU Regents professor of English, will help connect the language of water and how it can be heard and interpreted.

“Water has the ability to deeply influence human connection and human storytelling. It has a language that can be heard and interpreted,” Lee said.

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WSU Insider

Anna Plemons named WSU’s 2019 Woman of the Year

Anna Plemons.Anna Plemons, a clinical assistant professor of English, has been selected as the 2019 WSU Woman of the Year.

Plemons teaches classes on the WSU Pullman campus in composition, rhetoric, and digital technology and culture. Additionally, she is the director of the Critical Literacies and Achievement and Success Program (CLASP) for the College of Arts and Sciences.

She, and five other 2019 WSU Women of Distinction, will be honored at the 2019 WSU Women of Distinction Celebration, 6 p.m. Monday, March 4, in the M.G. Carey Senior Ballroom of the Compton Union Building on the WSU Pullman campus. This event is free to those that RSVP prior to March 1.

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WSU Insider

The Passamaquoddy Reclaim Their Culture Through Digital Repatriation

Today, a renewed spirit of indigenous activism coincides with the homecoming of some Passamaquoddy cultural artifacts. Audio engineers at the Library of Congress are using new technologies to convert rare, historical recordings into a much cleaner digital format, and, in a Native-first approach to archival work, the library is giving the tribe curatorial control.

Kimberly Christen.
Christen

The return of the Passamaquoddy archive involves the work of a large interdisciplinary team. There are, in addition to the librarians and engineers at the American Folklife Center, two academics who specialize in digital repatriation: Kim Christen, professor of English and director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University; and Jane Anderson, at New York University.

Christen manages an open-source content-management program called Mukurtu. Since its launch, several years ago, the software has been used by more than six hundred groups, including the Passamaquoddy, to curate their own Web sites and regulate access in accordance with custom. On the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, for example, members of eight participating tribes can log in to view materials specific to their community; the Web site of the Warumungu tribe restricts access to certain items according to gender.

The tool is not only for First Nations; Terry Baxter, an archivist in Oregon, is helping Don’t Shoot Portland, a civil-rights group that opposes police violence, use Mukurtu to organize everything from children’s drawings to protest announcements.

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The New Yorker