Books by Faculty:
My Chaos Theory
By Steve Watkins
English professor pens collection of quirky stories
Steve Watkins was weighing his options.
A day before his scheduled appearance at Riverby Books in downtown Fredericksburg, he was still trying to decide which of his newly published short stories he’d read to the crowd.
His friends and colleagues wouldn’t mind the occasional curse word or sexual reference. But his wife’s parents were coming to the reading.
“It’s the in-law factor,” he joked.
In the end, Watkins, an English professor at the University of Mary Washington, settled on “Painting the Baby’s Room,” a tale about an anxious father-to-be’s attempts to get the walls just right in the nursery and protect his family from thieves.
The story is one of 12 fictional tales in Watkins’ new book, My Chaos Theory, published in October by Southern Methodist University Press. In reviewing the book, The Los angeles Times praised “Painting the Baby’s Room” and “Ice Age” as “thoughtful stories about young men struggling with the responsibilities of fatherhood.” Watkins’ “stripped-down style of writing and minimalist approach to plot steer clear of easy epiphanies,” Veronique de Turenne, book critic for National Public Radio’s day to day wrote for the Times. “Instead, he gives us honest and sometimes devastating emotion.”
Though each of the stories has appeared separately in literary journals and anthologies over the last 20 years – one was cited in Best American Short Stories, another printed in 100 Percent Pure Florida Fiction – this is the first time all the tales have been published side by side.
Watkins, who teaches journalism and serves as adviser to UMW’s student-run newspaper The Bullet, said the zany nature of the stories in My Chaos Theory has caught some off guard.
Many associate Watkins with his award-winning nonfiction book, The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an american Corporate Empire. Published in 1997, it is a decidedly serious account of the largest employment discrimination class action lawsuit in U.S. history.
My Chaos Theory is a bit more offbeat.
“People’s reactions have been a lot of surprise. They didn’t know I did this stuff,” said Watkins, a UMW professor since 1990. “They find them [the fiction stories] very odd. They’re funny, they’re poignant, but also, they’re odd.
“I mean, the dumbest of three smart kids is plotting to kill an elephant,” he said, referring to the first story in the collection, “Critterworld.”
“And the premise of ‘Bocky-Bocky’ is the guy finds a dead body washed up on the shore and puts him in a yoga pose – and then Uma Thurman comes along.”
His recent stories focus more on redemption and hope than his earlier ones, Watkins said. But most contain a healthy dose of humor and pathos, and even the most bizarre tales contain some measure of personal experience.
“I get a lot of, ‘Where are you coming up with this stuff?’ ” Watkins said. “There’s always a part of me in my stories, but it might just be an emotional understanding.”
Students and faculty got a kick out of “Critterworld” when Watkins read the tale aloud at a campus gathering just after the book came out. In it, three kids scheme to kill an elephant at a roadside Florida zoo, only to have it collapse of natural causes onto a Volkswagen, trapping a Michigan tourist. The story, first published in the Mississippi Review, won the Pushcart Prize in 1992.
“People stopped him and said, ‘It’s so totally bizarre’ – and it is so totally bizarre – ‘but so believable,’ ” recalled Jack Bales, the University’s reference and humanities librarian. “This sounds like this could actually happen. If all the stories are like that, it’s going to be a great book.”
UMW senior Katie Molinaro, who has taken several journalism classes with Watkins, said she thoroughly enjoyed hearing his fiction.
“Of course you could hear his voice in it because he read it. But even if you read it, you’d know who wrote it,” she said. “His voice is clear in it.”
Reviewers have hailed the book as “darkly comic” and “entertaining and gripping.”
The stories had been recognized individually over the years, and collectively they were a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Watkins said he knew he had a strong collection – he just needed a publisher.
Nine months after sending his work to Southern Methodist University Press, he received an e-mail from Editor Kathryn Lang saying she was interested. At the time, Watkins and his wife, Janet Marshall Watkins ’93, were preparing for a trip to China to adopt their youngest daughter, Lili.
They returned in August 2005 to discover that, of the 700 manuscripts submitted to SMU that year, My Chaos Theory would be one of the half dozen or so published.
Watkins said it’s been especially gratifying to see his two oldest daughters, Maggie, 22, and Eva, 20, reading – and enjoying – the book. Preschoolers Claire, 4, and Lili, 2, are more amused by the photograph of the elephant’s backside on the book’s cover.
In between classes – he teaches a range of courses from literature of the Vietnam War to news writing – Watkins has started pulling together another short-story collection, titled Horrible Disfigurement Club. He’s also shopping around a novel called Sand Mountain.
And he’s reserving a few moments here and there to enjoy the thrill that accompanies seeing his name on a book jacket.
“There’s nothing like a book,” he said. “There’s seeing your baby for the first time and marrying your wife – and a little to this side of that is having a book published.”
– Edie Gross
Adjunct instructor of journalism at UMW_________________________________________________________________
Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain
By Allyson Poska
Allyson Poska, UMW professor of history, won the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in early modern history and theology for her book Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain.
The book explores the northwest portion of Spain’s Galicia and how peasant women came to have significant social and economic authority in a region characterized by high rates of male migration. It was published by Oxford University Press in February 2006.
The Roland H. Bainton Book Prizes are three awards given out each year for the best books written in English about the period between 1450 and 1660. Categories are: art and music history, history/theology, and literature.
Awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, the prizes are based on quality and originality of research, methodological skill and/or innovation, development of fresh and stimulating interpretations or insights, and literary quality.
This is not the first national achievement for Poska. She was the recipient of a 2000-01 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project on women in northern Spain. An expert on women’s history, colonial Latin American history, and the history of early modern Europe– especially early modern Spain – she also has authored Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain and co-authored Women and Gender in the Western Past.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in international studies from Johns Hopkins University, Poska earned a master’s degree in history from Brown University and a doctorate from the University of Minnesota.
Poska’s next project will be an examination of the way that regional identities influenced Spanish immigrants in the Americas during the 18th century.
– Marie N. Purkert ’07_________________________________________________________________
The Origins of Revisionist and Status-Quo States
By Jason W. Davidson
In The Origins of Revisionist and Status-Quo States, Jason W. Davidson, UMW assistant professor of political science and international affairs, explores why some states strive for revision and others seek the status quo in international relations. He argues that governments that pursue revisionist policies are only responding to powerful groups, such as nationalists and those in the military who believe they can defeat their rivals. He draws on examples from France, Italy, and Great Britain to enhance understanding of a fundamental source of instability in international affairs.
The Origins of Revisionist and Status-Quo States was published in May 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan.
- Marie N. Purkert ’07
_________________________________________________________________
Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance
By James M. Harding and John Rouse
Not the Other avant-Garde denies the notion that the avant-garde began in Europe and spread elsewhere. Edited by James M. Harding, UMW associate professor of English, and John Rouse, associate professor of theater at the University of California, San Diego, the collection of 10 original essays illustrates that the first and second avant-garde movements were a blend of global performance traditions and practices from Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. The essays suggest that the very concept of avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized outside of Eurocentric paradigms.
Not the Other avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of avant-Garde Performance was published in June 2006 by the University of Michigan Press.
- Marie N. Purkert ‘07__________________________________________________________________
Books by Alumni -
Securing Global Transportation Networks: A Total Security Management Approach
Rosalyn York Wilson ’77 and coauthors Luke Ritter and J. Michael Barrett offer several strategies to prevent a global transportation attack in Securing Global Transportation Networks: A Total Security Management Approach. The book recommends how to use business practices to maintain security among transportation systems. The authors explain the business philosophy known as the total security management approach through real-life examples of major international retailers and shipping moguls.
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, global transportation networks have undergone heavy government regulation. The authors posit, however, that these transportation systems are still susceptible to a large-scale attack, and if that were to occur, the economic fallout would be devastating.
Securing Global Transportation Networks: A Total Security Management Approach was published in October 2006 by McGraw-Hill.
– Erica B. Mason ’07