by Monique Daviau
Plates and bowls are meant to be simple conveyances for food, but now eating at home would possess the burden of memory: each grown-up, lonely dinner of spaghetti with jarred sauce and salad from a bag would be served on plates that screamed in my face COLLEGE! YOUTH! 1998! NORTHAMPTON! NEVER EATING ALONE! Over time, would these thirty-six pieces of cracked, used china simply become my regular old dishes, no longer returning to my mind an amalgam of dusty, distant college memories? Did I want my Madeleine or didn’t I?
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by Nania Lee
All eighteen students in my College Writing course this fall showed up prepared and on-time for their 15-minute, one-on-one meetings with me during week three of the semester. I had a short list of questions for them — what’s your intended major? do you like to write? and what are your goals for this course? Now, many would say there’s no point in asking a Freshman about their major, as it’s likely to change at least once before the end of this….sentence. (…and several times throughout their college careers.) But it’s the way in which they answered — their delivery and the words they used, that helped me see past the student to get glimpses of the writer.
Their answers varied, but many of them had a common tone: “I’m going to work on Capitol Hill so I’m majoring in Political Science and Minoring in International Studies”… “I’m getting into Ross [UM's very prestigious and competitive pre-business program] and then I’ll be an I-Banker” … “Pre-Med. I’ll probably be a doctor but I’d like to try out surgery to see which one I like better.”
I loved their confidence. Many of them spoke in firm declaratives about their futures and felt their paths were hammered in stone. Bold, brave, and ready to take college by the horns — my Freshmen were gunning for success. But with the very next question, these first-year lions turned into lambs.
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This issue of MQR brings together academic essays, high-level journalism, personal narratives, fiction, poetry, and visual art responding to the transformations of Jewish experience in the United States during the last fifty years, and, speculatively, extending into the twenty-first century. It offers writings that respond to the multiplicity of representations, cultural forms, fashionings and refashionings, that have defined the experience of Jews in America and continue to compel debate. These include works by Jews and non-Jews that engage contemporary controversies in the fields of politics, sociocultural dynamics, the arts, and the relation of Jewish life in America to other historical periods, other geographical places.
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This issue of MQR brings together academic essays, high-level journalism, personal narratives, fiction, poetry, and visual art responding to the transformations of Jewish experience in the United States during the last fifty years, and, speculatively, extending into the twenty-first century. We offer writings that respond to the multiplicity of representations, cultural forms, fashionings and refashionings, that have defined the experience of Jews in America and continue to compel debate. These include works by Jews and non-Jews that engage contemporary controversies in the fields of politics, sociocultural dynamics, the arts, and the relation of Jewish life in America to other historical periods, other geographical places.
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