Julianna Baggott’s career is cranking like Nobodies’ business.
And Anybodies’. And Somebodies’.
Already a critical success in books for grown-ups, the FSU assistant professor of creative writing hit it big in youth fiction last year with The Anybodies, a fantastical, action-packed tale featuring evildoers, mistaken identities and a preteen protagonist with shape-changing powers. Astute minds at Nickelodeon Movies recognized a hit when they read one and, before the year was out, bought motion picture rights to the series with sister company Paramount Pictures.
This spring, the second in The Anybodies trilogy, The Nobodies, is hitting book stores. And lest you think her a slacker, Baggott’s third tome for the younger set (named The Somebodies, natch) is slated to come out next year. Anybodies the movie is currently in development and, no, Baggott isn’t writing the screenplay, which she’s “really happy about,” she said.
It’s quite a streak for a writer who has already made her mark in literature. Her output currently totals nine volumes, published and forthcoming, including the national bestseller Girl Talk and a critically acclaimed book of poems, This Country of Mothers. But Baggott itched to escape all the seriousness, and one N.E. Bode was only too willing to assist.
Bode is the penname (and alter ego) Baggott adopted for The Anybodies series. He allowed her to delve back into magical realism, a style she loved as a young writer but, she found, American readers did not. “Now I have an audience that is really willing to leap with me,” she said.
Just as young readers have influenced her work, so has the prospect of her stories being watched. It has, she said, made her structures tighter, her ideas sounder—and her writing altogether crazier.
“Even while writing The Anybodies I had the idea that this would probably be a movie, so the way I thought about the book became more wild, more imaginative, more cinematic,” said Baggott. “I really stretched my imagination much further than I thought it could be stretched.”
Guggenheim Gold At Music
Guggenheim Gold At Music
It’s roughly the academic equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place at the same time.
In April, two faculty members from the same FSU home—the College of Music–beat out thousands of other applicants to win prestigious Guggenheim fellowships.
Tapped for the honor were Dale Olsen, professor of ethnomusicology and director of FSU’s Center for Music of the Americas, and Mark Wingate, assistant professor of composition.
Fewer than 200 fellowships are given out annually by the New York-based John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and while Florida State faculty have landed a few in recent years (David Kirby, professor of English, and Thomas Joiner, professor of psychology, both received one in 2003)–it is uncommon for two colleagues at the same institution, and in the same discipline, to be so honored. The Guggenheim Foundation gave an average $39,000 to this year’s recipients with no strings attached, assuring creative freedom for their projects.
Olsen has traveled from the Andean peaks to the cities of Japan to perform and study music. He plays instruments most have never heard of, such as the kena, siku and shakuhachi. Flutes are his passion: He owns about 100, from a two-inch long Chinese specimen to a three-foot long Hawaiian nose flute. Director of FSU’s summer program in Vietnam, Olsen plans to return to the country in his fellowship year to interview musicians for a book on Vietnamese pop music.
Inspired by Igor Stravinsky, John Coltrane and Gregorian chants, Wingate composes pieces that combine traditional acoustic instruments, voice, natural sounds and digitally-processed sounds. His electroacoustic music has garnered many prizes, including the Prix de Rome in Music Composition from the American Academy in Rome.
Letters Trove Spans 200 Years
Thanks to FSU’s Institute on World War II and the Human Experience, a vast new collection of letters and other documents chronicling the lives of one European family—and focused on the turbulent 1930s and 1940s—is now available online.
The collection contains letters that poignantly depict the suffering, separation and cruelty marked by Hitler’s lost crusade. From long love letters to postcards, the collection puts the tragedy of the war in Europe into endearing human terms.
William Oldson, founder and director of the institute, acquired the collection from Holocaust survivor Giulia Koritschoner Hine. Spanning more than 200 years, these documents tell the story of how a global conflict played out within one well-to-do Austrian family.
Now in her early 80s and living in Colorado, Hine chose the institute to house her family’s treasures because of the staff’s commitment to put them online, a massive effort. Hine, who has translated much of the collection, was sent to Switzerland as a girl in 1938; a sister went to Africa, their mother to England. Though all three survived, Hine’s grandfather and the family patriarch, Paul Hasterlik, perished at Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. The collection is dedicated to his memory.
Two things distinguish this collection, said Oldson. First is the historical context that helps explain how a Catholic family with Jewish origins was persecuted by the Nazis; and secondly is the collection’s breadth, offering hundreds of voices over a two-century span speaking on a wealth of subjects ranging from astrology to world travel.
“This is a treasure trove not just for the historian, but for anybody in the social sciences and humanities,” Oldson said.
Short Story Spotlight
When lit lovers open to the first pages of this year’s The O. Henry Prize Stories, they will travel back a century to meet a sickly lad on his bumpy, sweaty way to a health spa, where it is said a good mud bath will do wonders for his aching knee.
A dubious claim, to be sure, but one thing’s for certain—the story’s placement at the front of this renowned annual short story collection is a bright feather in the cap of the writer, FSU’s Elizabeth Stuckey-French.
This is not the first time Stuckey-French, associate professor of English and a member of FSU’s Creative Writing Program since 1999, has been noticed by The O. Henry Prize judges. In 1997, her story “Junior” was short-listed for an award there, as well as with the Best American Short Stories. But in giving “Mudlavia” the coveted lead spot in the collection this year, The O. Henry judges made Stuckey-French the envy of fiction writers everywhere. When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo, one of the judges for the collection, picked her story as his very favorite, Stuckey-French was thrilled.
“It was as exciting to me as getting a book published, winning that award,” said Stuckey-French, who met Russo at the festivities in January.
“Mudlavia” takes place at a real spa of the same name that operated in the early 20th century in Stuckey-French’s native Indiana. Patients plagued by rheumatism, alcoholism or other complaints sought relief there.
“I love the whole idea of people, strangers coming together, and I like the idea that they thought that this mud was going to cure everything that was wrong with them,” said Stuckey-French, also the author of a novel, Mermaids on the Moon, and a short story collection, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa. “Mostly I’m just interested in characters and how people delude themselves, and how we can be helped in spite of ourselves.”
Stuckey-French was so taken by these ideas that she is writing a novel set in the same spa, with a different cast of characters. Tentatively entitled The Mudlavia Hotel, it is slated to be published next year.
Douglass the Denunciator
“A new world had opened upon me. Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted, but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.”
Frederick Douglass, born into slavery on a Maryland farm in 1817, was describing his arrival in New York City as a 20-year-old, tasting freedom for the first time in his life. He would go on to become the icon of anti-slavery forces both in America and in Britain, a brilliant author and lecturer who advised Lincoln on the slavery issue during the Civil War.
This spring, Yale University Press picked FSU’s Joseph McElrath as the primary textual editor for a new, comprehensive biography on Douglass, who by all accounts became the most distinguished black American of the 19th century. McElrath, William Hudson Rogers Professor of English and associate dean in the College of Arts & Sciences, earned this honor as a specialist both in 19th-century American literature and in textual research. Editing the Douglass biography is the latest challenge for McElrath whose previous work has illuminated the lives of such noted American writers as John Steinbeck, Frank Norris and Charles W. Chestnutt.
