Amy Weldon
Email: weldam01@luther.edu
Office: Main 603A
Phone: 563-387-2224
"I describe my own goals with two interrelated Teaching Verbs: destabilize and rebuild. They aren’t what I do to students—they are what I help students do with their own assumptions, ideas, and skills."
Snapshot
A transplanted Alabamian with a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Associate Professor Amy Weldon has settled into Iowa life, getting her students pumped about local poetry slams and author readings at the Iowa Writers Workshop, teaching adult writing classes at a local arts center, and revising a second novel about a small town in nineteenth-century Iowa. A Southern story-teller in the grand tradition, Amy is a passionate teacher of Southern American literature, British Romanticism, and—primarily—creative writing: fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. Amy’s personal essay “The Odd Girls: Flannery O’Connor and Me,” was co-winner of Shenandoah’s Bevel Summers Award and the Carter Prize for the Essay in 2010. An avid biker, seed-saver, and urban gardener, she blogs about sustainability, finance, and other nourishments of life and spirit at http://cheapskateintellectual.wordpress.com.
Thoughts on Teaching
In describing my teaching, I used to reach for the standard teaching-goal verbs—inspire, motivate, empower—but the longer I teach, the more inadequate they seem.In the world of Standard Teaching Verbs, there are no unprepared or confused students, and there are no questions from the back of the classroom that throw your own assumptions about the text (and about your students) into disarray.
There are only faces shining eagerly up from desks, freshly sharpened pencils, and—unless the teacher is speaking—perfect silence. Like the natives in some colonial fantasy, students in Standard Teaching Verbs are only grateful vessels waiting to be filled by a benevolent leader who holds all the answers that they lack.
Therefore, these verbs don’t do justice to the complex people we, and, more importantly, our students are. They barely hint at the daily work of engaging students with just the right balance of familiar and unfamiliar knowledge, sensing what they already understand and what they don’t, and thinking of how you can combine the two to reach your goal by the end of that classroom day. They suggest the true goal of teaching—helping students become independent, flexible, and savvy writers and thinkers—in only the gauziest way.
Therefore, I describe my own goals with two interrelated Teaching Verbs that I redefine and question every day: destabilize and rebuild. They aren’t what I do to students—they are what I help students do with their own assumptions, ideas, and skills.
Good discussion classes depend on taking students seriously by acknowledging the individual perspectives they bring to the classroom. They also require asking students to challenge, consider, and question those perspectives from the first day of the course.
A student who’s unsettled by her encounter with new texts or ideas is a student who’s ready to revise her assumptions, revisit her previous knowledge, and rebuild new structures of understanding around it. Growth requires at least a little uncertainty.
Selected Publications:
Short Fiction:
“Burning Lou.” Forthcoming in Fiction Southeast (http://fictionsoutheast.com) (2011.)
“Fairhope.” The Carolina Quarterly 57.3 (Spring 2006): 26-28.
“Mansions.” O. Henry Festival Stories 2005 (Winter 2006): 43-55.
“Explosions.” North Carolina Literary Review 12 (2003): 104-107.
“Traveling Grace.” Yemassee X:1 (Fall 2002): 67-79.
“Wonders.” StoryQuarterly 38 (2002): 376-385.
“Praying for Ruth.” The Carolina Quarterly 53:1 (Winter 2001): 49-56.
Creative Nonfiction:
“Spiral.” Forthcoming in A River & Sound Review (http://www.riverandsoundreview.org).
“Money and a Room: One Woman Gets Real.” New Haven Review (Summer 2011): 106-117.
“The Odd Girls: Flannery O’Connor and Me.” Shenandoah 60:1-2 (Spring/Fall 2010): 68-80.
Co-winner (with Barry Moser) of the Bevel Summers Prize for Best of Issue.
Co-winner (with James MacLeod) of the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay, Vol. 60.
“Notes on a Flood.” Inspire(d) Magazine 1:9 (July/August 2008): 20-23.
“The Fruits of Memory.” Southern Cultures 9:2 (Summer 2003): 91-97. Reprinted in Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing, ed. John Egerton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
“Dreaming of Eudora.” The South Carolina Review 35:2 (Spring 2003): 13-18.
Selected Scholarly Articles and Reviews:
Review of Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics (Keats-Shelley Journal, 2011.)
“One Teacher’s Beginnings: Inside the Nickel and Dimed Controversy.” Published in Agora: Luther College in Conversation (Spring 2006) Delivered as a lecture in the Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series, February 16, 2006 at Luther College.
“‘The Common Gifts of Heaven’: Animals and Moral Education in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ and ‘The Caterpillar.’” Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 8 (June 2002).
“‘When Fantasy Meant Survival’: Writing, Class, and the Oral Tradition in the Autobiographies of Rick Bragg and Harry Crews.” The Mississippi Quarterly LIII:1 (Winter 1999-2000): 89-110.
Writing sample:
Excerpt from “The Odd Girls: Flannery O’Connor and Me” (Shenandoah, Spring/Fall 2010.)
My short-short story “Fairhope,” in The Carolina Quarterly, Spring 2006
