FYHC

FYHC, a new e-journal looking at composition's relationship to honors programming/curricula, looks interesting. I went to grad school with the journal's founder, a novelist who goes by the name McKenzie. We were new TAs together and were put in the same "small group," a collective of first-year TAs coming from the five or six separate grad programs sponsored by Arizona's English Department. As such, we got to know one another.

I was in the rhetoric program, but McKenzie was new to Arizona's MFA fiction program. He spoke in a provocative southern drawl but had spent the previous few years working on a novel in a Vermont cabin that had no electricity. He spoke frequently about 1) Jesus, 2) the years he spent working as a male model, and 3) his desire to teach students to avoid "purple prose."

The years in that Vermont cabin seemed to have affected McKenzie's attitude toward computer technologies--an attitude that leaned toward a Unabomber-esque loathing. He wished to handwrite his syllabus that first semester, but, if memory serves, eventually relented and paid some hungry grad student to type it for him. Due to a registrar screw-up, McKenzie's English 101 class was scheduled in a broom closet, so he took the class to the McDonald's that was adjacent to campus, ordered 25 Hi-C beverages, and held class in a booth there.

Standard MFA wackiness, I suppose, but I was surprised two year later, as I was prepping for comprehensive exams, when McKenzie finished the fiction degree and entered the rhetoric program. Though our program tended to draw on "retread" grad students from the University's masters programs (creative writing, ESL, etc.), McKenzie, a devotee of prose-as-craft, seemed like an odd fit for a program that emphasized theory and history.

I was even more surprised, even more years later, when (apparently) recovering luddite McKenzie started an electronic journal. Good going, McKenzie. The publication looks interesting, featuring articles by Victor Villanueva and Marvin Diogenes, another former Arizona MFA-turned-rhetorician. Check it out.