‘Perfect security guard’ retires after 12 years at Lyon College

By Wil Shane Lyon College News Bureau A “hardcore guy” said goodbye to Lyon College on Wednesday after spending the past 12 years protecting the campus and its students. Friends and colleagues of campus safety officer George Cunningham showed their affection for him at a reception held in his honor at the Lower Union in Edwards Common on the Lyon campus. Wallace Hightower, director of campus safety, said George joined the College staff in 1994 after he retired the first time. A former jailer for Independence County, George, 84, trained as a U.S.Navy pilot during World War II. During his time at Lyon, he worked weekends, beginning on the day shift and later taking over the night shift on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. “George is the perfect security guard,” Hightower said. “He knows how to handle situations, and he knows when to call the police.” Inmates in the Independence County Jail sometimes found out firsthand just how well George could handle himself in a rough situation. Hightower said a female employee at the jail told him a story about a time when a young inmate wanted to test George to see what the older man was made of. “She told me the kid tried the old man and in about 15 seconds he was laying on his back with George standing on his chest,” he said. “He’s a hardcore guy.” While at Lyon, George has “been through” two College presidents and one interim president, and three vice presidents of finance and one interim finance VP, Hightower added. “He’s seen quite a few changes around here,” he said. “He’s also trained a lot of our people.”

Joining George Cunningham (right) at his retirement reception were (from left) grandson Taylor Fuqua, daughter Rose Fuqua, and his wife of 59 years, Louise Cunningham.                                                                   Photo by Eric Stewart Lyon’s Vice President of Business and Finance Ken Rueuer said George “doesn’t mess around.” “When there’s trouble, he knows what to do,” Rueter said. “He’s been a truly wonderful employee for us, and we’ll all miss him. We really do love him.”George opened several gifts given to him by his friends, including a copy of a book chronicling the history of Lyon College given to him by Clarinda Foote, director of human resources. When the reception’s honoree read the title aloud, he jokingly found a link to his own life. “Lyon College, 1872 to 2002,” George said. “That’s about when I was born.” George said the people are what he’ll miss most about the job, specifically noting Mrs. Foote and President Dr. Walter Roettger and thanking them for their friendship and help throughout his tenure at the College. Visibly moved by his friends’ show of support and affection, he thanked everyone for his gifts and said good-bye. “If I had known I’d get a send off like this, I would have quit a long time ago,” he said. Mr. Cunningham says thanks Hello to all my friends! I want to thank everyone for attending my retirement reception last Wednesday. I will miss all of your smiles and my association with Lyon College. A special thanks goes to the Pipers (Jimmy Bell and Kenton Adler) who “piped me out,” and to Terry Bryant and the dining services staff for the special refreshments. God bless and best wishes to all. –George Cunningham.

Fiction Matters opens with craft lecture tomorrow

Award-winning novelist and short story writer Ron Tanner will open the 2006 Fiction Matters series of events at 11 a.m. Tuesday when he will present a craft lecture, “Creating Characters Who Count,” in Nucor Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public, and he’ll be discussing how writers create compelling characters.

On Tuesday, Feb. 7, he’ll read from his award-winning fiction, with a book signing to follow. That will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Bevens Music Room. This event will also be free and open to the public.

Finally, on Saturday, Feb. 18, he’ll conduct the Fiction Matters Writing Workshop in the Alphin Room of the Alphin Building. Limited to 15 participants, this event requires pre-registration and fees ranging from $15 -$40. Contact Adele Grilli (698-4246 or agrilli@lyon.edu) for registration information. More information and a downloadable registration form may be found at www.lyon.edu/fictionmatters.htm.

Awards for Tanner’s fiction include a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the New Letters Fiction Prize, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Award for Short Fiction, and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for his collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, and the prestigious Pushcart Prize.

He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Wisconsin and is chair of the writing department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, where he has taught for 15 years.

Tanner began his residency at Lyon College in mid-January. While in Batesville, he is completing work on a novel and teaching the advanced fiction writing intensive at the college.

The Ashley-Lewis Concert features Quink on Friday

The Dutch a cappella vocal group, Quink will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3, the Bevens Music Room as the Ashley-Lewis Concert and Recital Series’ featured guests.

The New York Times praised Quink’s music, saying it, “reveals Quink’s elegant phrasing, impeccable intonation and a purity of tone reminiscent of Renaissance madrigals.”

After debuting at the 1978 Holland Festival, Quink quickly emerged as an a cappella vocal ensemble that has developed a truly unique style and established a reputation for captivating its audiences with expressive and emotional programs.

Their repertoire varies from early Renaissance tunes to music from our own era. They have recorded on the Etcetera and CBS labels and released CDs with Vanguard Classics.

The members of Quink are Mariet Kaasschieter, Mariette Oelderik, Elsbeth Gerritsen, Harry van Berne and Kees Jan de Koning.

The Ashley-Lewis Concert and Recital Series was endowed in 1982 as a gift from Jewel Ann Price Ashley of Newport in honor of her husband, Dr. John D. Ashley, and in memory of her two sons, John Nicholas Lewis III and Mark Price Lewis. Her purpose was to recognize her husband’s strong affinity for music, art and humanities and to encourage musicians and artists to bring their talents to Lyon College and the surrounding Batesville and Newport communities.
 

Artist Najera showcases the ‘Double Meaning’ of her work

Lyon College’s Kresge Gallery will soon get an intimate look at the many sides of San Diego, Calif.-based artist Marie Najera.

On Friday, Feb. 10, from 6 – 8 p.m., the gallery will host an opening reception for Madera’s art exhibition, “Double Meanings.” The exhibition will run from Feb. 1 – 26 in the gallery located in the Alphin Building.

Najera’s paintings consist of images and icons with multiple meanings and feelings that are layered together to create a sense of chaos and order. Within the heavily textured paintings, the viewer is allowed glimpses of objects, words and numbers. Secrets often lie below the surface about love, lust and truths. Every object holds within it a double meaning.

Using familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, such as adhering rulers and soap dishes to the frames or surfaces, her work, “awakens the viewer to looking at these objects in a different light,” according to the Collector’s Guide.

Over the past decade she’s held exhibitions in galleries in Tennessee, California and New Mexico, and she’s appeared in such art magazines as Arte Contemporary Magazine, the Collector's Guide, Focus/Santa Fe, Raw Vision, the Santa Fean Magazine, the Santa Fe Reporter and the Union Tribune

Though Najera lives and works in San Diego, Calif., the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis, Tenn., represents her work. Lusk recently served as the juror for Lyon’s third annual Juried Student Art Exhibition in Kresge Gallery. He’s been representing contemporary artists across the country since 1988.

Robert Hollingsworth, director of gallery logistics at David Lusk Gallery, will give a discussion about Najera’s paintings during the opening reception. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Chris Valle, Lyon College assistant professor of art, at 698-4336, or by e-mail at cvalle@lyon.edu.

Good things come in threes for Little Rock novelist, attorney, educator

By Wil Shane
Lyon College News Bureau

Lyon College’s visiting writer and guest instructor Phillip McMath seems to have the number “3” following him around like a warm shadow lately.

First off, he holds the three jobs of attorney in Little Rock, respected novelist and, thirdly, he was a creative writing instructor at the college in the fall semester.

He’s also about to complete the biggest writing job of his career when his trilogy of novels culminates when the third book in the series, Lost Kingdoms, is completed in the coming months.

The first and second installments in the series, Native Ground (1984, August House), and Arrival Point (1991, M&M Press), are both available in the Mabee-Simpson Library.
 
The books’ plots revolve around a young Marine Corps officer, 1st Lt. Christopher Shaw, his time spent fighting in Vietnam and what living under those conditions does to a man, internally as well as externally.
 
McMath based Shaw on his own experiences in the war handling two platoons and two companies of tanks with the First Division, working near Da Nang. The novels’ descriptions of the fighting, the fears, the hardships and the friendships encountered by fighting men put the reader in the thick of the action. But it’s McMath’s realistic use of dialog that really brings the characters to life, infusing them with something many fictional characters lack – a soul. Long stretches of dialog sing past the reader, inflected with rhythms and cadences that often make the use of attributes unnecessary.

For McMath, the act of writing is both torturous and enjoyable. “If it were just one and not the other, it wouldn’t be worth doing,” he said.

Writing a novel, like surviving close encounters with the ever-present threat of death in guerrilla warfare, requires diligence in paying attention to detail, knowing your terrain and its inhabitants intimately and staying focused until the job is done.

“With writing a novel, you have to work on it every single day,” McMath said. “You have to work even when you don’t feel like it. Talent only takes you so far. Hard work takes you all the way.”

McMath does his writing early in the morning, before he heads in to work as an attorney. Though his stint as a creative writing teacher at Lyon is his first foray into teaching at a college, McMath has taught writing at seminars hosted by the Arkansas Literary Society.

“I’ve had a great time teaching the class here at Lyon, and if they ask me back again, I’d love to do it,” he said. “It’s been fun and I enjoy it. I think my students have had fun, too.”

While studying for his undergraduate degree in English at Hendrix College, McMath took a single course in creative writing, but the bulk of his training as a writer came from reading as many novels as he could get his hands on, he said.
 
His favorite writers are Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Tolstoy, Chekov, Patrick O’Brien and Virginia Woolf. Her stream of consciousness writing style has always appealed to McMath. “She’s just wonderful,” he said.

Those influences are visible in the characters McMath has created. When reading about Shaw and the rainy jungle firefights, the deadly open ground of flooded rice paddies and the red flash of tracers streaking out from machine gun nests, one can readily see the thread that connects writers like McMath and Hemingway.

However, where the legendary “Papa” of the Hemingway legend served as Red Cross ambulance driver, journalist, correspondent and rumored sub hunter and resistance fighter, McMath was a hardcore Marine Corps officer, and his real-world experiences breathe life onto the page so realistically as to leave the acrid scent of spent gunpowder burning in the nostrils of a reader.

In addition to his novels, McMath has also authored Dress Blues, a full-length play produced by the Weekend Theater in Little Rock in 1999. He also had two short stories published in the Timberland Press.

With the completion of his trilogy, McMath will lessen the load he imposed upon himself to get the sprawling project completed. But he will continue writing. Real writers don’t have a choice. They have to write.

Like Shaw, caught up in the deadly fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, McMath has a job to do. And like Shaw, he will get the job done or die trying.

“It just won’t go away,” Shaw says at one point in the trilogy’s first installment, Native Ground, referring, perhaps, to the images of war burned into his psyche.

It’s like that with writers like McMath. The stories, the characters and the eternal moments of their lives all exist within him. They just won’t go away.

International Night celebrated Mieko U. Peek (with microphone), instructor of Japanese at Lyon College, speaks at the Community International Night held at the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville Jan. 22. Community International Night is hosted by Lyon College and UACCB annually to celebrate cultural diversity in the Batesville area. The evening featured food, music and entertainment with an international flare. Standing at the podium behind Mrs. Peek are Daria Paunovic, a Lyon student from Bosnia, and Tom Hilton, director of student activities and community relations at UACCB.                                                                                                                               Photo by Eric Stewart

Dr. Beck to attend international faculty development seminar in Turkey

By Wil Shane
Lyon College News Bureau

Dr. Martha Beck, associate professor of philosophy, will travel to the Middle East this summer.  From May 30 through June 10, she will be attending an International Faculty Development seminar in Turkey, hosted by the Council on International Educational Exchange.

Dr. Beck said she found out about the seminar from Dean John Peek.

“I went into the Dean's office one day, asking if I could try to find opportunities to teach abroad, and he gave me the brochure of the organization that sponsors this seminar,” she said.

Though this year’s seminar is being held in Turkey, the CIEE hosts them in different locales each year.

“The CIEE sponsors trips throughout the world,” she said. This year’s seminar is called, “Civil Society, Politics, and Religion in Turkey.”

Dr. Beck’s attending the program will benefit Lyon College and its students by connecting her to people from differing walks of life, she said.

“Since I teach Humanities, I want to know about humanity, whatever that is,” Dr. Beck explained. “I want to keep in contact as much as possible with human beings from different cultural backgrounds.”

At the seminar, she will be a student and a teacher.

“I teach the ‘Western Intellectual Tradition’ class, which consists of readings in the ‘Great Books’ of the West,” she said. “I would love to read and take a class in the great books of the Muslim or Mid-Eastern Tradition, taught by someone who grew up in that tradition.”
 
Other ways the program will benefit the College might include having an instructor from the Middle East come to our campus as a visiting teacher, Dr. Beck said.

“In my application, I said I would like to make contacts this summer so that I could someday teach for a semester in Turkey and, perhaps, someone from Turkey could teach at Lyon,” she said. “The students would benefit greatly if they learned about Islam and the Mideast intellectual tradition from someone who grew up in that tradition. But the students will also benefit when I come back with ideas and stories from my travels and incorporate them into what I currently teach in my classes. I am really looking forward to it.”

For more information on the CIEE and its educational development opportunities, log onto www.ciee.org.