Inspiring students: Dedication trumps high-tech

Concordia's Venkatanarayana Ramachandran helps students succeed

Venkatanarayana Ramachandran decided in the fall of 1979 to step down as the graduate program director in what was then Concordia’s Department of Electrical Engineering, but students rallied for his return. They wrote to the department chair, citing Ramachandran’s humble and unselfish dedication to their welfare as “above and beyond the call of duty.”

Venkatanarayana Ramachandran

Their appeal worked, and Ramachandran spent another four years in the position before deciding once and for all that administration wasn’t where he wanted to put his energies. Instead, the professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science has devoted his career to instructing his students with the same dedication that he demonstrated in his former administrative role.

His numerous teaching and research accolades include most recently the 2009-10 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Full-Time Faculty. The award’s accompanying citation notes his “unsurpassed reputation among his students for innovation in teaching methods, clarity in explanation, perseverance with classroom instruction, and availability above and beyond conventional lecture hours.” The citation further recognizes him as “a true educator, in that his success is measured in the success of the thousands of students he has taught.”

Ramachandran’s approximately 20 other awards include the Outstanding Contribution Award from Concordia’s Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, the Merit Award from the Concordia Council on Student Life, and the 1997 Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching. The American Society for Engineering Education has recognized him with its Centennial Award. He is also the recipient of a medal from IEEE (Canada) for the Outstanding Educator Award and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers made him a Fellow Member in 1989.

Somewhere along the way, Ramachandran has also found time to write four books, course notes and laboratory manuals on his areas of expertise that can help other professors to teach students about circuits and systems, and modelling techniques.

Ramachandran began his academic career in India on January 17, 1958, two days after his MSc training period ended. His distinguished supervising professor, K. Sreenivasan, “the first person to teach electronics in a university department in an independent India,” pulled out all the stops to get Ramachandran an academic appointment. “We didn’t get along that well; any other administrator would have just thrown me out. But he recognized only one thing: merit. That was a great quality for me to learn, and I never returned from India without visiting him.”

Ramachandran arrived at Sir George Williams University in 1969 after a brief time at the Nova Scotia Technical College (now part of Dalhousie University).

His focus has always been on helping students. “Each year, the student body is different and I have to adapt myself to that,” he says.

Ramachandran reverted to old-fashioned chalk on a board about five years ago when he realized that the information was being conveyed too quickly in PowerPoint and slide presentations for students to follow. He extols his low-tech method for providing students with ample time to copy information.

He regularly pauses to scan the faces in his classroom for signs of comprehension, and to encourage students to ask questions. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” he emphasizes, hoping that will persuade shy people in particular to ask for clarification when they don’t quite grasp a concept.

Another way he combats student reticence is through an open-door policy with “lots of time for consultation, including Saturdays,” hoping this individual time for consultation motivates students to present their concerns. “If I don’t know what they don’t know, it’s very hard to figure out what to do,” he emphasizes.

Related links:
•    Concordia Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science:
•    Concordia Council on Student Life
•    American Society for Engineering Education
•    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers


Originally published on Concordia NOW.

Darryl Martin: Perseverance is the key

Even while he was shoeing horses, he was always fascinated with "how things work"

Darryl Martin has been working with the Mohawk Bridge Consortium on the Mercier Bridge rehabilition. | Concordia University

Darryl Martin and his wife had four children when she obtained a degree in early childhood education from Concordia. At the time, Martin worked with draft horses, with a sideline as a farrier — a horseshoer. He had never graduated from high school, but he decided it was his turn to go to university.

Martin, now a grandfather, will receive his bachelor’s in civil engineering this June.

“I was always interested in how things work,” he says. Engineering seemed like a natural fit. A friend and counsellor at a school on the Kahnawake reserve suggested Martin start off by developing good study skills. “It was one of the best pieces of advice I was ever given.” So he started by taking courses he felt most passionate about.

The key to his success, Martin says with humour and modesty, is “perseverance, or in my case, bull-headedness.” He kept working full-time as a farrier, taking sociology, psychology and anthropology, and then the math and calculus prerequisites for engineering studies. “I knew I didn’t have a fresh mind so it might be harder for me than for someone else,” he says. He compensated by taking reduced course loads, summer courses, and putting in a lot of late nights. At the beginning, he says, it was “really rocky finding my feet.” He credits Concordia’s centres for Native Education and Mature Students (the latter now part of the School of Extended Learning’s Student Transition Centre) for helping him find his path.

Martin works for the Mohawk Bridge Consortium, which was awarded the first contract in the rehabilitation of the Mercier Bridge. The project involves the federal and provincial governments, along with the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake.

Learning, he maintains, isn’t just about schooling; it goes on everywhere, all the time. “If you can memorize the names of the contestants on American Idol or learn somebody’s phone number, you can learn this other stuff. People always say, ‘Oh, I could never go back to school.’ That’s the kind of statement that just shuts everything down.”

Related links:
•   Concordia's Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering
•   Concordia's Centre for Native Education
•   Concordia's Centre for Mature Students

Originally published by The Concordia Journal.

Logic in harmony with passion

Concordia professor Fred Szabo takes the Socratic Q&A approach to math instruction

Anyone who listens to Fred Szabo, a full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, talk about teaching, quickly realizes that he embodies the adage: do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

For Szabo, teaching is not a job, but a vocation. His dedication has resulted in him receiving a number of teaching awards, including a recent President's Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching.

Fred Szabo | Photo by Concordia University

For Szabo, the challenge has been to create “teaching vehicles that reach individuals in a group setting.” He has been working at Concordia for 46 years but, far from feeling burned out or jaded, he says his mind is clearer than it has ever been.

“I feel more excited and more committed,” he says. “My long-term plans are evolving faster than I can cope with, and I’m really having the time of my life.”

Szabo is particularly inspired by newer technologies that take math instruction out of the classroom and into the real world. Szabo has so far created three online mathematics courses that are available through eConcordia: linear algebra, business math, and business calculus.

His goal for the next five to 10 years is to significantly contribute to global education, especially to making the instruction of mathematics more available in Latin America. A Mexican university will be the first to offer one of his online courses on a trial basis. He hopes to expand access to the online offerings so that they can reach people anywhere, anytime. It would make the online courses more like the one-on-one tutorials he experienced as an Oxonian undergrad.

Szabo is similarly enthusiastic about convincing the university to obtain a site license for the Mathematica software and install on 100 laptops available at the university’s library. The easy-to-learn software has a myriad of applications for design, education, biotechnology, engineering, science and technology uses, and students no longer have to be tethered to a math lab.

These days Szabo teaches linear algebra, an introduction to math course offered through online technology, and a math course for non-math students that he proudly relates is “fully subscribed every year.”

He strives to make learning mathematics “accessible, relevant, and fun,” and says some of his students are stunned when he canvasses them to discover what it is they’d like to learn. “To get them to be self-motivated, though, you have to teach them what interests them,” he says.

Szabo believes in the Socratic method of asking and answering good questions to stimulate critical thinking. Students work on projects they find intriguing. Recent projects included the calculations involved in Ponzi schemes, finding out how a radio works, the mathematics of music, and investigating search engines.

Szabo obtained his undergraduate degree at Oxford University in a course of study called the Modern Greats — “replacing the Classic Greats of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,” he says. Much of the teaching was done one on one, with tutors. Szabo discovered his calling after one of his tutors involved him in writing about the papers of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who dealt with the foundations of mathematics and logic.

Szabo came to Montreal to pursue logic and its applications at the graduate level, obtaining his PhD at McGill University. He’s been teaching at Concordia for 46 years.

“I love and respect my students,” he says. “Most students are smarter than they have to be to succeed at university.”

Szabo has always been a passionate tennis player and might take up his beloved violin again, after a holiday in Mittenwald, Germany – a place renowned for its violin makers – but he has no plans to retire.

“This is a great time to be alive and teaching,” he says. “You’re still at the point where you can be a pioneer, so it’s really exciting.”

Related links:
• Szabo discusses Mathematica’s application in many courses of study at Concordia
• eConcordia
• Mathematica
• Ludwig Wittgenstein

Originally published Dec. 14th at Concordia NOW.

Teaching is his week's highlight

Martin Pugh is busy, athletic, generous and an excellent teacher of engineering materials

They say if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. That person is Martin Pugh.

Pugh plays squash, cycles to the Sir George Williams Campus from his West Island home (“except in winter”), and keeps track of three dogs, two cats, two kids, more than 1,000 undergraduates, and several hundred graduate students.

The professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering is busy, sporty and a good sport. He recently kept his promise to shave his head if the Concordia chapter of Women in Engineering raised $1,000 to support research into cancers affecting women.

Martin Pugh is in his sixth year as chair of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. | Photo by Concordia University

Pugh was appointed a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) earlier this year. He’s also an award-winning teacher, being the 2011 recipient of the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award for Full-Time Faculty in Engineering and Computer Science (ENCS). Pugh additionally won the CSME (Concordia student chapter) 2007 Teaching Award, and the Faculty of ENCS Teaching Excellence Award in 2005.

The key to successful teaching “is to be enthusiastic about your subject,” he says. “I like my subject and I like to transmit that to my students.”

If enthusiasm is what it takes, Pugh has it in abundance. His subject is engineering materials “that make up everything around us – iPads, kitchen knives, cars.” He is an expert on the properties, processes and failure of engineering materials, including ceramics, plastics, composites, as well as joining processes such as soldering and welding.

Though an Engineering professor, Pugh isn’t married to high-tech classroom toys, preferring to “pick and choose what works well.” He still uses the blackboard, but also employs Power Point and a tablet PC to annotate and draw while diagrams and tables remain on screen.

He likes to bring to class “failed parts and bits, like the gas-turbine blades out of jet engines, to discuss how and why they’re broken.” It drives home the lesson to students that failure may be due to abuse, poor design, or improper manufacture. “They’ll be better engineers if they know how and why things break,” he says.

Pugh is as interested in a classroom discussion about how to pick a good squash racquet as he is talking about a robotic space arm.

He did his Bachelor of Science and doctoral work at the University of Leeds, and a post-doctorate degree at McGill University. He arrived at Concordia in December 1998, following a stint as a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. In his sixth year as department chair, Pugh also served for four years as undergraduate program director.

“No time off for good behaviour,” he quips. “Teaching is the highlight of my week.”

Originally posted at Concordia NOW on November 30, 2011.

Related links:
• “Pugh Shaves to Save” – November 15, 2011
• Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
• Women in Engineering Concordia

Keeping Students Engaged is Key

i>clickerFollow @Beverly_Akerman

Engineering lecturer and first-year program coordinator Nancy Acemian

If students find Nancy Acemian sometimes feels like a big sister, it is probably because she’s been a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of West Island for almost three years now.

She finds mentoring preteen girls very gratifying. “I’m a role model they can come to about issues in their lives.” She uses her love of painting and crafts — knitting, crocheting, jewellery making — to help connect with the girls.

Nancy Acemian was honoured with the President’s Teaching Award in 2010 for Innovative Excellence in Teaching. | Photo by Concordia University

This desire to connect drives her achievements in the classroom, too.

Acemian received the President's Teaching Award 2010 for Innovative Excellence in Teaching for her classroom performance and leadership in developing innovative teaching in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science (ENCS). The year before, she was recognized by the Faculty with the Teaching Excellence Award.

A native of Montreal, Acemian earned her bachelor’s from McGill with a major in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science. She then obtained her master’s in Computer Science from Concordia and is working on a PhD in Educational Technology, also at Concordia. She taught at Marianopolis College for 11 years before arriving at Concordia in 2000. Plus she teaches in her third language, giving her unique insight and a deep appreciation of the diversity that’s the heart of Concordia.

“At Concordia, we give everyone a chance, with kids straight out of cegep alongside young adults back at school after several years at work,” she says.” The multicultural diversity of the student body is also way up on her list of Concordia pluses.

Acemian is the first-year program coordinator at ENCS, and shares her knowledge and expertise through the Centre for Teaching and Learning Services; however, her passion is teaching introductory level courses in computer science, which can be difficult. “Classes are large and the students are very diverse. Some have never programmed before.”

Keeping students engaged — ensuring they’re active participants in classroom discussions — is paramount. Acemian believes in a very interactive class: “Teaching is a two-way street.” She needs to know right away if students have problems with the material.

That’s why she uses the i>clicker classroom response system. Like the “ask the audience lifeline” from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the i>clicker lets Acemian pose multiple-choice questions and get instant feedback. Because it’s anonymous, “everyone participates, even the shy ones.” And she can zero in on unclear concepts in real time.

She also uses i>clicker to get students interacting. “Sometimes, the answer will split 50/50 in the class. I’ll tell them ‘find someone who doesn’t have the same answer as you and talk about it, try to convince each other.’”

Acemian also relies on the tablet. “Students can have the teaching slides ahead of time and we can figure out the problems in class. And because I’m always facing them, I can see when the light goes on,” she laughs.

Sometimes attention spans are short, especially when it comes to teaching on a Monday morning at 8:45 a.m. “You can’t be passive. You have to challenge the students, to keep them involved. Programming isn’t a spectator sport.” Breezing in, doing a lot of talking, and then walking out again is what doesn’t work. “The challenge is to keep from boring them.”

Respect is also very important. Acemian cultivates an open-door policy, encouraging her students to consult her, and not just about course content. “Life can be tough. There are career decisions and sometimes problems in their private lives. There’s the juggle of kids new to Montreal, living on their own for the first time.”

And Acemian likes being there for her students. Just like a big sister.

Related links:
• Centre for Teaching and Learning Services
• Slide show of the 2011 Mascot Design Contest Acemian organized as first-year program coordinator at ENCS

(Originally published in Concordia NOW.)

Jordan LeBel's Recipe for Success in the Classroom

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One part real world, one part no nonsense, and one part fun

Jordan LeBel, an associate professor at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business, calls upon his experience as an executive chef in some of Canada’s food service organizations and a top restaurant to teach The Marketing of Food and Experience Marketing.

Currently on sabbatical, LeBel has twice received the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2010, he was a recipient of a President’s Excellence in Teaching Award for full-time faculty. Recently, he was the first recipient of the student-created award for MBA Elective Professor of the year for his course on Experience Marketing.

Marketing professor Jordan LeBel | Photo by Concordia University

A Montreal native, LeBel has taught at the Norwegian College of Hotel Management, the École Hôtelière de Lausanne, as well as Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s of science from Cornell and a PhD from McGill.

He co-developed the award-winning online course Marketing Yourself and its accompanying textbook. One of his latest undertakings is the online ‘edu-tainment’ course, The World of Chocolate: Explore, Experience, Enjoy.

LeBel’s research focuses on consumption for pleasure or aesthetic reasons, and the impact of related marketing on consumer choice and behaviour. His expertise and findings have been featured by NBC, CBS, PBS, the Discovery Channel, CTV, Global, Glamour, Self, Washington Post, New York Daily, Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Sun, The Gazette, La Presse, and Le Devoir. He has written for publications such as Commerce, and starting next February he will sign a branded column in the glossy Le Must Alimentaire, titled Parlons plaisirs.

What is it that makes him such a successful teacher? “That’s like trying to pin down the indefinable ingredient that makes a recipe sing,” he offers with a laugh. But when pressed, he says “it’s human interest. I care that the information I share will be useful to students, not just for the exam but in their work and in their life. We reflect on concepts larger than just the textbook concepts and theories.”

LeBel describes his approach as “very real-world pragmatism” and “no-nonsense grounded theory.” Fun is another valid descriptor, if the year-end student presentations, which follow the format of the popular CBC TV show Dragons’ Den, are anything to judge by.

His engagements outside class, such as his vice-presidency on the board of Youth Employment Services (YES), enrich his pedagogical approach. He says activities such as co-chairing the annual fundraiser for the not-for-profit organization help to make what he says to students more relevant.

LeBel has also been involved with the McGill World Platform for Health and Economic Convergence (MWP), which brings together representatives from business, government, academia and other organizations to brainstorm about improving health worldwide through better standards of living. MWP has given LeBel the opportunity to meet such innovative thinkers as Mohammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who founded an institution to provide microcredit to people who want to start a small business but have no collateral. The organization has enabled LeBel to share a global outlook with his students.

He says his students “ask the kind of questions that make me a better volunteer,” and he admires that so many of them manage to balance part-time work with their studying. He praises the university as blessed with “an incredible vibrancy, energy and multi-ethnic diversity” that keeps him and other professors on their toes. Even on sabbatical, he likes to stay in touch with students, recently giving a sold-out talk to help raise funds for the MBA student's International Community Outreach Program.

Students give him grief about being old-school for his short quizzes on assigned readings, but he is determined to ensure his students learn the basic lingo and culture code of the discipline.

LeBel’s teaching is most likely celebrated because he so clearly values its role. “I know research is important and that we have to do it, but we are a higher education institution,” he says. “We all have to develop our own approach, I just hope that my work inspires others as I have been inspired by gifted teachers.”

Related links:
• John Molson School of Business
• Jordan LeBel’s bio
• “The Skinny on Bulging Waistlines” — NOW, February 14, 2011
• “Dragon's' Den, Concordia-style” — NOW, April 18, 2011
• Marketing Yourself
• The World of Chocolate: Explore, Experience, Enjoy.

(Originally Posted on Concordia - NOW, November 14, 2011)

Award-winning teacher believes in blackboard and chalk

[Originally published October 21, 2011 on Concordia NOW]Adaptive approach led to prestigious teaching award for Concordia's Lyes Kadem

Concordia NOW featured profiles of outstanding educators — people making a difference in the classroom and within in the Concordia community.

If you phone Lyes Kadem’s office, you probably won’t get his voice mail. Kadem, who received the Concordia President’s Excellence in Teaching Award (New Faculty) earlier this year, is nearly always at his desk — unless, of course, he’s in the classroom.

Lyes Kadem | Photo by Concordia University

Kadem, who has been teaching at Concordia since 2006, is the first-year program director for mechanical engineering, and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

Educated in Algeria, France, and here in Quebec where he did a PhD in Bioengineering at Université Laval and a Post-Doc at the renowned Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal, Kadem says it’s the environment and ambience that he enjoys most about Concordia. “You can find people from everywhere in the world,” he explains. “It’s a true melting pot, and I really like that.”

In addition to his teaching duties, Kadem conducts research as the director of the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Fluid Dynamics. The lab researches the cardiovascular system from an engineering aspect, using engineered cardiac simulators. The effort necessary to develop simulators, “shows us how highly efficient the human body is – how it’s been optimized,” Kadem says. “We need two pumps and a large Plexiglas structure to try to duplicate the heart.”

The lab also examines the parameters used to diagnose cardiovascular diseases to develop new diagnostic methods based on physical concepts. This is being specifically applied to valvular diseases and prosthetic heart valves so far.

“Doctors now use ultrasound to evaluate the speed of blood passing through the heart valves,” Kadem explains. “In our lab, we can take out the variability due to patient features, such as age or sex. This allows us to correct and suggest ways of improving the specificity and sensitivity of the tests.”
Sending a person who is actually healthy for more testing is known as a false positive. When this happens too often, a test is said to have poor specificity.

“But false negatives, when a sick person is actually told he or she is fine and to ‘go home,’ are more serious,” Kadem adds, explaining that it signals that a test has poor sensitivity.

As for his teaching philosophy, Kadem says, “I can summarize my thoughts on teaching in one line: a piece of chalk, a blackboard, and to make it simple, like my teachers taught me.”

He understands the increasing use of technology, and that making information free and open-sourced — available in the form of YouTube e-course videos, for example — “is very democratic.” However, he remains convinced that students appreciate and benefit most from the instruction and interaction that can only happen in person. He supports his stance with reference to a recent study that indicated 80 per cent of the surveyed students preferred to be in an actual classroom with a teacher.

Kadem says teaching with notes and a blackboard always leads to new ways of explaining a concept. “New ideas come up, sometimes suggested by the students themselves,” he says.

“It’s hard to follow the process of deriving equations with PowerPoint,” he adds. “It’s more of a discussion – there’s more give and take.”

His notes-and-blackboard approach can result in him completely revamping his lectures on the same topic from one semester to the next.

“That’s also better for me,” he says, “because it keeps things fresh for me, too.”

Related links:
• Lyes Kadem’s biography
• Faculty website
• Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

A Writer's Gratitude

Follow @Beverly_Akerman


As a confirmed evolutionist, I know my unfortunate tendency to see bad news like THIS while good news meanders across my brain pan in a lower case way, was hammered into human DNA through the ages. After all, recognizing danger must surely confer a stronger evolutionary advantage than non-stop partying (or so I rationalize. Always possible I’ve just caught a case of incipient Presbyterianism).

So you won’t be surprised if I admit to sometimes having to force myself to dwell on the positive, rather than succumb to my default attitude (accentuating the negative). But I do know, deep down, that I have much to be thankful, especially as 2010 draws to a close. So I hereby declare today my gratitude day, a day to look over the year’s accomplishments, to goose my sunny side to the forefront, as it were.

My year in publishing started with February’s “Now It Can Be Told: The Hardboiled Stress Of Being Santa,” appearing on Joyland.ca. David McGimpsey, Joyland’s Montreal/Atlantic Editor, is the man who tried to teach me humour at a Quebec Writers’ Federation Workshop. Making people laugh…now THERE’S the kind of work I’d love to have!

My story follows intrepid tabloid reporter Renta Yenta as she susses out the secret links between dirty letters written by Santa, cash payments to former Prime Minister Mulroney, a Guess Who reunion tour, randy goats, sustainable development and Gilbert Gottfried. Quite the high wire act, but when, while writing it, I caught myself laughing out loud, I knew I was on to something. David called it hilarious and said he loved it! So I’m grateful for all of that, and I think you’ll find it’s just what Canadians need to read as we contemplate the tortures of the upcoming Xmas season (e.g. sharp-elbowed crowds and the endlessly looped, pan pipe version of “The Little Drummer Boy,” coming soon to a department store near you…).

Not long after that, I finally received my “printed” version of the prizewinning and honourable mention stories of The Binnacle’s Sixth Annual Ultra-Short Competition. The word limit was 150. I was expecting a typical print journal issue, though someone I’d met during a writing residency in Banff last year had hinted it would be a bit out of the ordinary. What I received was a box with 56 business card sized versions of the winners and other honoured stories, my “After Katrina” being one of latter.

What does a 150 word story look like, you ask? In answer, may I present, for your delectation,

After Katrina

My sister Darlene, she ain’t never been what you call reliable. I was the one ended up seein' to Mama after Katrina hit. The whole thing give her a heart attack, but I found her safe in hospital.

She didn’t want me going to the house. “Try and stop me,” I said. It was the only home I’d ever known.

Everything was a total write off. Papers everywhere, like Scarlet O’Hara’s discarded handkerchiefs, like drowned doves. And the smell! Eau de outhouse.

Only managed to fish out Mama’s marriage license and our birth certificates. Discovered Darlene wasn’t really my big sister.

At the hospital, Mama said, “Find anything?” her gaze red-rimmed steel, her lips like dried worms. Skeleton fingers plucked the sheet. This old woman. Lied to me my whole life entire.

The heart monitor hiccupped, the IV dripped its silvery drops.

“No ma’am,” I said. “Didn’t find nothing.”

For those interested in such things, the story arose from a prompt of Nancy Zafris’ at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop of 2008—to date, three of my published stories germinated under her skilled attention. Does she think writers are hothouse flowers? Hardly! But her green thumb left faint traces as well on my multi-award-winning flash story “Pie”--which has just made the Commendations List in the UK's Aesthetica Magazine Creative Works Competiton--and on “What I’ve Prayed For,” the latter published in The New Quarterly this spring. All these stories came from this movie review prompt in the New York Times. So please let me hereby express my gratitude to Nancy and also to The Binnacle’s Gerard NeCastro, The New Quarterly’s Kim Jernigan and The Lists Issue Guest Editor Diane Schoemperlen (thank you, thank you, thank you squared…).

And maybe this would be an appropriate time to thank all the incredibly generous and talented creative writers whom I encountered as writing workshop leaders and mentors over the past six years of my journey to published-authorhood: (in temporal order) Colleen Curran, Greg Hollingshead, Isabel Huggan, Edna Alford, Robyn Sarah, Joel Yanofsky, Monique Polak, Lori Weber, Luis Urrea (also instrumental to “Pie”), Mikhail Iossel, Brad Kessler, Tess Fragoulis, Robin Marantz Henig, Guy Lawson, Neale McDevitt, and Ilona Martonfi.

Whew! They say it takes a village to raise a child; it appears to me that it may take a small town to raise a writer. And sorry if I’ve forgotten someone (I probably have; but I’m even grateful for fallibility—it reminds me to be humble).

Well, this feels like enough gratitude for today…Besides, I think I like the idea of stringing this out over several entries.

Wishing you all peace and love (oh, I am so not a hippie!),

Bev