Special Events
Resistance at Tule Lake
OCTOBER 19 , 2017 Forced from their homes simply because of their ancestry , more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were forced into World War II internment camps , but many resisted , leading to more severe punishments for 12,000 prisoners .
Reporter ( Currents ) and filmmaker Konrad Aderer told their long-suppressed story at St . Francis through his documentary Resistance at Tule Lake , and a talk with students about the film and his personal connection to Japanese internment camps .
“ My grandparents were incarcerated at Topaz , which is another one of the ten camps ,” said Aderer . “[ They were ] removed from their homes to be put in a camp but they essentially made the best of it … My mother was born there and they had another child in the camp and that was the story which everyone talked about ; Japanese Americans showed what good Americans they were by cooperating , taking the whole experience and even signing up for military service .”
Aderer wants to make sure people know his family ’ s experience was very different and far less brutal than what happened to thousands of Japanese Americans .
The screening was sponsored by the Departments of History , Communication Arts , Sociology & Criminal Justice , and the Honors Program . Learn more about the film at resistanceattulelake . com .
Filmmaker
Konrad Aderer : https :// youtu . be / uYV-LnznIuU
Arthur Miller Birthday Celebration
OCTOBER 21 , 2017 Jessica Hecht ( The Price , Friends ) joined the Arthur Miller Birthday Celebration at St . Francis College at an event sponsored with the Arthur Miller Society and organized by Professor Stephen Marino , the Editor of The Arthur Miller Journal .
“ It is very , very difficult to play a Miller hero . It brings up , for men playing those roles a tremendous amount of sadness and anger ,” said Hecht who performed on Broadway in Miller ’ s A View From the Bridge with Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson , as well as The Price with Mark Ruffalo , Tony Shaloub , and Danny DeVito . “ It brings up a feeling of outrage that things aren ’ t the way they should be , both as you ’ re working on the play ; the little microcosm of this world that you ’ re creating ; there are so many obstacles coming at you and so you get really frustrated as an actor that you don ’ t have a path that ’ s clear , and I think it also brings up a lot of frustration in the actors who go for it emotionally .”
The event celebrates the playwright ’ s birth on October 17 , 1915 . Miller lived in Brooklyn Heights in the 1940s and 50s when he wrote notable works , All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View From the Bridge .
Actress
Jessica Hecht : https :// youtu . be / acn3DoBaT6Q
Author Ron Currie
OCTOBER 25 , 2017 Author Ron Currie shared his latest book , The One-Eyed Man , as the latest author to read for the Walt Whitman Writers Series .
Reflecting on how to balance comedy and tragedy in a novel , Currie said , “ It ’ s tricky because if you go one step too far with the comedy or with the humor then your reader is going to feel that you ’ re not taking the dramatic aspects of the story seriously as a writer and they ’ re not going to care about it .”
Currie ’ s other work includes the novels Everything Matters ! and Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles and the short story collection God is Dead , which was the winner of the New York Public Library ’ s Young Lions Award . In 2009 , he received the Addison M . Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters .
Author Ron Currie : https :// youtu . be / KTH9Yrxc2C0
Poet Susan Miller
NOVEMBER 29 , 2017 The Women ’ s Poetry Initiative at St . Francis College and the Department of English welcomed Susan Miller , two-time winner of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize for poetry , to read from her new collection of poems , Communion of Saints .
“ Writing is a place where you work out the trouble . The nice thing about writing this book was that it was all just full of models for me of how to work out the trouble ,” said Miller . “ All these people that I care about ; I ’ ve written about them in the guise of historical saints because I feel they ’ re working it out . They ’ ve got it figured out maybe a little bit better than the rest of us in certain ways .”
Communion of Saints is divided into four sections ( Faith , Hope , Love , Pax et Bonum ), with the final section based on the life of St . Francis as well as Miller ’ s own pilgrimage to Assisi . ●
Poet Susan Miller : https :// youtu . be / 9EjssX7tXK4
ST . FRANCIS COLLEGE TERRIER | SUMMER 2018 , VOLUME 81 , NUMBER 2 2