Per Henningsgaard stands in front of the classroom, looking more Billie Jo Armstrong of Green Day than Sting, for those of us who humanize professors by comparing them to rock stars.
But the words out of his mouth are more Sting – a former English teacher – than Armstrong – a high school dropout. “For those of you who don’t like to do work, this class isn’t for you,” Henningsgaard warns students in his English 349/549: Editing and Publishing class at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UW-SP) on the first day. “You will work harder in this class than any other you take at UW-SP.”
After taking the class for my graduate studies, I’d agree with him. Students spend a lot of time doing work for the class, and any slacking off can have grave repercussions to the end mission, which the whole class strives to reach.
That end mission is a book, as the class staffs Cornerstone Press, UW-SP’s publishing house, during the semester, and it is responsible for publishing one by the time finals begin. Each student becomes an “employee,” with each required to take on a role that corresponds to an actual job at a publishing house. Students vie for roles early in the semester, with classmates selecting who fills them through an election process.
I sought out the role of publicity manager, as it would give me experience in public relations, which is the focus of my graduate studies in the Department of Communication. Substance editor and copy editor positions would have been more logical choices for me, given my editorial role at The Gazette. I do those jobs on a daily basis at the newspaper, though, and wanted to get experience in an area that I don’t have much in. Because I interact with public relations practitioners on an almost daily basis, I realized knowing how they operate could be beneficial to my current job.
As a class, our first task was to select a manuscript. We received more than two dozen to choose from, including books of poems, guidebooks, essay collections and a variety of novels in several different genres.
For me, selecting a manuscript was the best part of the process. I enjoyed reading what authors submitted – including the ones that weren’t so good – and thinking about the possibilities of what each manuscript would look like as a finished product. In the end, the class selected the manuscript I most wanted published, “Syncopation: A Memoir of Adèle Hugo,” written by Elizabeth Caulfield Felt, an associate lecturer in English at UW-SP.
To tout the book, it’s a historical fiction novel about poet and playwright Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle, a woman in real life who was committed to a mental hospital. Felt uses known facts, combined with some fiction to show readers how Adèle may have gotten to this place in her life. She does so in an exciting, and literate, manner in a book I believe any local book clubs would be wise to select (Felt is willing to meet with any book clubs to talk about the novel; it’s not often the author is available to do that).
Getting back to the class, though, students were required to work a minimum of 2.5 hours each week outside of the classroom on job duties related to the book’s publication, although most of us probably spent many more each week. The majority of my time was spent writing press releases, contacting other media about the book, and meeting with the marketing team to come up with interesting ways to promote the book. People may have noted “Syncopation” written on chalk throughout this community, as well as several others. That guerilla marketing technique was a way for us to promote the book.
In addition to our roles with the publishing house, we had other homework related to book publishing but separate from Cornerstone. Each student was required to write a letter to one of the rejected authors explaining the good points about his or her manuscript, as well as the area that needed improvement; and each student had to design and copy edit a short manuscript from another source. Both were fun, but time-consuming projects.
Taking a class where the work we did generated actual results was eye-opening. It’s a model every class should strive for, as it reaches beyond what one normally learns in an English class and offers valuable skill-building tools, such as communication, teamwork and the ability to meet deadlines.
I’m still struggling with the deadline thing, though. That’s relatively new to me.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, May 4, 2012.
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