Words that lead us into mystery

Sigma Tau Delta and meeting poets

From Carl Phillips’ poem “Civilization,” published in Then the War (2023).

“You can’t grow if you don’t take risks.”

Last month was my first experience with the national Sigma Tau Delta conference, but hardly my first rodeo with academic conferences. The primary Sigma attendees are English majors and other members of the English honor society — which was celebrating its 100th anniversary this year — and their advisors and professors.

Me? I’m an alumni, designated by the gray sticker on my badge. I am not going to examine how “gray” might not be the moniker I wanted attached to me, but most of the other alumni are significantly younger than I am, so I guess they weren’t bothered. I continue to volunteer with the university’s Sigma chapter, of which I was president last year, but I am not officially an advisor and am not teaching this semester.

Therefore I wasn’t sure how useful STD would be for me (and save the dirty jokes, we have heard every. single. one. and perpetuated more than a few of them ourselves.) But it was held in St. Louis this year, so with the lack of travel costs, it seemed a no-brainer to give it a trial run and see how useful it would be professionally and creatively.

Verdict is: Mixed.

The vast majority of programming consists of student presentations of their research and original writing, with a healthy thread of pedagogy for the advisors and professors. That’s okay, because I’m still doing research (at a snail’s pace in between work that, you know, pays rent).

Here’s a sampling of the topics I heard presented over the last four days:

• “Feminist” tropes in science fiction films
• Contemporary discourse surrounding banned books
• Tackling the hard shell of weight loss narratives
• Children’s literature as a medium for change
• The portrait of the prostitute as woman
• Finding female agency in Little Women
• Devoted mundanity and queerness in Dickinson’s late letter-poems

Here are some I missed, but had on my list: