An Interview with Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez grew up in California, the son of immigrant Mexican parents. He excelled academically, completed degrees at Stanford University and Columbia University, and was poised to continue in academia when he turned down offers from several prestigious schools, uncomfortable with the possibility that affirmative action gave him an unfair advantage. Rodriguez wrote about his early experiences in Catholic school and his assimilation to America in his first book, Hunger of Memory. Subsequent books, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, and Brown: The Last Discovery of America, further explore issues of culture, race, and identity. Rodriguez has received the George Foster Peabody Award, the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California. His work has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rodriguez visited Butler University in the fall of 2011 as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers series and agreed to interview with Booth\u27s Susan Lerner

A Conversation with Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen, arguably the best living American novelist, began his career in the late eighties. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, is a thriller set in his hometown of St. Louis. Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion, tells the story of the Holland family, who live in a Boston that is beset by earthquakes. But it wasn’t until 2001, with The Corrections, that the author found a wider readership. This book sets the Lambert family’s conflicts and anxieties against the backdrop of larger social issues, like the changing economy of the ’90s, and the rampant use of psychopharmaceuticals. When Franzen expressed ambivalence at having The Corrections selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, the ensuing flurry of media coverage secured his foothold in mainstream culture. The author’s fourth novel, Freedom, interweaves the story of the Berglunds with subplots that examine mass consumerism and environmental issues. Franzen’s oeuvre also includes two collections of essays, How to Be Alone, and Farther Away, and a personal history, The Discomfort Zone. His most recent book is The Kraus Project, a translation with commentary of the work of the nineteenth-century Austrian critic, Karl Kraus. Franzen’s visit to Butler University—as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series—was three-fold: a reading for the general public, a Q&A for Butler students, and an interview with Booth. As the MFA candidate/reader for Booth who was to interview Mr. Franzen, I attended his reading and Q&A so as to get a better sense of what the author is like. Many articles profiling the novelist cast him as a cranky contrarian, but the Jonathan Franzen I saw didn’t fit into any of my preconceived ideas. During his reading he seemed intent on entertaining the crowd. Afterwards he fielded questions from the audience and responded genially. He smiled. He said thank you. When someone asked Franzen if he wanted his work to be a catalyst for social change, the novelist said he wasn’t opposed to the idea, but added, “I’m just trying to give the reader a good time.” The undergraduates who attended the author’s Q&A had questions about The Discomfort Zone. Franzen said that the first thirty pages he wrote were awful because he was ashamed of his innocence. “Shame is the worst substance on the page, the most contagious of all feelings,” he said. After he rewrote the material using humor, casting himself as a “ridiculous figure,” he was able to let go of that shame. When Franzen was asked about his intense interest in birding, he told the crowd—most of them in their late teens and early twenties—that he didn’t start to grow up until he was in his forties. “I was so self-conscious for so much of my life, especially as a teenager,” he said, adding that it was through birding that he learned how to be in the moment and enjoy it. After the undergraduates left, Jonathan Franzen sat down with me to share some of his thoughts on literature, social media, and infamy

A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates

In the Kenyon Review, Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, “Writing is our way of assuaging homesickness,” and this is the quote that came to mind in the fall of 2015 when Oates read as part of Butler University’s Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series. At Clowes Hall, she read from her memoir, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, which tells of her childhood home and her formative years. She read with ease, pausing occasionally with a humorous aside. Oates, the serious-looking woman on the book jackets of countless dark novels, is funny. In the introduction to The Best American Essays of the Century, an anthology Oates edited, she wrote: “Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.” Oates carries this sentiment through in her novels and stories, which provoke and disturb by employing plots that often spark from an act of violence. The author’s empathetic prose never excuses her characters’ cruelty, but informs it by providing a window into their deepest hurts and desires. Oates’s list of accomplishments, still growing after fifty years in the field, is so vast and unwieldy that it defies attempts to catalogue. Her work ethic embodies the historically American idea of success—a Horatio Alger story—that a dream can be achieved through perseverance and hard work. But Oates’s career also fits another narrative of success, that some individuals are born with a bounteous talent. In The Lost Landscape Oates reveals that as a girl she told stories by coloring pictures with her Crayolas because her desire to narrate came before she learned to write. Oates’s oeuvre fills bookshelves and includes novels, short story collections, memoirs, essays, and literary criticism. The New York Times has included dozens of her books on its list of notable books of the year, and other honors include the National Book Award; nominations for the Pulitzer Prize; the National Humanities Medal bestowed by President Obama; and the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement. After her reading, Oates fielded questions from the audience, and the next morning she sat in a room with thirty students to answer more questions. In this more casual setting she spoke about being a formalist. She explained that different stories call out for specific types of language, and that she is always seeking forms to tell the multitude of stories that crowd her head and fill her files at home. “I’m really happy when I’m running,” she said. “I get lots of ideas when I run.” Before Oates headed home she sat down with Booth

Interview with Alicia Erian

Alicia Erian is the author of a novel, Towelhead, and a collection of stories, The Brutal Language of Love. Her writing has appeared in Playboy, Zoetrope, and The Iowa Review. She has worked as a film director and screenwriter and taught at Wellesley College. She is currently completing a memoir. In March 2011, Erian came to Butler University as a writer-in-residence and sat down with Susan Lerner to discuss her writing process, messy families, and sex

Chemoprevention of BBN-Induced Bladder Carcinogenesis by the Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulator Tamoxifen

AbstractBladder cancer is the fifth most frequent tumor in men and ninth in women in the United States. Due to a high likelihood of recurrence, effective chemoprevention is a significant unmet need. Estrogen receptors (ERs), primarily ERβ, are expressed in normal urothelium and urothelial carcinoma, and blocking ER function with selective ER modulators such as tamoxifen inhibits bladder cancer cell proliferation in vitro. Herein, the chemoprotective potential of tamoxifen was evaluated in female mice exposed to the bladder-specific carcinogen, N-butyl-N-(4-hydroxybutyl) nitrosamine (BBN). Carcinogen treatment resulted in a 76% tumor incidence and increased mean bladder weights in comparison to controls. In contrast, mice receiving tamoxifen concurrent (8–20 weeks) or concurrent and subsequent (8–32 weeks) to BBN administration had no change in bladder weight and only 10% to 14% incidence of tumors. Non-muscle-invasive disease was present in animals treated with tamoxifen before (5–8 weeks) or after (20–32 weeks) BBN exposure, while incidence of muscle-invasive bladder carcinoma was reduced. ERβ was present in all mice and thus is a potential mediator of the tamoxifen chemoprotective effect. Surprisingly, ERα expression, which was detected in 74% of the mice exposed to BBN alone but not in any controlmice, was correlated with tumor incidence, indicating a possible role for this receptor in carcinogen-induced urothelial tumorigenesis. Thus, these data argue that both ERα and ERβ play a role in modulating carcinogen-induced bladder tumorigenesis. Administration of tamoxifen should be tested as a chemopreventive strategy for patients at high risk for bladder cancer recurrence

Teaching Third-Year Medical Students to Address Patients’ Spiritual Needs in the Surgery/Anesthesiology Clerkship

Introduction: Despite many patients wanting physicians to inquire about their religious/spiritual beliefs, most physicians do not make such inquiries. Among physicians who do, surgeons are less likely than family and general practitioners and psychiatrists to do so. Methods: To address this gap, we developed a 60-minute curriculum that follows the Kolb cycle of experiential learning for third-year medical students on their surgery/anesthesiology clerkship. The session includes definitions of religion/spirituality, an overview of the literature on spirituality in surgery, a review of the FICA Spiritual History Tool, discussion of the role of the chaplain and the process of initiating a chaplain consult, and three cases regarding the spiritual needs of surgical patients. Results: In total, 165 students participated in 10 sessions over 13 months. Of these, 120 students (73%) provided short-term feedback. Overall, 82% rated the session above average or excellent, and 72% stated the session was very relevant to patient care. To improve the session, students recommended assigning key readings, discussing more cases, role-playing various scenarios, inviting patients to speak, practicing mock interviews, and allowing for more self-reflection and discussion. Long- term feedback was provided by 105 students (64%) and indicated that the spirituality session impacted their attitudes about the role of religion/spirituality in medicine and their behaviors with patients. Discussion: We have designed a successful session on spirituality for third-year students on their surgery/anesthesiology clerkship. Students reported it to be a positive addition to the curriculum. The session can be modified for other surgical subspecialties and specialties outside of surgery

An Innovative Approach for Integrating Mandatory, Longitudinal Spirituality Training into the Medical School Curriculum

Problem: Most Americans indicate they are religious and/or spiritual and wish to have their beliefs taken into account when engaging with health care providers, yet gaps in medical education and health care practice remain. To underscore the importance of spirituality as a significant social determinant of health, a team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York developed mandatory spirituality and health training for students integrated into all 4 years of the undergraduate medical education curriculum. Approach: From 2014 to 2020, a small group of faculty took an innovative approach, launching the initiative and expanding the team by engaging interprofessional faculty and staff from across the institution. The team used an iterative process to integrate 4 distinct modules into 4 existing courses, spanning the four years of medical school. Outcomes: The majority of students found that the spirituality and health curriculum was valuable to training and professional development. They appreciated the importance of patients’ spiritual needs; valued learning about the role chaplains play in patient care and how initiate a consult; and indicated they intended to integrate spiritual history-taking in their patient care. With respect to process, 3 key factors—establishing an interprofessional team, working through an iterative process, and integrating the curriculum into existing courses—were critical to designing and implementing the modules. Next steps: The team aims to expand and improve the curriculum by linking learning to specific standardized competencies as well as developing more specific performance assessments to demonstrate achievement of competencies. Professional development efforts will be enhanced so faculty can better model and reinforce the integration of spirituality into health care practices, and expand the curriculum on spirituality and health into graduate medical education

Cognitive behaviour therapy versus counselling intervention for anxiety in young people with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders: a pilot randomised controlled trial

The use of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) as a treatment for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been explored in a number of trials. Whilst CBT appears superior to no treatment or treatment as usual, few studies have assessed CBT against a control group receiving an alternative therapy. Our randomised controlled trial compared use of CBT against person-centred counselling for anxiety in 36 young people with ASD, ages 12–18. Outcome measures included parent- teacher- and self-reports of anxiety and social disability. Whilst each therapy produced improvements inparticipants, neither therapy was superior to the other to a significant degree on any measure. This is consistent with findings for adults

Constraints and possibilities: Lima Film Festival, politics and cultural formation in Peru

The Festival de Cine de Lima (Lima Film Festival) launched in 1997 and, from humble beginnings, each year now introduces around 300 films to diverse audiences across the Peruvian capital and beyond. In 2014, for the first time in its history, four of the nineteen films selected for the feature competition were made by Peruvian directors, signalling a growing recognition of national talent by programming panels and critics that had tended to look beyond national borders for inspiration and challenge. Despite the relative paucity of co-ordinated film production activity in Peru, it is argued here that the flourishing of Lima Film Festival provides evidence of a deep sense of film appreciation that conveys a commitment to all forms of cinema. This essay reflects critically on the local, national and international impact of this Festival, its influence on the development of film policy in Peru, and explores its role as a ‘key building block of film culture’ (Iordanova, 2013) across a complex national framework