Shocker alumni have made their mark in almost every field, and books are no exception. Whether you’re interested in novels, journalism, biography or memoir, looking to brush up on some classroom techniques or just need a great picture book to read to your kids, these diverse titles have something to offer every summer — or any season — reader.
Beverley Olson Buller ’86
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From Emporia: The Story of William Allen White
Since Beverley Olson Buller was editor of her high school newspaper, she’d heard about William Allen White, the influential Emporia newspaperman.
As a school librarian in Newton, Kan., she’s long been part of the committee that nominates children’s books for the William Allen White Awards — in fact, she’ll be chairman next September. But, she says, “I can’t tell you how many times I wished there was a book in my classroom that I could show kids when they asked, ‘Who’s this William Allen White anyway?’”
While White’s autobiography is still in print, there had never been a book for kids about this famous Kansan. So Buller wrote one herself. From Emporia: The Story of William Allen White was published in September 2007.
In addition to presenting a wealth of information about White in a “pain-free” narrative style, Buller’s book embodies features like timelines, sidebars and captions, so that teachers can
use it in the classroom.
“It was very important to me to have a book with a picture or a graphic on every page — I wanted the book to be very graphical,” says Buller, who’s been pleased with From Emporia’s reception.
Amy Mattson Lauters
The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist
Amy Mattson Lauters was raised in northern Wisconsin, where she knew the family of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Lauters, naturally, loved Wilder’s books: “I never thought of those books as fiction because I knew that these were stories about real little girls, just like me. I once led a crusade in my elementary school library to have the books reshelved as nonfiction.”
In graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Lauter’s studies
in women’s history, literary journalism and American history combined in a renewed interest in Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
Lane was a prolific writer in many genres. In her research, Lauters discovered previously uncollected materials of Lane’s stretching
over 50 years, on topics as diverse as her stint as an extra in a Douglas Fairbanks movie to war correspondence from 1965 Saigon.
Says Lauters: “She was a fascinating person, one of conviction and heart, who had at her core the need to not only survive financially, but to thrive — and writing provided her the way to do this while still maintaining an independent lifestyle.”
Lauters is an associate professor at WSU’s Elliott School of Communication. Her book was published in February 2007 by the University of Missouri Press.
Myrna Messer ’87
Remembering… A Town That Was
Myrna Messer grew up in the small North Dakota town of Foxholm, northwest of Minot, during the Great Depression and World War II. Founded in the 1880s, Foxholm has now nearly disappeared: “There’s only a cluster of houses, a little bar and a Catholic church,” says Messer. “The Foxholm I knew is gone. The ghost town gods are smiling, ready to claim it as their own.”
Messer’s memories of her hometown are still alive and well, however, and she’s preserved them in a well-researched and witty memoir, Remembering… A Town That Was, published in July 2006 by BookSurge Publishing.
She started the project just for her family, particularly her two little granddaughters, but she’s sold over a thousand copies not only to former Foxholm families but to readers as far off as Florida, California, Alaska (a priest called her to say, “I’m reading your book and you’re writing about my life!”) and even Germany. Messer attributes its popularity to the lingering resonance of small-town America and the humor that fills her narrative —“It’s not just dry history,” she stresses.
Messer, a retired teacher, lives in Derby, Kan.
Janet Peery ’92
What the Thunder Said
Shortly after Janet Peery graduated from WSU’s fiction MFA program, she learned of a one-year visiting teaching position at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.
“After I was hired, my three daughters and I packed our ’84 Mercury Marquis — a beat-up charity car with tinted windows and torn leather seats — and drove cross country from Kansas to Norfolk. Looking back, I see what a risk my decision was, but at the time all I knew was that I had children to support and no job. Fortunately, the one year was extended to a tenure-track assistant professorship. I’ve been here 15 years now, and have just been promoted to full professor.”
She’s also won the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and taught for the National Book Foundation's American Voices Project on reservations in South Dakota and Montana.
Peery has published a collection of short stories, Alligator Dance, and two novels: The River Beyond the World (a 1996 National Book Award Finalist) and last year's What the Thunder Said. Told in shifting perspectives as a novella and interlocking short stories, Thunder chronicles the lives and families of two Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma sisters. It comes out in paperback this June.
Howard Pitler ’76/97
Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works
Howard Pitler holds a master’s degree in music performance and a doctorate in education from WSU. He has served as both an elementary and middle school principal and since 2003 has been director of educational technology for Denver, Colo.-based Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), a federally funded educational research laboratory dedicated to helping teachers at all levels bridge the gap between theory and practice.
With three co-authors, Pitler wrote Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works, published in July 2007 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Educators hoping to integrate more modern educational methods
into their teaching will find the book useful: “We tried to provide concrete examples for teachers at all levels of technology implementation, from the expert to the novice. We also focused on technology and software that should be readily available to all teachers and web resources that are free. Our goal was to provide teachers with a deeper understanding of the role of technology in the learning process.”
Covering nine categories of research-based instructional strategies, Classroom Instruction has sold over a million copies to date.
Susanna Pitzer ’81
Not Afraid of Dogs
After WSU, Susanna Pitzer worked with Seem to Be Players, a professional children’s theater company in Lawrence, Kan., as an actress and then a playwright. Her first love, though, was illustration, and after two years studying art at KU, she took the plunge and moved to New York, where she studied with the School of Visual Art and the Art Students’ League.
She has published several books for children, both as writer and illustrator, in addition to serving as a writing mentor and remaining active in children’s theater.
Recently, she was commissioned to write a play that will premiere this fall in New York State in a barn on a sustainable farm. If this sounds like a busy schedule, that’s usual with Pitzer: “I’m always working on a lot of projects at the same time and that works for me, helps me not get bogged down.”
Not Afraid of Dogs, about a little boy’s warming to a not-so-scary canine, was published by Walker & Company in 2006 and has won numerous awards, including a 2006 Golden Kite Award, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book Award and a 2008 Keystone to Reading Book Award. More of Pitzer’s work can be seen on her website, www.susannapitzer.com.
Gary D. Wilson ’68
Sing, Ronnie Blue
Gary Wilson has taught fiction writing for 40 years at WSU, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and now at the University of Chicago.
He’s published dozens of short stories in literary magazines throughout the country such as Glimmer Train, Kansas Quarterly and Witness. In Sept. 2007, Rager Media published his debut novel, Sing, Ronnie Blue.
The book is set in the small town of Bartlett’s Junction, Kan., and follows the lives of the title character, son of a junkyard owner and his high school friend John Klein, son of the town’s bank president, as they drift apart and come back together at a fateful Independence Day celebration that leads them both into tragedy.
“Small towns have always fascinated me as microcosms of society at large, in that they have the same economic, social and emotional forces at work as do larger communities. Having grown up in a small Kansas town, it seemed natural to me to set my novel in a similar place,” says Wilson. “The best fiction has a sense of inevitability about it, rather than predictability. I hope Sing, Ronnie Blue feels inevitable, and as such, becomes a memorable experience for the reader.”
The Shocker publications showcased in “Summer Reading” are available from Amazon.com and, in Wichita, at local merchants such as Watermark Books.
Here are a number of other Shocker-authored books to hit the bookstands recently:
• Matthew Eck ’01 of Kansas City, The Farther Shore, (Milkweed Editions, September 2007).
• Monty L. Fetterolf ’81 of Aiken, S.C., Crime Scene Chemistry for the Armchair Sleuth, (Prometheus Books, August 2007).
• Stan Finger ’83 of Wichita, Into the Deep, (Tyndale House Publishers, July 2007).
• J.M. Hayes ’66/66/70 of Tucson, Ariz., Broken Heartland, (Poisoned Pen Press, November 2007).
• H. Craig Miner ’66/67, WSU distinguished professor of business history, Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890-1940, (University of Kansas Press, September 2006).
• Molly O’Shaughnessy ’93 of Jackson Hole, Wyo., Just Write: The Art of Personal Correspondence, (Gibbs Smith Publishers, May 2008).
• Robert M. Owens, WSU assistant professor of history, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
• Keith Pickus, WSU associate provost, associate professor of German and Jewish history, and member of Kansas’ State Holocaust Commission, Our Only Hope: Eddie’s Holocaust Story and the Weisz Family Correspondence, (University Press of America, March 2008).
• Glyn Rimmington, Boeing Professor of Global Learning at WSU, and Mara Alagic, WSU associate professor of curriculum and instruction, Third Place Learning: Reflective Inquiry into Intercultural and Global Cage Painting, (Information Age Publishing, 2008).
