New Interview With Me

Last year I was interviewed for Visible Distance Fanzine about DIY ethics in the classroom. The zine came out a few months ago. The interview is cut up a bit so everyone who was interviewed has their answers separated, so I’ve including my original answers below.

Who are you? Your name, age, where did you grow up?where do you live ?
William Patrick Wend. 40. I grew up in northern New Jersey (AOD and The FUs played like 2 minutes away from where my pediatrician was located), but moved to the shore in 1992. I started slowly getting into hardcore that winter and went to my first show in 1994. I currently live in Mount Laurel, which is about 20 minutes outside of Philadelphia. The address on the Turning Point demo is a few minutes away.

What is/was your involvement in punk/hc (play in a band? Do a label or zine? book shows? Enthusiastic show goer, record collector ? Sxe? Vegan/vegetarian?) What were /are you favorite bands?
Never quite played in a band. Did practice a few times for one, but we were too disorganized to ever play. I think the songs would have ended up sounding like early Youth of Today, Cause For Alarm, Antidote, etc. I know we wanted to cover Artificial Peace's "Outside Looking In." I did a whole bunch of fanzines over the years which are, mostly, collected at signifyningnothing.net. I'm still missing copies of a few things...

I did do American releases for a few band demos back in the 90s. I was also supposed to do a tape compilation which would have had bands from the tri-state area, Europe, and Australia, BCT style, but it fell through. A bunch of American bands were going to give me live stuff....the European bands were from demos and the Australian ones were a bunch of different stuff. I miss BCT style tape compilations a lot. Spotify mixes aren't the same, but especially when it could vanish one day because of "licensing issues." Punk fucking rock.

I only officially was involved with booking two shows. One included Floorpunch, Vision, and some others. The other was a local show. I was the "responsible adult" involved. I was 19. I was not responsible.

Not a big showgoer. I don't like crowds and have significant anxiety issues, so even back in the day I feel like I missed a ton of shows because of that. Also shows were too damn long. I hate how shows have trended towards being longer and longer these days and absolutely loath "fests." 3-5 bands. No set longer than 30 minutes. This is hardcore, not Van Halen.

Half ass collected records but then realized it was a waste of money. Once I was able to digitize everything I sold it all off.

Not straight edge.

28 years vegetarian. I've actually been vegetarian for about a year before I started getting into hardcore.

I guess my biggest contribution to hardcore these days is that I run the Hardcore Show Flyers archive.

Why did you want to become a teacher?
It's all I ever wanted to be. One of my earliest memories was having problems in preschool and wondering if I could do that too. It went from there. I really never had any other career ambitions until much later when I briefly considered journalism (but the job fell through and then the paper went out of business about a year later) and then library/research work, but the day after I went up to Rutgers for their MLS open house events I got the call that nudged me towards my current job. .

What do you teach (grade level, subject, etc.,)
I worked in K-12 from 2002 to 2009. I currently I am an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts. I teach freshman and sophomore level writing courses, plus literature courses (primarily British literature, which is my research field), plus two film courses. I have been the coordinator of our honors program since 2017 and ran the THATCamp Community College unconference at the college from 2013-2019. I just ended my stint as faculty senate secretary the other day.

How has your experience in this subculture influenced your work as a teacher? What about punk/hc, if anything, influences your approach to teaching? Does if come into play at all?
I think the best thing it influences is making sure I am an advocate for my students. I often butt heads with people because I try to bring in not only the excelling student's voice, but the disheartened or underwhelmed ones too. We're in the middle of finals week right now and, especially in the situation we are in right now, I have to make extremely individualized decisions for each student beyond just grading their work. Some of it is making sure they know about resources at the college. Some of it is getting them access to mental health resources. In other cases it's advocating for them with the college. I can't really change a lot in the larger context of academia or politics or whatever, but locally I can really "make a change" and whatnot.

Does being a teacher factor into your engagement with punk/hc ? Is being in a band or doing a label or a zine or something, at all similar/have any parallels or are they unrelated ?
I think the biggest influence was creating zines. The experience of crafting your own projects by hand (I was never one for Pagemaker or Quark Express) and distributing them taught me so much about how to design things that help when creating assignments and projects. I like to do things my way and not use publisher created content that isn't my own. Sure there might be a few typos or changes made after discussing it with students, but I'd rather have raw edges than something real slick and shiny that is soulless or only exists to collect data for third parties.

What, if any tension or conflict to you feel as a teacher? For example: if you have anti-authoritarian leanings, but a teacher is an authority figure of sorts. How do you address these challenges?
Who in hardcore doesn't have anti-authority leanings? I make my classroom very student centered. We have discussions, not lectures. I hate lecturing. I run all assignments by my classes to ensure they are sensible and do not need corrections or further elaboration before they go "live." Any major policy changes made on syllabi are done with a student committee who help me to draft policy language that is then opened up to comment by all of my students before becoming official policy.

A lot of punk/hc is about rethinking, questioning, or unlearning what we were/are told or what ever been taught. Do you ever have to deal with curriculum that you feel is bullshit , is there room to present other perspectives?
One of the big reasons I got out of K-12 was that. It's also why my classes are very discussion based. I want students to feel comfortable expressing themselves and see other perspectives they might not have seen before.

An example of this is the Women's Literature course I teach once every few years. Inevitably, and rightfully, women's suffrage comes up in connection to something we are reading. Last time it was a Kate Chopin short story. I always end up bringing up, on one hand, that many white suffragettes were extremely racist, but, on the other hand, there were also many women during that era who opposed women voting for a wide range of reasons including a belief it wasn't a "woman's place" or a cynicism towards choosing between a range of men who likely did not have their best interests in mind. Students are often stunned to find this out and wonder why they had not before. It makes them rethink what we are reading and leads to new possibilities for research and essay writing.

The education system can at times be a factory like system that churns students out. Sometimes it ends up being about memorization and test score and not always about actually learning something. How do you address the challenge of balancing authentic learning with making sure your students get the necessary boxes checked.

We do a lot of assessments, but they are pretty organically added into assignments. Any exam I give, which is mostly just finals, is take home and available for at least a week. These days our students' lives are so fractured whether by family, work, or personal issues and that gives them a chance to get the work done in their own time. I don't give quizzes or ask for memorization. If someone can just look it up on their phone, why waste their time?

Do you connect differently with students if they seem punk or alternative leaning/ oddball/ weirdo
I guess? I don't really think about that much.

Do students and parents have a sense of or have any knowledge of your punk/hc side or is that not something you share?
I run into students at shows sometimes, but not really. Like 5 years ago I had a student who was totally blown away that I was hanging out with members of a fairly prominent hardcore band at a show. I don't know. They have been my friends for over 20 years. It's not really a big deal to me.

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Valkyira Chronicles Paper

In October, I will be speaking at Rowan University at the "Alternate Worlds" conference. My paper will be about Valkyria Chronicles. Here is my proposal:

Valkyria Chronicles is a Playstation game released in 2008, and reissued in a remastered edition in 2016, by Sega. The game chronicles Squad 7, a militia in an alternative version of World War II Europe, as they fight back after their neutral, but resource heavy, country is under siege from both outside and within. Squad 7, “peasants and barbarians,” as an enemy calls them, is led by Welkin, a nature loving school teacher and his half sister Isara. Isara is a Darcsen, a group of people blamed for calamities in the world and discriminated against both by society and members of Squad 7 itself.

Valkyria Chronicles uses the tropes of World War II films, modern anime, and post 9-11 anxieties about dwindling resources and The Other to create a narrative that explores how we fight war, what we believe, and how ingrained prejudice is difficult to overcome. Each member of Squad 7 has “potentials” which randomly activate during battles. Some members are pacifists, who will occasionally refuse to fight. Some members are so prejudiced against Darcsen that they will trigger a “Darcsen Hater” potential that lowers their statistics when near Darcsen.

The game's plot explores these issues by combing war film tropes with the conventions of anime to create a narrative that reimagines the past while also examining our current world and the issues that modern life struggles with each day on the homefront and battlefield. Cut scenes explore these issues and examine a world fighting over limited resources, thousands year old prejudices, and both military and civilian life.

Valkyria Chronicles is critically acclaimed and received a remastered re-release in 2016. As Nadia Oxford argues in “I Can't Believe They're Not Jews! Valkyria Chronicles And Respectful Representation,” the game “pinpoint(s) Jewish culture, its history, and its struggles in a way that’s respectful, emotional, and non-cloying.” The game engages the past and brings it forward to the present to examine the modern world. Valkyria Chronicles is worth further examination.

My colleague Chris Gazzara will also be giving a paper at this conference. When the paper is drafted, I am going to create a podcast version for Giraffe Feels as well.

New Publication In The Victorian

I have a publication in a promising new journal called The Victorian on adapting Dracula as a work of hypertext fiction. If you have engaged with my MA Thesis at all over the years, a good portion of this essay is a rewritten version of some pieces of it.

I am working on a few more publications this fall. One is for a familiar publishing venue and another will be engaging with a familiar project. More soon.

Subject & Strategy Acknowledgement

After taking part in their manuscript review survey for the latest edition of Subject & Strategy: A Writer’s Reader, I have been thanked in the acknowledgement portion of the preface. I know this is pretty casual and normal for academics, but I am pretty excited to have participated in this process and now see my name inside the book I use for my composition classes.

Two pictures taken from my new cell phone. I’ve never had a camera phone before, so I apologize for their poor quality.

Hacking The Academy: Lessons Learned From 15 Years of Hardcore-Punk Shows About Hacking The Academic Conference

I’m not sure if this is exactly the style they wanted, but here is my contribution for the Hacking The Academy collection. Last week, a CFP went up on Prof Hacker to put together an edited volume of essays in different forms of media about, well, hacking the academy. Among those putting this together is Dan Cohen from Zotero. I decided to write about what attending and promoting hardcore-punk shows for the past 15 years taught me about academic conferences.

Lessons Learned From 15 Years of Hardcore-Punk Shows About Hacking The Academic Conference

A lot of this I’d already deciphered by the time I was 15 years old. I spent my youth attending hardcore punk shows in, primarily, the tri-state and Delaware Valley area. I had a lot of ups and downs in regard to this, but a lot of the experiences, both good and bad, prepared me to “hack” my experience at academic conferences. Like hardcore shows, I only attend a handful of conferences per year. This is due to a variety of concerns: finances, lack of ability to travel, and a strong tendency towards being antisocial keep me at home or on campus most of the time.

I was originally drawn to the digital humanities because it encompassed a lot of the things I wasn’t seeing fully actualized by DIY hardcore. While underground and outside of the mainstream, although that is unfortunately changing, hardcore-punk is often very slow to change and evolve. Fans sneer at new means for communicating, producing and distributing records, and changing attitudes about digital media. The digital humanities are constantly changing and innovating, progressing in new and interesting ways. “Unconferences” like #thatcamp and forward thinking meetings like Digital Humanities 2009 are how I have always envisioned conferences being, but never had seen before. Projects like this one, where a book is compiled over a week, are much more “hardcore” than the ridiculous, conservative, nonsense which passes for it music wise.

When I first began attending conferences about five years ago, I drew from years of attending hardcore shows to make my experience much more interesting and productive. Here are some of the lessons I can offer for “hacking” the academic conference:

  • You don’t have to attend every conference (aka just say no): I go to, maybe, a handful of hardcore shows a year. By December, I have attended around the same amount of conferences. As a teenager and in college I wasted a lot of time, energy, and money going to hardcore shows “just to go,” or because a friend of a friend’s band was playing, and other stupid excuses. As an academic, if I even remotely feel like my attendance at a conference is due to a circumstance like this, I am not going. If the money isn’t there, the schedule is bad, the presentation you want to see is the metaphorical headlining band and you can’t see yourself waiting, just say no.
  • If you don’t go you can still keep in touch: The first half of my senior year of high school, I barely attended any shows because I was working every weekend at a crappy job as a dietician in a nursing home. Back then, 1996, I got caught up on shows and other concerns via IRC. I would wait up until my friends logged on at night and get all of the information I needed about the show. These days, this can be done in near real time via applications like Twitter and FriendFeed. A great example of this was the Twitter stream from Digital Humanities 2009. I did not attend, primarily because of a lack of financial resources, but I was able to follow the conference due to the #dh09 hashtag on Twitter. Many attendees live tweeted the conference, posting notes and comments about the panels they attended. Interested parties, like myself, could not only follow that stream, but offer questions for attendees to ask panelists. I could also comment and interact with those who attended and participated, offering my own thoughts and ideas as the conference progressed. Many new friendships and connections were also formed during this process.
  • People who seem totally cool online can and will be jerks in real life: Attending hardcore shows for years, one of the most heartbreaking things for me was finding out someone in a band or a fanzine editor, or other sort of important scenester was a jerk, sexist, homophobic, etc. I took this personally and often brooded on drives home about how IMPORTANT it was to notice and point out their jerkiness. Eventually, I concluded, not soon enough, that hardcore was just like the real world. There were cool people, there were plenty of jerks, and many were very insincere. A lot of popular scenesters and band members had bloated egos or serious delusions of grandeur. At the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Philadelphia at the end of 2009, I met a lot of friends who I had known from my weblog, Twitter, and other social media. I also encountered a certain person who is very prominent in the digital humanities. They are someone I have interacted with online and had been a fan of their very popular weblog. After I introduced myself, this person couldn’t have been a bigger, egocentric, asshole to me. Totally dismissive, self important, and uninterested in anything but himself. In the past, I would have been distraught and agonized over this, but now I just shrug it off and move on. Just because someone is an awesome theorist/blogger/podcaster, doesn’t mean they will be a good person. Nor, however, does it take away from their art.
  • Save ephemera: I run a website called Hardcore Show Flyers (and it’s sister website Hardcore Punk Misc) which archives show flyers from the mid to late seventies to a few months from now. I’ve been in the habit of saving flyers, folders, handouts, and other ephemera since I was a child. The first scanner I bought in 2000 allowed let me to begin digitally archiving a lot of what would become the roots of Hardcore Show Flyers. Since becoming involved with attending, and putting on, conferences and symposiums over the years I have saved and scanned a lot of things which I hope one day will be useful or interesting to someone. I’d rather spend the time now and save something, than wish someone else had later.

 

New Publication In The Quarterly Conversation

For the second spring in a row, I have been published in The Quarterly Conversation. This time I wrote about Shelley Jackson’s career in and out of print and electronic literature. There are a lot of other interesting essays on Borges, Bolano, and Swift among others alongside of my piece in the new issue.