Posted on Aug 11, 2003

[From the Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 6, 2003, this article details the St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminar founded by Mikhail Iossel,
writer in residence at Union College.]

A city of writers that still inspires
By Carlin Romano
Philadelphia Inquirer Book Critic

ST.
PETERSBURG, Russia – The designer tour of this city's hip
literary cafes – offered one-time-only to sign-ups from Mikhail Iossel's month-long Summer Literary Seminars (SLS) – is
about to get rolling on a hot July afternoon.

Dmitry Golynko-Volfson, 33, the multi-tasker
local poet and culture critic who cooked up the idea, gathers his would-be
cappuccino-crawlers around him at the first stop: an enormous building on Liteiny Prospekt, surveillance
cameras perched at each end, on a main road choked with truck traffic.

No cafe in sight.

But his charges are no
tour-bus ninnies, waiting to be chaperoned to the nearest rest rooms. Robert Coover, the politically shrewd American novelist who's
leading SLS sessions on hypertext lit, gets the point. So does Lady Gabriella
Windsor – known hereabouts as “Ella” – the friendly
29th-in-line-for-the-British-throne beauty who's taking courses like any other
22-year-old who, uh, happened to be voted England's second most “datable siren”
last year – after Gwyneth Paltrow.

It's a very big
building indeed. Dubbed “Bolshoi Dom”
(“Big House”) by locals, it starred as KGB headquarters in the bad
old days.

“As you
know,” Golynko-Volfson remarks in a deadpan
tone, explaining his wry launching pad, “many poets and writers were
confined in the basement. Sometimes the militia would arrest writers at Saigon ],
and take them to the basement for three or four hours, or three or four days,
or three or four years – it depended.”

Now in its fifth year,
SLS, founded by Russian emigre poet and novelist
Mikhail Iossel, 48, occupies a singular place among
the hundreds of literary conferences and workshops that compete each summer to
draw ambitious writers hot for feedback and established pros seeking
supplementary summer work – and peak experiences.

The mansion where
Vladimir Nabokov grew up, the small flat where
beguiling Russian poet Anna Akhmatova endured the
indignities of Soviet rule, the sweeping avenues where the independently minded
nose of Nikolai Gogol's beloved story took a walk,
the endless plaques that announce Ivan Turgenev lived
here and Leo Tolstoy crashed over there: St. Petersburg constantly reminds
visitors that it's also a “city of immortal writers” with no European
rival except London or Paris.

“Petersburg exists almost as much in language as it does in object and
artifact and structure,” remarks Coover over
lunch on Mayala Konyushennaya,
the cobbled walkway in central Petersburg dominated by a statue of Gogol
looking off to his side, deep in thought. “The way the city was built,
instantly, by one man's ambition [Peter the Great ordered it built ASAP on a
marsh in 1703], is a kind of novel-writing of its own. It's not a city that
organically developed. You can't write about Paris in the way that you write about St. Petersburg.”

“There's a special
literary aura,” agrees Iossel, who left here in
1986 and has been writer-in-residence for seven years at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Some of Iossel's small staff,
such as program coordinator Natalie Mykysey, 27, a
Slavic languages Ph.D. student at Ohio State who first visited seven years ago, sound
positively serotonin-boosted by the place, comparing it to a certain literary
town on the Delaware.

“I remember
thinking, 'I really like this city because it reminds me of Philadelphia,'
” says Mykysey, who grew up at Fourth and
Girard, and attended Bodine High School for Foreign
Affairs at Fourth and George.

Sitting in SLS's modest Herzen University office awaiting the next student who needs a menu
translated, the fluent-in-Russian “ombudswoman” appreciates that the
two former national capitals are both blessed with few skyscrapers. She thinks
walking Nevsky Prospekt,
the city's chief promenade, is like doing Center City from “Front Street on”: “It has as much history as Philadelphia does, and it's a good walking city… .
There's so much character and soul.”

In a year in which many
writing-abroad programs contracted because of the Iraq war, the bad economy and fears of flying, SLS drew roughly
the same number of students as last year – 65 – along with such eminent writers
as poets William Meredith and Nobel-Prize-winner Seamus Heaney, and
critically praised young talents like California novelist Aimee Bender.

SLS divides into two
two-week sessions from mid-June to mid-July, though students can opt for a
whole month since teachers and workshops rotate. Most participants stay in the Herzen Inn, the guest house of nearby Herzen University. While a handful specialize in Russian or come with a
special linguistic or cultural connection, most are united only by that
familiar workshopper's love of writing.

Credit for maintaining
the enrollment numbers goes to Iossel and program
director Jeff Parker, an Ohio-based writer active in hypertext fiction. Two
years ago, Parker, 29, pulled in Coover, a big fish
who generally shuns the writing-conference circuit. Running one of the few
writing conferences without a university affiliation, Iossel
and Parker remain free to make SLS fun as well as edifying.

While the writers
attend workshops every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in areas of their choice –
poetry, fiction, translation, Internet writing, arts criticism, nonfiction, and
playwriting – Iossel and Parker jam other time slots
with a full schedule of optional events, both serious and quirky.

Former student and
writer James Boober, who's working on a Petersburg novel, leads a detailed, incisive Dostoyevsky tour.
Publishing sorts – this summer, Dalkey Archive
editors John O'Brien and Martin Riker – discuss their houses. Regular readings
feature visiting eminences, prestigious avant-garde Russian writers like Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (in
Russian, with translation), and student winners of SLS's
annual writing contest in fiction and poetry. This year the contest received
more than 900 applications, and provided top winners with free SLS attendance
and publication in highly respected Tin House magazine. Many finalists got 25-
to 30-percent discounts on the cost of attending SLS.

But Iossel
and Parker also scheduled a trek to the site where Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin,
was shot to death in a duel. They sprang for multiple midnight boat trips along the city's waterways. (During its
celebrated mid-summer “White Nights,” Petersburg hardly darkens between midnight and 6 a.m.) Evenings at Brodyachaya Sobaka, “The Stray Dog,” where Russia's Silver Age poets once met, allowed participants to
imagine the greats who once argued in those same small rooms. And weekend
outings headed to both the city's fabled suburban palaces and the Baltika beer brewery.

To be sure, as Iossel says, “It does take a certain amount of
adventurousness to come here. By and large, Russia's reputation is still something unknown and fairly rough
and new.” Two years ago, a trio of local toughs mugged Coover.
(It didn't sour him on the place.) A handful of students this summer learned
about the pickpockets who work Nevsky Prospekt.

But this year's session
also offered moments of counter-cliche serendipity.
In a country often depicted as hostile to people of color, it was not Lady
Gabriella, but Caroline Okienya, a striking young
writer from Kenya, who found herself greeted on the street with a gallant
Russian gesture: a bouquet of flowers from a Russian admirer.

Coover thinks SLS's strategy of
sponsoring a writing contest with Tin House draws talents capable of being
moved by a face-to-face experience with a place widely celebrated for stoking
literary genius.

“All writing
conferences are an unlikely place to get a lot of writing done,” muses Coover. What Petersburg offers, he notes, is the opportunity to help writers grow
by “actually getting them involved in literature in a living way,”
possibly introducing them to the admixture of suffering so central to local
work.

He could have been talking
about Joyce Frauenholz, a 49-year-old writer and
English teacher at Community College of Allegheny County. Reflecting on the
experience in a Herzen Inn lounge, Frauenholz began to cry as she acknowledged being
“disturbed by the poverty,” and “in awe of what these people
here have been through.”

“I get worked up
over it,” she admitted, her red eyes making that plain. “The
old women who stand in the street selling a pathetic piece of lace. Is
it not enough – World War I and II, the revolution, the siege of Leningrad, and everything else – and now they have this abject
poverty to deal with? It's just incredible.”

It sounded like something she might write about.

Posted on Aug 6, 2003

From the (Oneonta, N.Y.) Daily Star

Tuesday, July 22,
2003
By Melissa Scram
Staff Writer

This summer,
Bainbridge native Jeremy Dibbell will jump from covering campus affairs to
foreign affairs.

A senior at Union College in Schenectady and editor-in-chief
of the student newspaper, Concordiensis,
Dibbell is one of a dozen college journalists from around the country
participating in the 11th annual Anti-Defamation League Albert Finkelstein
Memorial Study Mission to Israel, Poland and Bulgaria.

“Everybody keeps
saying, `Aren't you scared to go to Israel?' But I say it's a
chance, it's an opportunity and you can't turn down opportunities when they
come to you,” Dibbell, 21, said. “So I see it as an adventure.”

The students, who all
hold leadership positions at their college papers, will visit several sites and
meet with

government officials,
historians, journalists and others to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian
situation and the history of Jewish communities in Europe and the Holocaust,
according to information provided by the ADL.

“These students
are the future journalists of tomorrow,” Sara Ladenheim, an ADL
spokeswoman, said. “It provides them with an interesting perspective that
they otherwise wouldn't be able to get just by reading other media.”

The Anti-Defamation
League, which fights anti-Semitism, was founded in 1913. The study mission was
established by a gift from philanthropist Bidi Finkelstein, in memory of her
late husband.

Dibbell said he plans
to keep an extensive journal while on the trip, parts of which he'll publish,
in addition to other pieces he'll write for the student newspaper.

“It's a lot more
than covering events on campus, which are important and exciting to
cover,” he said. “This is a whole new ball game.”

Concordiensishas
a world news section, Dibbell said, but “it's hard to report world news in
a college newspaper 'cause … you're a weekly, and you can only get what you
find in other places.”

He said some
discussion panels stemming from the trip will probably be held on campus.

Dibbell said he's
excited to see everything on the trip.

“It all, to me,
is going to be a new world,” he said. “I've been to Spain, France and England before, but never
ventured forth to Poland and Bulgaria.”

One of the issues he
hopes to examine is Israel's national service
program, as Concordiensisand Union College have been very active
in pushing for a national service program for high school and college students.

The students, who return
Aug. 15, were chosen from between 80 and 100 applicants, through interviews and
essays, said Ladenheim, who described Dibbell as a “dynamic kid.”

“He exemplifies
leadership. He's an excellent writer,” she said. “He's coming to the
mission with a very open mind.”

Dibbell graduated from
Gilbertsville-Mount Upton Central School in 2000. While a
senior in high school, he was active in campaigning for Sen. John McCain's bid
for president.

“I've left
organized politics,” the self-described moderate Republican said.
“I'm still active in terms of advocacy. I tend to fire off letters to the
editor every once in the while.”

On campus, he's a
resident assistant and a member of several college committees, he said.

A political science
major, Dibbell said he hasn't decided what he will do after he graduates next
spring. Though he enjoys working at the college newspaper, he said, he doesn't
plan a career as a reporter. His interests are history and politics, he said,
and he's considered eventually teaching at the college level.

But, he said,
“it's too far down the road.”

Posted on Aug 2, 2003

From: Visions
August 2003
Volume 3 Issue 8
thechamber (albany-colonie regional chamber of commerce)

In my mind, it is no coincidence that International SEMATECH, Tokyo Electron and a growing list of technology companies have decided to locate significant operations here in Tech Valley. As one who has spent
more than 25 years in higher education, I recognize the significant role
institutions of higher learning play in spurring economic development. These knowledge-based companies, and surely those that will follow, make their business decisions based on their most essential need – access to intellectual capital.

In Tech Valley, and throughout much of New York state, we are fortunate to have the most comprehensive array of colleges and universities in the nation. In addition, perhaps more than ever before in this region, we are seeing a convergence of business, education and government that enables us to leverage our abundant resources to improve both the economic climate and overall quality of life for all.

At Union, we have for more than 200 years prided ourselves on educating individuals to be contributing members of the global community. In this spirit, Union, and the other fine undergraduate institutions in the Capital Region, represent essential components
in ensuring that what is now an R&D focus in key technology areas –
biotechnology and nanotechnology – moves from the laboratory to the
marketplace. History shows that undergraduates often take the lead in
commercializing technology. Witness Steve Case, Michael Dell and Bill Gates. We need to understand and maximize the potential of the undergraduate in this dynamic economy.

As evidenced by the dot-com enterprise, there are perils in a narrowly defined economy. Diversity in knowledge is a must. As much
as we need skilled lab technicians and research scientists, we must have an abundance of people who can communicate, learn and think critically.

We are engaged at Union in converging technologies (CT), a first-of-its-kind initiative to address the effects – both opportunities and challenges – of a computerized, technology-based society. Designed to build on the strengths of our engineering and science programs and bridge these disciplines with a classical liberal arts program, CT will produce graduates who are “at home” in both of these essential areas.

In my mind, delaying exposure to the emerging fields of nanotechnology, bioengineering, mechatronics and pervasive computing until the graduate level is far too limiting. Consider, for instance, a political scientist who has an applied knowledge of technology as well as a
deep understanding of the municipal decision-making process. Would not that person prove to be a valuable asset to any community deliberating the citing of a major manufacturing facility, such as a chip-fab plant?

Undergraduate institutions are doing their part to address the needs of our work force as well. Gender and ethnic diversity are sorely needed in the engineering and technology industries. The EDGE Program (Educating Girls as Engineers) is a Union-sponsored program to encourage high school girls to pursue careers in this vital field. Recognizing that diversity is defined, appropriately, in many ways (by gender, geography or ethnicity), the two-week resi-dential program
welcomes girls from across the country to experience real engineering and to enjoy what life at college offers. Working closely with local industry partners and high schools in dozens of states, we believe that programs like EDGE will thrive at Union and that similar programs would work at other institutions throughout Tech Valley.

From outstanding community colleges, to a broad range of quality undergraduate institutions, to some of the nation's leading research
universities, Tech Valley has much to offer in and out of the classroom. As we strive to support the success of Tech Valley, collaboration is
essential, for higher education is our greatest strength.

—Roger H. Hull
President
Union College

Posted on Aug 2, 2003

Thirteen feet below ground, in one of many forgotten tunnels that crisscross under this Industrial Age city, is what experts are calling a tremendous discovery — part of the original Erie Canal.

Two Union College professors, Andrew Wolfe and Denis Foley, spent three months investigating the tunnel, which was buried decades after barges first plied the waters of “Clinton's Ditch” when it opened in 1825. The team was asked by the city to look into the origins of the tunnel.

On a tour of the cave-like hall on Friday, the professors now say the 500-yard tunnel includes locks 37 and 38 of the original canal. At the bottom is the foundation of the canal, carved out of shale. Above it is a wall of rough-cut blocks cemented in place, and an arched ceiling of brick built by parties unknown decades after the canal was abandoned in favor of a bigger waterway.

“This made New York City,” said Foley, an anthropology professor. “By getting over the Cohoes Falls, New York City became the leading port” in the country.

The two professors have been working on unearthing traces of the state's canal since 1999. Last October, they announced they had found Lock 1 in an industrial area of north Albany.

The lock was a later incarnation of the canal, however, one that was built in 1843 in order to widen and deepen the canal.

The original 350-mile-long Erie Canal opened in 1825, a controversial and expensive link between New York City and Buffalo that was derided by many of the nation's leaders. But it took only a few years for the canal to dramatically open up upstate New York — and through it, the Midwest — by connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

The canal was expanded again in 1918, but the entire system began to fall into disuse with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1955.

In Cohoes, the buried locks that recently were discovered had been abandoned in 1843 with the widening of the original canal. A few decades later, that section of the canal was sold to the Cohoes Power Corp., which used water from the canal to turn giant turbines that powered the Victory Mill. The mill, one of the largest in the country at the time, made textiles, using machinery powered by the largest cast-iron turbines ever made.

An unknown time later, the locks were capped and buried. For years, the tunnel was known only by the city maintenance department, which had access by way of a metal grate and a ladder.

Although Wolfe will be leaving Union at the end of the summer to teach at the SUNY Institute of Technology in Utica, the two professors plan to keep working together, looking for more traces of the canal in Cohoes and elsewhere around the state.

Ralph Pascale, director of the city Department of Community and Economic Development, said he'd like to see the tunnel turned into a tourist attraction.

“This is huge for us,” said Pascale, standing in the tunnel with water dripping over his head. “It's a wonderful opportunity. We're looking for ways we can utilize these resources.”

Posted on Aug 1, 2003

Think of it as a cross between computer science and a hip-hop dance
party.

A group of 20
teens from the Capital Region at Union College's Robot Camp this week have
been honing their programmable automatons to take on obstacle courses, a
bowling lane and a relay race.

But the real
test came at the end of camp on Friday,
Aug. 1, when they saw how well their 'bots could dance to Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys.

The dancers were
three-wheel drive automatons — about the size of a small shoebox – built and
programmed in a summer camp for aspiring robotics engineers this week at Union College. All 20 bots danced simultaneously.
Mishaps occurred.

On Friday
morning, the young engineers programmed their robots through a maze, an
obstacle course, a bowling competition and a relay race. But at various work
stations throughout the week, they were listening to the Beastie Boys' Intergalactic, and choreographing their
robots' moves.

The Robot Day
Camp is an offshoot of Union's Robot Club. Members of the club have
competed in international robot competitions in France and Turkey, and a handful serve as
counselors for the summer camp. Professor Cherrice Traver is director of the
camp, now in its fifth year.

“These kids
are truly exceptional,” Traver said. “They have, in just a few days, exceeded
our wildest expectations. Their robots are performing tasks that are quite
complex, things that we thought would require much more class time for high
school students to master.”

Nearly all of the 20 students are from local schools.

For more photos from Robot Camp 2003, visit: http://doc.union.edu/Robotcamp/Camp_03