Wild Knights
The University of Bridgeport's English & Professional Writing Blog

Susan Ferency was an Associate Professor in the University Bridgeport’s College of Health Science. She was UB's Faculty Senate President. She was a beloved teacher and colleague. She was my friend. I was surprised last fall when she emailed me out of the blue to tell me that she wanted to submit some of her photographs to Groundswell, UB’s long-running annual magazine showcasing campus-based art and creative writing. I was not sure what to expect, but when I opened the

WK: Hey Carl! You completed your first year at UB! How’d it go? Carl: Wow. It was so inspiring, prose fails me, so I wrote a poem about it. WK: No way. Carl: Indubitably. My experiences as an English major at UB have empowered me to flex my verbal talents in a variety of startling directions. Let me read you my poem. [Lights dim, mellow jazz comes from somewhere.] When you’re a kangaroo You don’t know what to do. Your heart is in your shoe. You feel like sometim

Right-wing critics attacked Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show as un-American, but the show emblematized many of the themes and values that characterize the American literary tradition. When Puerto Rican recording artist Bad Bunny was announced as the headlining performer for the halftime show of Super Bowl LX, conservative commentators blasted the choice as un-American. Department of Homeland Security adviser Corey Lewandowski decried the NFL for picking “somebody who

One of the great things about majoring in English is that there are so many different ways to do it. According to University of Bridgeport Department Chair Dr. Randy Laist, “English is different from other disciplines because the content, the knowledge, is less important than the learner. This means that ‘studying English’ or ‘majoring in English’ can look very different from one student to another, because there’s so much intellectual flexibility and so much personalizatio

Edival Rios and Dr. Randy Laist at the awards ceremony Milagros lives on Clinton Avenue in Bridgeport. Her husband lured her away from her native Puerto Rico with false promises, cheated on her repeatedly, and then died, stranding her in a house full of mostly ungrateful children. She hustles and struggles to make ends meet, until finally she announces to her children that she is going back to Puerto Rico. "How?" her children ask. "You don’t have any money." “It was then

Sigmund channels his inner cat Any performer would be challenged by the role. You have to be a cat. Ok, Sigmund can do that. He’s been doing it all his life. You have to be a living cat. Ok, still good. And you also have to be a dead cat. A little more of a stretch, but not too much. Sometimes Sigmund is so lazy and serene that he looks like he could be dead. It’s one of his many talents. But now you have to be dead and alive at the same time. Hmm. That’s a genuine act

Have you ever had an idea? If you are like most people, you probably have had an idea before. In fact, you might even have a number of ideas every day. Maybe even a large number. Things you think. Things you notice. Funny ideas, sad ideas, disturbing ideas, and even ideas about your ideas. If you are like most people, the idea comes and goes, and then that is the lifespan of the idea. If you are like the student writers featured in Groundswell 2026 , however, you do someth

Dr. Fisher plays the marimba The sound of a marimba, how to describe it? It’s like the sound a light rain of marshmallows makes when it falls on an angel’s halo. It’s like the first spring notes of a bird made out of silver. If jellyfish sang opera on the moon, it might sound something like this. Trap a dream inside a hollow golden sphere and then listen to the ringing tones it makes as it bounces around inside. If God has a windchime dangling from the rafters of His front po

Doctor Faustus is having a bad day. The stage lights are glowing in diabolical shades of sulfur and lava. The fog machine has kicked into overdrive. Depending on the production, Beethoven, Nine Inch Nails, or Radiohead is blasting on the speakers. Doctor Faustus begs for his life back, for another chance, for a scintilla of heavenly grace. But Mephistopheles’ cackling laughter echoes through the theater, and now it looks like there is some kind of trapdoor or something, becau

By Janine Oliva Have you seen the movie Moana ? It re-imagines the ancient art of Polynesian wayfinding – and depicts how Polynesia was settled thousands of years ago. Imagine standing on the deck of a double-hulled canoe, the diamond-filled night sky as your foundation of nature’s map. The sound of the waves lap up against the wooden hulls, the direction of swells also aiding as a compass. Which direction to go? There are no instruments or maps to tell you where you are, o