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Donald Challenger
Profile
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Background & training
7 Prospect St.
Clinton, NY 13323
Phone: 853-3604
Send e-mail
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- As a journalist: I have worked as a reporter and editor at the
Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, USA Today, and the Utica Observer-Dispatch,
where I am currently nation/world editor and hold training seminars for
younger reporters and editors.
- As a writer: I am co-author of Contemporary Editing (McGraw-Hill/NTC,
2000), a college text for news media students, and '"Fruit of the Poisonous
Tree': Journalistic Ethics and Voice-Mail Surveillance," in the forthcoming
edition of the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. I have also published
a number of short stories and poems in little magazines, including "White
River Spools," anthologized in Baseball Diamonds (Doubleday). After
a much-too-long hiatus from fiction writing, I am at work on a novel, Magnetic
North, a mystery about a series of present-day crimes tied to the life
of a nineteenth-century railroad baron. I am also beginning work on a second
edition of Contemporary Editing. (You can read more about the book at McGraw-Hill's site.)
- As a teacher: I have taught composition and newswriting courses
at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, the University of Delaware, Utica
College, and New School University. This semester I am developing a Writing
Across the Curriculum program for New School's Saratoga Springs campus.
I have also participated in a number of training seminars and workshops, both for working journalists and student writers.
- As a student and scholar: I completed an M.A. in English at Syracuse
in December. My dossier included papers on Kenneth Burke's concept of "address"
in A Rhetoric of Motives and the ways in which it might provide a
bridge between classical rhetoric and poststructural theory; on the concept
of meconnaissance or misrecognition and its relationship to subjectivity
and ideology in Derrida, Lacan, and Althusser; and on the play of narrative
and historical determinacy and indeterminacy in Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo
Jumbo. I intend that my work toward the Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural
Rhetoric will balance the study of ancient rhetoric -- going in, I'm particularly
interested in Cicero and Augustine -- with composition pedagogy and new technology.
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"I would write a paragraph in the evening sure
of how it read, only later to find that it could be read in a different
way which completely altered the meaning. I could only solve the problem
by severely controlling the context of words in a sentence, and that of
sentences in a paragraph, and that of the paragraph within the entire situation.... Yes, words did slip and
slide under my own eyes. They would not stay in place."
-- Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, on the task of abandoning English to write fiction in his native
Gikuyu
Bricolage consists "in conserving all these old concepts ... while here
and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can still
be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them; there is a readiness
to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful.
In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed
to destroy the old machinery to which they belong."
-- Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences"
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