Not many 19-year-olds can say they have worked on an anthology of fiction for college students. However, that is not the case with sophomore Michela Greco. In the summer of 2008, Greco helped Scott Geisel, a lecturer at Wright State, on his new anthology ‘Gravity Fiction.’ Greco worked together with several other people but was the only one in college at the time. ‘I was part of the advisory board,’ Greco said. ‘I represented the college perspective.’ Geisel said he chose Greco because she had been going to school at the University and the English department was doing some pretty advanced things. ‘I thought she’d make a very good choice,’ Geisel said. Geisel also said he knew her before, as Greco’s father would take her to Shakespeare plays in the summer with Geisel and his wife. Geisel employed several other people for the advisory board, including a retired high school teacher, a college professor and avid readers. He said he wanted to get a range of different readers so he could make a better product with several different stories. ‘I think we did have a better mix because of that,’ Geisel said. The advisory board’s duty was to read, pick out and lightly edit the stories for the anthology. Greco said for most of the stories everyone agreed strongly on the same things. It was only for the contemporary stories where they disagreed. Greco said she had fun seeing how the choices changed because of her input and the input of the others in order to make the book better. ‘The goal was to make it applicable to both students and teachers,’ she said. Geisel came up with the idea after he co-founded ‘Mudrock: Stories ‘amp; Tales,’ an academic literary journal. Geisel said the anthology was based on a simple idea: there are several good undergraduate writers coming out with great literature across America, he said. ‘Gravity Fiction’ is composed of 13 stories, 10 are from undergraduates and three are from graduates who wrote the stories when they were still in college. ‘It’s the first of its type,’ Geisel said. Geisel said he looked around for an anthology that contained only undergraduate work but could not find one. Geisel said he hopes in future editions of ‘Gravity Fiction’ he will have only current undergraduate work. Unfortunately, Geisel said, there was a bad turnout for nominations this year and had to pull many local stories, some of which were published in ‘Mudrock.’ However, Geisel said he is getting the word out and sending review copies to different schools around the nation. Geisel said he wants to have a second edition out by 2011 and will start accepting nominations in sometime in 2010. The current version is on sale at www.amazon.com and features several different types of stories as well as a commentary and biography of the writer following each story.
Gravity Fiction’ provides anthology of college writing
March 23, 2009
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