Faculty for Writing & Publishing

Niels Caul

Biography

Dr. Niels Caul graduated with a PhD from University College Dublin in 2022. He has previously presented papers at the James Joyce Symposia in Dublin and Trieste, the James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference in Rome and the 2021 International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. He has curated literary exhibitions for Museum of Literature Ireland and more recently “Revolutionary Dublin’s Literary Networks: C.P. Curran, Helen Laird and James Joyce’s Ulysses” for University College Dublin Special Collections.

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Erik Esckilsen

Biography

Erik Esckilsen came to Champlain College from the publishing industry, where he worked as a writer and editor. Today he teaches writing-intensive courses in a range of subjects, emphasizing art and digital culture, and remains active as an essayist, fiction writer, journalist, and scholar.

Curriculum Vitae

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Deena Frankel

Biography

Following more than 20 years in Vermont’s energy and public utility world, Deena is now helping clients in Burlington and beyond collaborate on critical issues and tell their stories. Her work brings together the diverse threads of her career as a facilitator, writer/editor, designer and storyteller.

For over a decade, at VELCO, she facilitated the nation’s first statewide stakeholder process dedicated to electric transmission planning, managing a committee comprised of public representatives, utilities, renewable generation developers, and other interests. Her work helped Vermont save half a billion dollars of electric grid investments. She managed VELCO’s strategic planning process, and played a key role in organization development and strategic communications.

Before joining VELCO, Deena served as Executive Director of the Vermont Public Utility Commission (formerly the Public Service Board) and as the first Director of Consumer Affairs & Public Information at the Department of Public Service.

Deena is an oral storyteller who has told Moth-style stories at venues around New England including appearances on the Flynn main stage and at the Boston Women in Comedy Festival. Until the pandemic, she co-produced Storytelling VT, a monthly event in Burlington. Her consulting business focuses on the use of story to help clients be more effective communicators.

She is an adjunct faculty member at Champlain College teaching writing in the Communications and Creative Media program.

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Rebecca Holt

Biography

Becky began her career in journalism, where she was an award-winning newspaper and online editor for 20 years. She then spent a decade as a nonprofit development and communications director. Since 2016, Becky has helped nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals (youth and adults) learn how to share their stories through interactive workshops, personalized trainings, and one-on-one coaching. She also writes creative fiction for young adults. Becky has a Bachelor’s of Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Distinctions & Awards

Gannett Supervisor of the Year (2008)
Missouri Lifestyle: National Award for General Excellence, First Place (2008)
Vermont Press Association: Outstanding Website, Daily (2008)
Gannett Chairman Award (2007)
Missouri Lifestyle: National Award for General Excellence, Second Place (2007)
Missouri Lifestyle: National Award for General Excellence, First Place (2004)

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

• Member of Griffiths Leadership Society for Women, University of Missouri Alumni Association
• Church Street Marketplace Commissioner, City of Burlington, Vermont (2019-present; current Vice Chair)

Curriculum Vitae

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Favorite Quote

“The sun will rise and set regardless. What we choose to do with the light while it’s here is up to us. Journey wisely.”

—Alexandra Elle

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Mark Johnson

Biography

Mark Johnson has had a 40-year career in Vermont journalism as a reporter, editor and talk show host. Johnson has worked at the Eagle Times in Springfield, the Burlington Free Press, the Vanguard Press, VTDigger.org and Seven Days as a reporter, editor and columnist. For 25 years, he hosted an influential political and general interest two-hour daily talk show on WKDR and WDEV radio stations. He also served as a regular panelist and guest host on Vermont Public Television’s weekly roundtable news show “Vermont This Week.” He and his wife, Lauren-Glenn Davitian, the founder of Town Meeting Television, and their daughter, Stella Rose, live in Burlington.

Distinctions & Awards

Vermont Association of Broadcasters Distinguished Service Award 2012

Favorite Quote

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

—Steven Covey

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Erik Kaarla

Biography

Erik Kaarla has been a lifelong educator who started from doing professional writing within a nonfiction context in the Boston area to becoming a writing educator with a special emphasis on rhetoric and composition and business communication. Erik has also remained an avid music and tennis educator. He has provided writing and research instruction at a number of New England colleges including the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Pine Manor College, Mass Bay Community College, Burlington College, Saint Michael’s College, Community College of Vermont and here at Champlain College. Erik considers himself to be a constructivist teacher placing a persistent emphasis on the compilation and exploration of new knowledge within the classroom ““ paradigms shift, but open inquiry remains a constant. He is also licensed in English 7-12 in Vermont and in all states that support reciprocity in high school credentialing.

Erik’s research interests include the study of practices and methodologies that lead to success in the writing process. He is also active in applying cutting edge music theory applications within classrooms that involve exploration and movement through music curricula.

Erik is a native Finnish speaker and he has also performed translation work and given language lessons for extensive periods of time. He continues to offer instruction in bass and guitar applications.

Favorite Quote

Wherever you go, there you are.

—Thomas à Kempis, a precursor appeared in a spiritual work by composed in the 1400s. The comical saying was circulating by 1955 when it was attributed to Jim Russell within a student publication at Pennsylvania State University in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

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Sheila Liming

Biography

Sheila Liming, PhD, came to Champlain in 2020 and settled into teaching an array of classes in writing and publishing. She is the author of three books: What a Library Means to a Woman (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and, most recently, Hanging Out (Melville House, 2023), and the editor of one, a new version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (W.W. Norton, 2022). Her writing has appeared widely in venues like The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Globe and Mail, LitHub, and elsewhere, while her work has been reviewed and featured in People magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and, in her spare time, she continues to play the Scottish bagpipes (just as she did as part of the Carnegie Mellon University pipe band).

Distinctions & Awards

Maryland Humanities — State-wide Common Read finalist (HANGING OUT / 2023)
Reader’s Digest Most Anticipated Book of 2023 (HANGING OUT / 2023)
LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2023 (HANGING OUT / 2023)
Teaching Excellence Award (North Dakota University System / 2018)
Whiting Foundation — Fellowship Finalist (2018)

Publications & Abstracts

• HANGING OUT: THE RADICAL POWER OF KILLING TIME (2023)
• THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton (2022)
• OFFICE (2020)
• WHAT A LIBRARY MEANS TO A WOMAN (2020)

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

• Modern Language Association (MLA)
• Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
• Edith Wharton Society (EWS)
• Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)

Curriculum Vitae

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Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Reading: I wrote my first book about the author Edith Wharton, who was a chronicler of Gilded Age privilege in America. People often ask me where to start with Wharton’s oeuvre and I like to recommend her short novel SUMMER (1917), which is page-turner dealing with rural politics, sex, gender, and class inequality.
• Reading: One of my specialties is gothic fiction and gothic storytelling. Some outstanding recent work in this genre comes from the Vermont writer Melanie Finn. Her novels THE HARE (2021) and THE UNDERNEATH (2018) blend a feminist perspective with classic features of the gothic genre.
• Reading: When you get serious about studying writing, you come into contact with other writers, and some of those connections turn out to be long-ranging. For instance, I went to college with the Asiya Wadud, a powerhouse poet whose collections SYNCOPE and CROSSLIGHT FOR YOUNGBIRD will challenge and provoke any aspiring writer.

Favorite Quote

“Sit as little as possible; give credence to no thought that is not born in the open air and accompanied by free movement in which the muscles do not also celebrate a feast.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, ECCE HOMO

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Fiadhnait Moser-Hardy

Biography

Fiadhnait Moser-Hardy joined Champlain College as an adjunct professor in the CCM (Writing), EHS (Elementary Education), and CORE divisions in 2022. She currently teaches Children’s Literature and the Expressive Arts, Creative Writing, Writing for the Workplace, Navigating Your Information Landscape, and Navigating Higher Education.

Moser received her M.F.A. in Writing with a specialization in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2021. She is especially known for exploring difficult themes through fabulism and fantasy within her children’s books. Her publications include two middle grade novels, The Flourishing of Floralie Laurel and The Serendipity of Flightless Things, as well as an article discussing disability in publishing in Publishers Weekly.

In addition, Moser has extensive experience as an interdisciplinary artist and teacher, having previously worked as an elementary art and dance teacher. She is especially passionate about broadening her college students’ perspectives with new and creative ways of learning through interdisciplinary artistic study.

Distinctions & Awards

Featured Author at Denver Children’s Festival of Stories 2019

Publications & Abstracts

• The Flourishing of Floralie Laurel
• The Serendipity of Flightless Things
• It’s Not All About the Pub Date

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
• I Talk Like a River by Jordan Scott and Sydney Smith

Favorite Quote

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

—Pablo Picasso

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Samuel Schieren

Biography

Sam Schieren is a writer from Valley Cottage, New York. He received his BA in English and Psychology from Tufts University and an MFA from the University of California, Davis.

Publications & Abstracts

Visit my personal website

Mating, by Norman Rush — A love story, also an adventure story, the best female character ever written by a man (IMO), and the wonderful interaction of two geniuses. The book takes place primarily in Botswana. In way it’s about trying to create utopia knowing it cannot be done. It’s also very funny.
Outline / Transit / Kudos, by Rachel Cusk — (3 book series) Cusk is maybe the writer I would be if I could choose to be any writer. She writes sentences as good as anybody, she’s funny and deeply smart. These are semi autobiographical novels, there’s three of them, and they have a strange form. The narrator, also a fiction writer, travels around the world, mainly europe, doing her writing thing. They are each composed more than anything of her interactions with other people in her working life/ explorations, so you get a picture of her only through her recording the lives of these other people she interacts with and their life stories and the things they’ve learned. It’s hard to describe.
Moby Dick, Herman Melville — The weirdest book ever lol. Be prepared for lots of whales obvi. And lots of homoeroticism thinly veiled as camaraderie. And much wisdom too. The great American novel.

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Erik Shonstrom

Biography

Erik Shonstrom is the author of several nonfiction books, including Wild Curiosity, The Wisdom of the Body, and I Probably Should’ve Brought a Tent. He has an MFA from Bennington College.

Publications & Abstracts

• Wild Curiosity
• The Indoor Epidemic
• The Wisdom of the Body: What Embodied Cognition Can Teach us about Learning, Human Development, and Ourselves
• I Probably Should’ve Brought a Tent

Curriculum Vitae

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