Knox in the News

From Central Illinois Proud (WMBD-TV, Peoria, IL):

The Sierra Club is recognizing Knox College as one of “America’s 100 Greenest Schools.” The “Cool Schools” list, released this month in Sierra magazine, recognizes colleges for environmental practices, energy saving initiatives, and sustainability-oriented academics.

Knox is ranked at 100 out of the 162 schools that responded to the Sierra Club’s survey, which was mailed to 900 colleges and universities. According to the Sierra Club, “there are more than 2,000 four-year colleges in the United States, meaning that the schools in the ‘Coolest Schools’ index are in the top 10 percent when it comes to the environment.”

Among the survey areas where Knox received top scores were for energy efficiency and administration. Both areas received a score of 9 out of a possible 10 points. According to energy efficiency data provided for the survey, Knox has reduced its carbon emissions by 22% in the past ten years, and doubled the amount of material recycled in the past four years.

The administration category recognizes Knox’s cross-campus commitment to sustainability, including the President’s Task Force on Sustainability and having signed the Talloires Declaration, an institutional sustainability pledge that has been adopted by colleges and universities worldwide.

From the Register-Mail:

The Knox College women’s tennis team handed Monmouth College a 5-4 Midwest Conference loss on Wednesday.

The Prairie Fire (3-8, 2-2) went 4-2 in singles competition with wins from No. 1 Dana Pierce over Kimi Wegner 7-5, 6-2, No. 4 Jordan Kuban over Kristen Huffman 6-1, 1-6, 7-5, No. 5 Rachel Clark over Mikaela Rogers 6-1, 6-1 and No. 6 Emily Tyl over Elizabeth LaFleur 6-1, 6-3.

From the Daily Reveiw Atlas (Monmouth, IL):

Robert Hellenga, a former Knox College professor and Galesburg novelist, has written six books. Wednesday, he gave a reading of his most recent novel “‘The Snakewoman of Little Egypt,” at the Warren County Library.

Hellenga came up with the idea for the novel at the library. He was reading a book about snake handling when he began to envision the character of Sunny.

“I usually start with characters,” he said. “I have three daughters, so I really like to write about young women. A man with three daughters will never run out of stories.”

Sunny’s husband is a snake handler — a sect of Pentacostals that interpret the Bible literally. Snake handlers believe that if a just person handles a snake it won’t bite them, but unjust people will be punished. Sunny’s husband wants to see if Sunny is cheating on him, so he asks her to handle snakes. Sunny, who doesn’t share her husband’s enthusiasm for snake handling, instead shoots him.

When Hellenga begins writing a novel he is careful not to plan too much.

“I’m a big believer that you should just sit down and write and surprise yourself,” he said. “I think it should be open to surprises every step of the way. What is this all about? What do I really care about? I like to imagine that I’m letting the reader imagine certain things. A lot of that happens after writing.”

From the Register-Mail:

It started as a simple photo shoot for Gabe Moreno and Chris Dokolasa.

Now, the two will be immortalized in Galesburg for years to come.

On Tuesday, city officials unveiled the “First a Dream” mural on the south wall of the Discovery Deport Children’s Museum, concluding months of preparation and painting. The mural, designed by artists Kathleen Scarboro and Kathleen Farrell, is being funded by Galesburg-based Blick Art Materials as part of the company’s 100th anniversary.

Prominently featured on the mural are Moreno, a Galesburg resident and Knox College student who is shown painting an empty canvas with a brush, and Dokolasa, a Galesburg High School art teacher who is looking on and instructing Moreno.

“I think they made me look pretty good up there,” said Moreno, an art student who studied at the high school with Dokolasa before attending Knox College.

The two were asked by Blick Art Materials to be a part of the mural. First, they needed to be photographed, which Moreno said took about 90 minutes.

From there, the artists used their photographs and many others to create the mural. John Polillo, executive vice president of operations for Blick Art Materials, said it was the company’s gift to Galesburg.

From the Register-Mail:

In his recently published book “Snakewoman of Little Egypt,” Robert Hellenga sticks to the author’s adage of “Write what you know.”

Local readers will smile while reading references to a natural food store named Cornucopia and a grocery store called Hy-Vee. And one of the novel’s central characters, Jackson Carter Jones, seems to be a lot like Hellenga.

Jackson is an associate professor of anthropology at Thomas Ford University in west-central Illinois while Hellenga is an English literature professor at Knox College (also in west-central Illinois.)

“I put a lot of myself in Jackson, of course,” Hellenga said last week, sitting on his apartment porch surrounded by potted plants and flowers. “But I’ve never had Lyme disease, never been to Africa.”

The sixth novel of Hellenga’s career, “Snakewoman of Little Egypt,” describes what happens when Jackson becomes intertwined with Sunny, a woman recently released from prison in Little Egypt, a non-fiction locale in southern Illinois. Unlike most of his books which have Italian connections — Hellenga lived in Florence with his family for a year — this book mostly takes place in Illinois, where he’s resided since the late 1960s.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The plains and prairies of Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” and cities of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” have come to define the Midwestern literary tradition, while “Little Egypt,” the triangular tip of southern Illinois bound by the Mississippi, Ohio and Wabash rivers, has been long overlooked. The swamps and dense forests, pocked by closed factories and coal mines, may have proven to be fertile ground, for it is the place in which Robert Hellenga has rooted his new novel, “Snakewoman of Little Egypt: A Novel.”

Hellenga, the author of five novels such as “The Sixteen Pleasures: A Novel” and “The Fall of a Sparrow,” is often associated with Italy, though he grew up in Three Oaks, Mich., and teaches at Knox College in Galesburg. Because his father’s business was seasonal, Hellenga spent summers in Milwaukee. He remembers that he got to know his father’s employees, mostly Italians, and came to understand the cultures of both: small-town, more austere Methodists with church basement weddings featuring cake and ginger ale punch with chunks of lime sherbet floating in it, and Italian weddings with huge celebratory dinners, lavish celebrations and lots of wine.

Hellenga recalls that he was putting the finishing touches on his last book, “The Italian Lover” when he heard an NPR interview segment featuring Jeff Biggers and his book “The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America.” The tales inspired Hellenga’s curiosity, he explains, leading him to the library where he found not only histories, but also fascinating first-person accounts of life in the region.